Way back in the days of dial-up modems, Furbies, and CDs, The New Yorker ran a 1998 story featuring seven women who were in top decision-making positions at Hollywood studios. At the time, Sherry Lansing was chairwoman and CEO of Paramount. (She previously became the first woman to lead a major studio when she became president of production at 20th Century Fox.) Amy Pascal was president of Columbia Pictures, Stacey Snider was a co-president of production at Universal Pictures (she would become chairman in 1999), and Laura Ziskin was running Fox 2000.
That era feels a million years away for many reasons, including the complete obliteration of the moviemaking landscape. With the Disney-Fox merger, the historic Big Six studios shrunk down to five, and now, with Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros., down to four. Meanwhile, the streamers—Netflix, Apple, Amazon—entered the game and changed all the rules.
What has also changed just as dramatically is who sits on top. Amid a flurry of cuts the past couple of years, the number of women in the highest ranks at the major studios has dwindled, and grows fewer by the day. And in just the past few weeks, it’s been a bloodbath.
“It is hard to see so many accomplished women being let go. Yet this is bigger than any one executive’s departure. If you look beyond individual headlines, there’s a larger pattern,” Women in Film CEO Kirsten Schaffer tells Vanity Fair. “We’re deeply concerned that with all of the consolidation we’re losing ground for women and people of color to attain and retain decision-making power.”
Last week, Netflix launched its largest round of job cuts since 2022, laying off about 1,000 staffers, 6% of its global workforce. The most surprising sack was chief content officer Bela Bajaria, who had been with the streaming giant since 2016. After being promoted to the role in 2023, she oversaw Netflix’s TV series, movies, and live events globally. She will be replaced by former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice.
The Netflix layoffs included other high-profile firings, like head of film Dan Lin, though his exit had been rumored for some time. Bajaria was a far bigger shock, given her long tenure and her success expanding the streamer’s global footprint and live events business. She seemed like a company girl.
Bela Bajaria, right, with Ted Sarandos and Kerry Washington at the Oct. 1 world premiere of Animals. Two weeks later Bajaria was out at Netflix.
Presley Ann/Getty ImagesNetflix’s cuts come on the heels of a slew of high-level executive exits as the Paramount and Warner Bros. merger finally comes to fruition. A week before the close of the October 6 merger, Cindy Holland announced in a staff memo that she would be departing Paramount Skydance. Holland, a former Netflix exec, hadn’t been there long: She was brought in as chair of direct-to-consumer by David Ellison in August 2025 when the Paramount Skydance deal closed. Per Deadline, she stated in the note that Ellison was “optimizing for HBO stability,” which, reading between the lines, meant that HBO chief Casey Bloys would run streaming for both Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery when the merger closed.
By October 1, Pamela Abdy and Mike De Luca were reportedly out as well. The former co-chairs and CEOs of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group had brought the studio 30 Oscar nominations and 11 wins last year with hits like Sinners and One Battle After Another. After that huge year, their contracts were renewed that October, but 2026 has been much rockier for the pair, with The Bride! and Digger both stumbling at the box office. Paramount film heads Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein will oversee films for both movie studios after the merger, with a goal to release 30 movies each year. They hit the ground running after the merger in 2025, with a new film from Timothée Chalamet and James Mangold, a first-look deal with Wicked director Jon M. Chu, and a four-year deal with Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer. But with Warner Bros. coming into the fold, they’ll have even more oversight as they’re tasked with shaping the landscape for both studios.
Yes, there were high-profile layoffs of men too. Along with Warner Bros.’s De Luca and Netflix’s Lin, Netflix’s film VP Doug Belgrad was also let go. But with so few women in greenlight positions already, the loss of three influential leaders is a sting to both Hollywood and audiences alike. "It’s like a brutal game of musical chairs,” says Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson, who was previously president of the Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group before launching her production company Color Force. “There have always been more men at the very top than women and you feel that more than ever as the chairs start being taken away."
Mergers always seem to hit high-ranking female executives hardest. After Disney acquired Fox in 2019, chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox Stacey Snider stepped down. And after the 2022 WarnerMedia-Discovery merger, Ann Sarnoff, who in 2019 became the first woman chair and CEO of Warner Bros., was also pink-slipped. Neither of them worked at another major studio again. “Films are so hard to make that most of them are the result of at least one person on the studio side who is willing to fight for it,” says a producer. “And I have watched many of the female studio executives around town get tired of fighting.”
The ink is barely dry on the Skydance merger, and there will inevitably be many more layoffs to come as Skydance executives attempt to deliver on a promised $6 billion in cuts. One peek at the Skydance leadership website, and it’s easy to spot that Goldberg is currently the only female executive working in entertainment at the top ranks. (Of the 16 other execs listed, three others are women: chief marketing officer Rebecca Mall, CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, and chief communications officer Melissa Zukerman.)
Along with Goldberg, there are only a few other women left standing with that level of control in the film space now. Chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment Donna Langley remains one of the most powerful female studio execs with a proven record of hits, including The Odyssey and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie this year. At Disney, when Josh D’Amaro became Bob Iger’s successor, Dana Walden became president and chief creative officer, a new position that included the addition of film studio operations to her already expansive purview of TV, streaming, gaming, and global marketing. And Courtenay Valenti, head of film, streaming, and theatrical at Amazon MGM, just promoted two women—Julie Rapaport and Alana Mayo—as heads of film, production, and development.
Tom Cruise, Pamela Abdy, and Michael De Luca at the Digger world premiere in London.
John Phillips/Getty ImagesThe consolidation of power into fewer hands (with most of those being male) is not without consequences. Individuals who have greenlight power not only decide which stories get told, but at what budget, and who gets hired. Women are still horribly underrepresented as directors. Last year, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the proportion of women working as directors on the 100 top-grossing movies of the year hit a seven-year low, with only nine women out of 111 working as directors on those films. Dr. Stacy L. Smith and Dr. Katherine Pieper, the authors of the initiative, called it a “complete reversal of any progress that was achieved behind the camera over the last few years.”
Even though women are directing independent movies outside of those top 100 of the year (48% of the features in the 2026 Sundance lineup were directed by women), they aren’t directing the big-budget movies that only studios can make. Having more female executives at the top gives more opportunity to female storytellers. “[Women in Film’s] research shows that when women are in leadership positions, they hire more women,” says Schaffer. “Women executives in decision-making roles open doors for the next generation. When those seats disappear, so do the opportunities.”
Back in 2015, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told The Guardian that “there’s nothing we’d like more than to find a female director for Star Wars.” It wasn’t until 2023 when two-time Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was hired to helm a spin-off about Daisy Ridley’s character, Rey. But the project has languished in development. Kennedy gave up her 14-year post earlier this year, handing over the reins to Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan.
And having women leading studios isn’t just about giving more women a chance to work on a $200 million movie, or making female-centered stories. It’s about a more inclusive group of decision makers who can therefore make movies that reach more diverse audiences. Hollywood is supposed to be the land of endless stories and possibilities, but without a more inclusive group of people deciding which stories get told, those possibilities will keep shrinking to whatever a narrow few already believe audiences want to see. “I am reduced to counting which of the male studio heads have daughters to understand whether they’ll see value in female-driven propositions they don’t endemically understand,” says the producer of this new landscape.
Hollywood has a history of pushing women out of the executive suite, only to watch them thrive elsewhere. After Pascal was fired as co-chairman of Sony, she went on to become a top producer behind films like Little Women, Challengers, Project Hail Mary, and Greta Gerwig’s next movie, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. Perhaps Bajaria, Abdy, and Holland will have just as fruitful next chapters.
The question is whether the industry will build the pipeline to replace them, or if the next generation of women who might have run a studio will simply never get the chance. "In truth, I worry more for the younger folks trying to make their mark in the business than I do about those of us who have stayed in the game for decades," says Jacobson. “The fewer jobs there are, the less people want to give up their spot or fear it will be taken and the fewer opportunities there are for the next generation to rise and get their chance.”
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