Paramount Skydance wants workers to kick off 2026 in the office every day, and it is giving workers less than two weeks to decide if they are up for it.

Paramount wants workers to sign on to the new five-day in-office plan by Sept. 15 or take a severance payment. Workers in Los Angeles and New York City will be the first required to return, but they won't have to actually come back until January, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Skydance Media and Paramount Global completed an $8B merger on Aug. 7, creating Paramount Skydance Corp.

Workers are presently operating under a two-day in-office requirement. CBS News, MTV, Comedy Central, BET and Nickelodeon are all under the umbrella of Paramount Skydance.

Offices for the company in the Los Angeles area include those at Paramount's Old Hollywood-era Melrose lot, where the new entity will be officially based and where it has 1.9M SF of soundstages, production facilities and offices. Paramount also has about 200K SF at 1575 N. Gower St. in Hollywood.

Skydance has a two-building, roughly 300K SF Santa Monica office compound on Olympic Boulevard, where its lease expires in 2034. CBS News has about 125K SF of office, production and studio space at the Radford Studio Center in Studio City.

In New York, the company's leases include 1.6M SF of office space in Times Square at 1515 Broadway. CBS News has about 300K SF of production facilities and office space along West 57th Street on Manhattan’s Far West Side.

Paramount is in the process of redeveloping its city-block-sized CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan.

The memo from CEO David Ellison that contained news of the in-office requirement emphasizes the importance of employees sharing office space.

“Being together in-person isn’t just about showing up — it’s about actively engaging with the business, supporting one another and the team’s efforts, and contributing to our shared momentum,” he wrote in the memo, reported by the WSJ.

When the merger closed, executives announced plans to cut costs by more than $2B.

Leadership hinted that sweeping layoffs were on the way, with Paramount President Jeff Shell telling media at an August press conference, “We don’t want to be a company that has layoffs every quarter."

“It is important for us to get done what we’re doing in one big thing and then be done with it.”

Reports citing unnamed sources revealed that more than 2,000 and as many as 3,000 layoffs might be on the way before the end of the year.

In June, prior to the merger, Paramount Global notified several hundred employees that they were being let go.