A 48-year-old woman is suing Paramount Pictures Corp., alleging she was passed over for colorist jobs in favor of male colleagues and underpaid for doing the work of three people before being laid off in 2025 at the same time a man was retained.
Marissa Arciero’s Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit allegations include sex and disability discrimination, retaliation, harassment and failure to accommodate and engage in the interactive process. She seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
A Paramount representative did not reply to a request for comment on the suit filed Wednesday.
Arciero was hired in November 2013 as a quality control technician at Paramount’s Hollywood facility on Melrose Avenue and was promoted to colorist three years later. At the time of Arciero’s promotion Paramount had hired a senior manager who had previously been found liable for discrimination during a previous job at Warner Bros., the suit states.
In May 2018, management promoted a less qualified male employee to a position instead of Arciero, according to the suit, which further states the plaintiff was demoted from her colorist assistant job to a transcoding position. Arciero filed a discrimination complaint, but a human resources representative told her that if she continued with it management would counter-complain the plaintiff had harassed a supervisor she had complained about, the suit further states.
Paramount convinced Arciero not to take a competing job offer in December 2021 by promising her an apprenticeship under a senior colorist apprentice job in December 2021, but the promise was broken and when she returned from a period working remotely she found that her office had been converted to a storage room, according to the suit.
In May 2023, after the layoff of preservation colorists and the departure of the senior colorist, Arciero’s duties expanded, but she was kept at a job classification that enabled Paramount to avoid increasing her pay, the suit alleges. A year later, Arciero was injured when the motorcycle she was driving was hit by a drunk driver, but instead of giving her sufficient recovery time she was asked to work from home in order to keep a project on time, the suit further states.
That same year, Arciero was reassigned to a lower-complexity project while giving a male colleague her higher-value tasks, according to the complaint.
Paramount released a DEI policy cancellation in March 2025 in response to a federal executive order and not long afterward Arciero was laid off, but a male colleague was retained and given training so that he could absorb the plaintiff’s workflows, the suit further states.
Arciero says she was passed over for future permanent work and that since the plaintiff’s removal from active assignments, three people have had to do the work she did by herself and that she was asked to return for one day because the other colorists could not do work she had “independently developed and mastered.”