Rising from the ashes of the 1929 stock-market crash, Twentieth Century-Fox was forged in a master stroke by ruthless producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who merged Twentieth Century Pictures with William Fox’s ailing studio—and booted out Fox in the process—to create a formidable Hollywood player. It was the studio that turned Marilyn Monroe into a star, awarded Elizabeth Taylor her first $1 million payday (for the costly Cleopatra, which at $44 million nearly capsized the company), and helped solidify the modern-day blockbuster with George Lucas’s space fantasy, Star Wars. Along the way, Fox experienced all the highs and lows of the burgeoning Hollywood system, from breaking box- office records with the 1965 hit The Sound of Music to earning 14 Oscar nominations for All About Eve, to Zanuck’s 1970 installation of his son, Richard, as the president of production, only to fire him in a move that would lead to his own ousting by a seething board of directors. And this was all before Rupert Murdoch bought the studio in 1985, launched the Fox Broadcasting Network along with Barry Diller, and doubled down on the Jim Cameron business, green-lighting and supporting the mercurial director through all his production-budget overages on the way to a $2.2 billion worldwide gross for 1997’s Titanic and $2.8 billion for 2009’s Avatar.

Unfortunately, Cameron can’t save everybody. The business climate in Hollywood has shifted in recent years, and studios are competing not just with each other but with a handful of ruthless Silicon Valley interlopers. New alliances have been forged out of desperation, none of them bigger than the $71.3 billion acquisition, which was set to close last month, that saw the Walt Disney Company absorb the once indomitable Fox. The deal could eventually result in the loss of anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 jobs, depending on whom you ask.

The situation has had longtime employees on the Fox lot suffering a kind of prolonged trauma since the merger was announced, in December 2017. To hear them tell it, they are being issued mostly vague, Orwellian-lite guidance that outlines dress codes and explains key-card access, but they have been left wanting in terms of business directives. In the middle of February, Fox’s marketing and distribution departments gathered with the filmmakers of Dark Phoenix, the latest X-Men installment from producer-director Simon Kinberg, to lay out their plans for the film’s June release. It was a typical meeting. Ad buys were discussed, and the publicity tour for the film’s stars, including Sophie Turner, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jessica Chastain, was laid out. But it was still disconcerting, both because of all the new faces in the room—a handful of high-end consultants have been hired temporarily to fill the jobs recently vacated by long-term employees—and because of the ad hoc approach the Fox marketing team was taking toward the film’s release, four months away.

“We know when we are dropping a trailer, but we are nowhere near where we should be at this time,” said one marketing exec who was at the meeting. “It’s frightening. I would be mad if I were a filmmaker.”

“What’s not normal is the elephant in the room, which is that most people there are not going to be the people that are still in the job when the movie opens,” added another attendee.

“Nobody has come around and said, ‘This is what’s going on.’ Why can’t they just tell us that there is no place for us? Why can’t they let anyone know?” said the marketing exec. “We are not leaving because we didn’t make money for the company or we did a bad job. We are leaving because of pure capitalism.”