How do you take the measure of 4,000 jobs lost in an industry with the size and scope of Hollywood?
That’s the number of pink slips being handed by Disney to Fox employees now that the merged mega-studio won’t need them anymore. Four. Thousand. Jobs. It’s undoubtedly the largest layoff from a single entertainment company in a generation — maybe ever — a fact that has not been widely discussed in an industry that has no context for this kind of consolidation.
Myself I’ve been trying to think about what it means. I grew up in Ohio, where these were the kind of statistics you used to read when General Motors shut an automotive plant.