Tom Cruise Parrots Paramount’s Empty Merger Promises Because He Loves His ‘Hollywood Family’

Just so we’re clear: pre-merger promises (especially in the media and telecom sectors) are absolutely worthless. There’s fifty years of indisputable evidence that all of the “synergies” and innovative improvements promised on the front end of major media mergers mean absolutely nothing. Especially in a country dead-set on defanging its labor and consumer protection regulators.

To sell their unpopular $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, Paramount/CBS executives continue to make the promise that the newly-merged company will produce 30 major films per year. It’s again a worthless promise that ignores all the massive pressures the bigger debt-riddled company will face in a sector where broadcast TV is dying and brick and mortar theaters are struggling.

There’s very little indication that this megadeal even ends with a functional company, much less 30 films a year. The massive debt from these transactions always results in higher prices, mass layoffs, and shoddier quality product due to corner cutting. 30 films a year simply isn’t something you can promise.

But the kind of Hollywood insiders that have tethered their horses to David Ellison have unsurprisingly come on in defense of what’s abjectly a terrible deal. Director James Cameron, for example, came out last April in full-throated support of the deal, propping up the Ellison family’s claim that significantly more media consolidation will result in bold new storytelling and a healthier Hollywood.

Now it’s apparently Tom Cruise’s turn to prop up the shitty deal. The Scientologist movie star went on The Pat McAfee Show to help sell Larry and David Ellison’s empty promise:

“They’re going to deliver 30 movies,” Cruise said on The Pat McAfee Show of the Paramount CEO’s sometimes-mocked vow to increase film production and releases. “It’s a community to me. It’s not an industry. The people in these studios are not just people in the studios. They’re my family.”

I think Cameron and Cruise really do love traditional movies in traditional theaters, and probably do think they’re “helping.” I suspect they haven’t really done the math or spent much time studying the academic literature on U.S. media consolidation, and are just basing their support on their personal financial ties to Ellison (who has thrown a lot of money into Cruise’s Top Gun revival in particular).

The 30 film promise exists to largely get traditional theater owners and guys like Cruise and Cameron on board. Though nobody will confirm this and they’re not sharing the actual document, there’s some talk they put the promise in writing for major theater chains. But that’s again meaningless if the company’s high-debt load, incompetence, and sagging viewership derail the company’s finances.

For what it’s worth, another top U.S. male lead, George Clooney, has taken the opposite tack, last week proclaiming he didn’t see how the deal or its promises make any coherent financial sense.

Clooney’s right to worry. The deal will result in untold thousands of layoffs as Paramount attempts to shift the debt load of this deal to consumers and labor. We know this because this is what always happens. You might recall the AT&T DirecTV/Warner series of mergers resulted in 50,000 people losing their jobs, something curiously left unmentioned by most press coverage of Paramount’s latest merger promises.

Pretending that mass layoffs aren’t going to happen is like boldly declaring you’re going to win a boxing match with the Colorado river. Mass layoffs are simply physics when it comes to this sort of debt-heavy consolidation.

And that’s before you get to potential price hikes, corner cutting eroding product quality, the deal’s dodgy funding by a bunch of Middle-East autocrats with a history of killing journalists, or the fact that billionaire Larry Ellison is a Trump-ally keen on converting both CNN and CBS into right wing oligarch-friendly agitprop machines aimed at undermining foundational Democracy.

What kind of gift is that to give your purported “family?” A recent survey indicated that most Americans aren’t buying the consumer benefits Paramount is selling, which is why the company has resorted to using fake consumer groups wielding fake AI-generated support to try and scuttle the 12-state antitrust lawsuit aimed at slowing harmful U.S. media consolidation.