What happens when an industry built on storytelling runs out of stories to tell? That’s what Hollywood found out in 2025, as pink slips piled up and the so-called entertainment capital of the world watched its workers disappear by the thousands.
The Wrap says more than 17,000 jobs vanished across film and television this year. That’s not just another bad quarter—it’s an 18 percent leap in job losses over 2024. From studios to streaming services, from newsrooms to sound stages, hardly a corner of the media escaped the cuts.
Executives blamed the usual suspects. “Restructuring and industry consolidation,” The Wrap reported. Translation? Mergers, cost-cutting, and corporate takeovers—moves that always seem to leave regular workers behind. Paramount Global and Skydance Media got a green light from the FCC to merge. Warner Bros. Discovery is chasing a buyer of its own. Disney kept shrinking, even though it still stands on its own two feet. Is this reinvention—or collapse?
Follow the numbers and the trend becomes hard to ignore. Paramount slashed 2,000 jobs. Comcast’s Versant cable cut 150—seven percent of its workforce. Disney let go of nearly 800 across its divisions. Even Warner Bros., which had already been through the wringer, shed another hundred jobs in 2025. Analysts warn that once a WBD buyout lands next year, thousands more could be gone. Estimates go as high as 6,000 layoffs.
And that’s just the human cost of corporate deals. A bigger storm is coming from something less human—artificial intelligence. According to the World Economic Forum, 41 percent of companies across the globe plan layoffs in the next five years as they swap people for machines. Amazon already sent home 14,000 workers in October. The Wrap reports that AI alone caused some 71,000 layoffs in 2025. A June study even predicted that up to 200,000 Hollywood jobs could vanish—or simply never exist—because of the technology that’s supposed to make life easier.
There will be some new positions created, of course, maintaining and managing these systems. But will that really replace the jobs lost? Or are we watching Silicon Valley’s dream turn into Hollywood’s nightmare?
The damage wasn’t limited to the studios. The news business kept bleeding too. Dotdash Meredith, now rebranded as People Inc., laid off a combined 369 workers. CNN cut 200. PBS lost 15 percent of its staff. The Washington Post said goodbye to 4 percent of its team. CBS News shut down streaming efforts tied to CBS Mornings and CBS News. Business Insider dropped 21 percent of its staff. Even respected entertainment outlets like Variety, Rolling Stone, and Billboard couldn’t avoid the knife.
Hollywood’s local economy tells the same story. Film and TV jobs in Los Angeles were already down 30 percent by the end of 2024—a loss of 100,000 positions—as productions moved to cheaper states like Georgia and New Mexico or to Canada and Mexico. By early 2025, the city ranked only sixth for active film and TV productions. Deadline reported that production declined again through the third quarter of this year.
With every merger and every AI rollout, another piece of America’s media machine grinds to a halt. The layoffs will keep coming. The question isn’t whether Hollywood and the corporate press can survive—but whether what rises in their place will still look like the industries we once knew.
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English (US) · 