Unfortunately the Mods can confirm this is true. Out of respect for those affected, please be kind and connect and support if you can.
I feel sad about the bad news. Are there international offices also on that down path? I would like to visit my old friends next week at The Mill Shanghai.
This is so sad. I sincerely hope everyone is hanging in there. Always happy to meet up with any artists in New York if anybody ever just wants to hang or talk. I think it’s important we have community in these crazy times. I’ll add this: The Mill and MPC have always had some wonderful artists so my only hope out of this is that some great new small and medium shops pop up out of the ashes
To bad the rental car executive they brought in to turn the company around, turned it right into shit.
Back when Technicolor bought the Mill (2016?) the founders of the Mill did a tour around the offices with an executive from Technicolor (presumably to mitigate panic)
At the all staff gathering, the Technicolor Exec spoke about why they purchased the Mill: patents and virtual reality. No mention whatsoever of Advertising, Color, Design, or Visual Effects. He went on and on about VR and patents, but never once said anything about the advertising work that was the core of the company.
My heart goes out to everyone who was informed by a shithead company that they are now out of work. Fuck the vultures who did this to you and the way they did it. May you land on your feet and recover. My hope is as time passes it becomes little more than a funny story you like to tell from time to time.
The plot thickens. This is global. Mill UK employees received this. The office will not be open on Monday, February 24th
for business
Dear Team,
As we have communicated over the past months, the Group has been experiencing difficulties linked to a variety of factors and has not been spared from external headwinds: the difficult operational situation resulting from post-covid recovery, a costly and complex separation from the previous group followed by the writers’ strike leading to a slowdown in customer orders causing severe cash flow pressures.
In each country, an appropriate framework for the orderly protection and way forward is currently being put in place to allow, where possible, business continuity. Please find below some details on the situation related to United Kingdom:
In the United Kingdom, Technicolor Creative Studios UK Limited will be filing for administration on Monday 24 February.
Administrators from Interpath Advisory will be appointed to handle the affairs of the UK entity, TCS UK limited, and will be responsible for liaising with all UK employees.
Once the Administrators are appointed, they will send an email with dial in details for a call tomorrow afternoon where they will explain the impact of the Administration on employees. Whilst you are awaiting this call tomorrow and the details for the next steps, we would ask that you please refrain from coming to the office which will be close for the day.
This decision was not taken lightly; every possible path to preserve our legacy and secure the future of our teams is being thoroughly explored in the hopes of allowing TCS UK’s activities to be pursued with potential new investors.
The Technicolor Group
This just sounds like an all out collapse to me. The cynic in me coupled with my limited understanding of labor laws imagines that the US employees had the leanest protections and made the offices the most quick to shut down.
I suspect that liquidating the stateside real-estate holdings combined with the higher US salaries was a large part of that decision.
But also, pure speculation…
Looks like they’ve been planning this for a few months.
I’ve been working with them remotely on Flame as a foreign contractor since COVID, taking on projects from time to time.
They still haven’t paid me for my last two gigs (end of December ‘24 and early January on a Super Bowl spot). Since it was The Mill, I wasn’t overly worried at first—never imagined they’d do this on purpose. I naïvely assumed there were some banking hiccups maybe even because of my bank…
Today, a freelancer working in Korea reached out to me—he told me they owe him eight weeks of work and have been ghosting his emails when he enquired for payment
My scheduler gave me contacts to email AP (Accounts Payable Supervisor), but as a foreign contractor, I feel like they can easily ignore me.
Any idea what could be done or attempted? They’ll probably cut off emails soon or fire the people I’m trying to contact…
Thanks for any insights!
crazy time!
I can’t even comprehend the mess they may have left behind in terms of human drama, artists and managers with children unable to face the cost of living and those projects that may be active that will go down the toilet.
It’s just the final catastrophe in a long string of disasters that whole organization has knowingly or unknowingly orchestrated.
Maybe hope?
its been going off the deep end long before they brought in that exec.
Reads like a bailout of the management layer.
Could be worst just imagine if you were the investors that gave them 170 million for restructuring just a few years ago, not that I feel bad for them just that technicolor really knows how to make a great thing turn to total shit in about 10 years.
What would be the back of the napkin summary of why Technicolor went down?
shareholders.
Deputy Head Executive Co-Management Creative explaining to artists why Cat Buttholes are some really great work and you should get a 1/2 doil this weekend because they should be grateful