WB Montreal Reportedly Hit by Layoffs as Paramount Skydance’s Warner Bros Deal Raises More Cost Cutting Fears
Warner Bros Montreal has reportedly been affected by a new round of layoffs, with an unknown number of staff said to have lost their roles across multiple departments. The cuts first came to wider attention after former employees began sharing public posts on LinkedIn, and the situation was later highlighted by GamesIndustry.biz. Current reports indicate the layoffs touched areas including production, level design, and narrative design, though Warner Bros has not publicly confirmed a number at the time of writing.
Among the public examples are posts from former staff such as a level designer on LinkedIn and a narrative designer on LinkedIn, both of which point to jobs ending on March 13. Reports also suggest that several of the impacted employees had been with the studio for more than 5 years, with some nearing a decade of service.
The timing is difficult to ignore. Warner Bros Discovery is currently in the middle of a proposed acquisition by Paramount Skydance, a deal announced at an enterprise value of about 110 billion dollars, after Netflix exited the bidding process in late February. The merger is still pending regulatory and shareholder approval, but the corporate backdrop has already raised broad concerns about restructuring and job cuts across Warner Bros operations.
That concern intensified after Netflix co chief executive Ted Sarandos explained why his company walked away from the bidding war. In remarks reported by Bloomberg, Sarandos said Netflix saw more than 16 billion dollars in expected cost cutting over the next 18 months when reviewing Warner Bros Discovery’s financials. While that figure was not tied specifically to WB Montreal, it reinforced the sense that workforce reductions could become part of the larger merger process.
For WB Montreal, this is another painful chapter rather than an isolated blow. The studio’s last major release was Gotham Knights in 2022, and it also contributed to the now cancelled Wonder Woman project before that title was shut down alongside Monolith Productions in 2025. Reports from the end of 2024 had already indicated earlier staff reductions at the studio, which means this latest reported cut lands on top of an already unstable recent period.
From an industry perspective, this is exactly the kind of scenario developers worry about when major media and entertainment companies move into acquisition mode. Even before a deal closes, uncertainty often freezes hiring, narrows project pipelines, and places teams under cost efficiency pressure. For a studio like WB Montreal, which has strong AAA pedigree but has not shipped a new tentpole title in several years, that pressure can quickly turn into visible staff losses.
At this stage, the most important missing piece is clarity. Warner Bros has not publicly outlined how many jobs were affected, whether more cuts are coming, or how WB Montreal fits into the larger post acquisition strategy. Until that happens, the studio’s future remains clouded by the same uncertainty now hanging over much of Warner Bros Discovery.
Do you think WB Montreal can still rebound with a new major project, or has the studio become one of the clearest examples of how consolidation keeps hurting long term game development talent?
