→ Customize what you receive from Ankler Media. You can keep what you need, skip what you don’t. Participant Collapsed. These 10 Execs Landed Big Roles AfterwardA year later, the indie's alums prove there’s life after layoff
Matthew Frank previously wrote about the viral trends behind A Minecraft Movie’s success, L.A.’s Democratic donor rage and Gen Z’s digital war with Hollywood. You can email him at matthew@theankler.com
In April 2024, Participant Media shut its doors and sent roughly 100 employees out into a Hollywood job market that was already buffeted by rounds of layoffs and a continuing contraction. For the staff of the socially conscious production company behind Oscar winners like Spotlight, Green Book and An Inconvenient Truth, the news of the company’s shuttering came as a shock. “Most people learned the day of that that was happening,” one former Participant executive tells me. “There was a week before where people knew that something big was happening… That it was an option that Participant was closing, but there was also the option of us being acquired, or there was going to be a significant restructuring, but it didn't end up happening.” Participant attracted a certain type of person, this person says — someone passionate about “wanting their work to have meaning and that really wanted to do good in the world.” Many of the approximately 100 people who were working there when the axe fell feared they wouldn’t find entertainment jobs, let alone roles that would allow them to continue the good fight. But at least 10 Participant alums, including some of its top execs, have landed good gigs — it’s a reminder that there’s life after a layoff or shutdown. Related:
Back when Participant launched in 2004, its billionaire founder Jeff Skoll was all in on film and TV (and film and TV executives) focused on social change — projects that highlighted society’s untold challenges and amplified marginalized voices. Over its 20-year lifespan, Participant put out films that grossed more than $3.3 billion at the box office, scored top awards and kept the faith with the company’s prosocial principles.  Those “unicorn projects,” as another former Participant staffer calls them, became harder to produce post-pandemic, and the strikes put a nail in the company’s coffin. In 2022 and 2023, Participant released just two films, and Skoll pulled the plug. “We didn’t have a big hit in a while,” a third former staffer says. “The writing was on the walls.” In his companywide memo announcing the closure, Skoll attributed the company’s demise to “revolutionary changes in how content is created, distributed and consumed.” Even before Donald Trump began his second term in the White House, socially conscious film and TV were not exactly hot commodities. And as Nicole LaPorte has reported, Trump’s return brought a continued quelling of political and activist documentaries. Participant’s dwindling output and influence also came as Skoll’s own mission seemingly drifted towards MAGA. Hints of this first came in July 2024 when Skoll — whose $5.3 billion fortune comes from his time as eBay’s first full-time hire and president — lobbed a social media post ridiculing President Joe Biden for his treatment of Elon Musk (Skoll and Musk have a friendship spanning decades), and by January, Skoll was celebrating Trump’s inauguration in D.C. For someone cozying up to the new administration, observers speculated that an association with the studio behind the iconic Al Gore-led climate change doc An Inconvenient Truth was… inconvenient.
However, that X post no longer appears on Skoll’s timeline, and in April he announced that his foundation would contribute $25 million to counteract what he termed the administration’s “careless and callous and inhumane” budget cuts. Former Participant CEO David Linde, who helmed the company for over eight years, has yet to take on a new role, but based on LinkedIn profiles and other publicly available information as well as my reporting, I compiled a list of 10 former Participant executives who’ve parlayed their experiences at the Academy Award-winning production company into solid new entertainment (and entertainment-adjacent) gigs, where many of them are still making mission-driven storytelling. Read ’em and hope — careers are resilient, and so are creators.
Meet the Survivors...Subscribe to The Ankler. to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of The Ankler. to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
|
Participant Collapsed. These 10 Execs Landed Big Roles Afterward
June 11, 2025
0
