Skydance Offers Staff Voluntary Buyouts as Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery Combine
Skydance is offering certain employees a one-time voluntary buyout, which is a payment in return for leaving the company. The offer is part of the work to join Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery into one business.
Skydance chairman and chief executive David Ellison and co-chief executive Ynon Kreiz set out the Voluntary Buyout Program in a memo to staff on Oct. 26. According to Variety, the same move brings in a mandatory five-days-per-week office policy across the company.
The backdrop is a very large deal. Paramount's $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery closed on Oct. 6. Bloomberg reported that the combined company carries nearly $87 billion in total debt, meaning money it owes to lenders and bondholders.
Skydance is aiming for more than $6 billion in annualised cost savings within three years. Annualised means the yearly saving once changes are fully in place. Part of that is expected to come from layoffs, and Variety reported that Ellison and Kreiz had already acknowledged in an earlier memo, on Oct. 6, that job cuts would follow the merger.
Kreiz is not a traditional studio veteran. He was chief executive of toy maker Mattel before taking on the co-CEO role at Skydance. A September announcement from Paramount said Ellison would stay as chairman and CEO of the combined company, with Kreiz as co-CEO and a seat on the board once the deal closed.
Staff have been through change before. Last year, about 600 Paramount Skydance employees took a voluntary severance package, according to Variety. In January 2026, the company set a return-to-office directive, so the new five-day rule builds on an earlier push to bring people back to desks.
For the people on the payroll, the next steps are personal. Each employee now has to weigh whether the buyout suits their situation, and how a five-day office week fits with their life. For the wider industry, the scale of the savings target makes this one of the clearest signs yet of how the merged company plans to run.
