Billionaire David Ellison officially controls Warner Bros. Discovery now that Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of its fellow media and entertainment giant closed on Tuesday.

Warner Bros., founded in 1923, now combines with the almost equally old Hollywood giant Paramount, which became Paramount Skydance last year after Ellison bought it. The newly formed conglomerate will be called Skydance, after the company Ellison founded in 2006.

“Today is a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry,” Ellison said in a press release. But in a memo sent to employees, the CEO reportedly acknowledged that layoffs were now on the horizon.

“Integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce,” the memo read, per Variety.

The acquisition brings together two major film studios, as well as two streaming services and two of the top news networks, CBS and CNN. The streaming services, Paramount+ and HBO Max, will “unify into a single service over time,” the company announced.

The sheer magnitude of the merger, and the implication that Hollywood would now shrink to only four major studios, meant that it sparked fierce outrage. The deal was criticized by more than a thousand Hollywood insiders and sparked several lawsuits from the likes of the Writers Guild of America, which claimed that the merger would suppress writers’ wages and reduce output, and a group of Paramount+ subscribers, who were worried about price hikes. Critics voiced concerns about the anti-competitive implications of the consolidation of two major studios, as well as the potential damage to the journalistic independence of CNN, which has faced significant ire from the President, who went so far as to ban the news outlet from the White House.

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