Is Hollywood really losing jobs to AI? The Paramount-Warner merger papers blame debt and consolidation

Hollywood often blames AI for its shrinking payrolls, but the paperwork behind the roughly $110 billion Paramount Skydance takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery points somewhere else, 24/7 Wall St. reported on 25 September 2026. Paramount's gross debt rose to $15.5 billion in the first quarter, and in August it raised its cost-savings target to more than $2.70 billion, which its chief strategy officer Andy Gordon said would come from combining cable and broadcast to "reduce redundancies, centralize shared services". California's settlement ties domestic production to a federal film tax credit, and the Writers Guild settled its lawsuit for $17.5 million and a five-year ban on writer layoffs at CBS News while still warning the deal "will cause damage to writers and the industry at large". AI is not absent: chief executive David Ellison expects "significant efficiencies as AI is deployed across the business". But in the filings the jobs are going to debt, merger overlap and tax arbitrage first. When a layoff arrives after this deal closes, those are the causes to check before believing it was AI.