In the past few weeks, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has started to feel like a villain real housewives performance. He’s not here to make friends. He is here to make money. Movies have been cancelled, TV shows have been removed from HBO Max with zero prologue, executions have been abandoned, the company’s already notable diversity problem is worsening, and the company has been stripped of its market cap. There is a loss of $20 billion – a saving of billions in an attempt to get all $3 and hope that a ship disagrees with Zaslav’s course.
Zaslav plans to focus on making as much money as possible as cheaply as possible. When they joined Discovery in 2006, it was a small collection of education-oriented cable channels. Zaslav turned it into the reality TV monster we know today. They’ve made their money for viewers who don’t pay for streaming, but instead, flip channels on TV — and when they can’t find anything to watch, pack up and go to the movie theater.
So while what we’re seeing may be the stumbling block of an egoist who has no grip on the properties he’s bought, who more likely feels that Zaslav just doesn’t care about the stuff we care about so much. are, such as “a large circulation of readily available content that speaks to small groups is often underrepresented in popular media at a significantly affordable cost.” Zaslav isn’t here to better enrich our entertainment landscape – he’s here to make money.
That means he will have to move to a company that has spent two years focusing its energy elsewhere. In the years before the Warner Bros. and Discovery merger, Warner Bros. underwent a very radical transformation. COVID changed the way people worked in 2020 (and in 2021 and even 2022), and Warner Bros. decided to focus on streaming at the expense of its other businesses.
As someone with a very good home theater setup and a love of quick and easy access to content, this was very appealing to me – and I’m sure it was to you too. Instead of risking illness to watch the biggest movies in theaters, we can sit at home watching King Kong Body Mothra over Mexico or make our way into the legend whispers Paul Atreides Dune, As people’s concerns over COVID subsided (though it’s still a pandemic, and you should test regularly and wear a mask indoors!), HBO Max has taken a stand against traditional Warner Bros. rivals like Disney and Universal. Maintained a steady stream of content designed to compete with. But with Netflix, whose movies go straight to the streamer and only make pit stops in theaters for award eligibility.
Theater owners, already ravaged by COVID, were furious with Warner Bros.’ new plan. They are overjoyed now that Zaslav has reversed course, widened the release window and even moved some direct-to-streaming films to theatres. (Even if marketing budget constraints mean that Warner Bros. movies will see fewer in theaters over the next few years… it’s the idea that matters.)
And Zaslav’s appeal to cinematography is mutually beneficial. Direct to streaming means a lot to Netflix, a company with a much smaller distribution arm. Warner Bros. Discovery has a whole system built in to make a lot of money from movies in theaters. “Why,” I’m sure Zaslav says to himself, “should we throw away all possible money promoting the $15 per month subscription we sold for HBO Max?” Instead, the company could put the movies in theaters and then move them to the streaming service and double whammy on us, the consumers.
I, personally, am not a fan of this! I don’t want to pay a billion times for the same content. But I’ve done it for a while with books, software, movies and TV. Zaslav knows that there are a lot of rubles like me who are probably willing to pay.
We don’t know how shockingly canceled bat girl Plays in Zaslav’s grand plan to reverse streaming courses and turn Warner Bros. Reports on the film ranged from “it’s so bad it should never see the light of day” to “it wasn’t bad and had a really good message.” It may have been canceled because it seemed a little too CW to appear on the big screen after the Warner Bros. Or it may have been canceled to help take out some of the extra tax break dollars as Zaslav & Co. works to save the $3 billion promised by the merger.
When I spoke to Francine McKenna, a lecturer in accounting at The Wharton School and author of the newsletter, dig upHe noted the cancellation move bat girl Was weird for tax reasons. “There are tax benefits to writing off assets now if you’re the kind of company that likes losses because they offset current or future tax liabilities,” she said via email. “WB is a loser to start with, so not sure why the incremental loss based on trash canning finished movies is so helpful.”
In its Q2 filing, Warner Bros. Discovery did not specifically reference the cancellation, but outlined its overall plan in very accountant terms:
Content loss for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022 was $496 million and $501 million, respectively, and $329 million for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022. Content development write-off due to abandonment of certain materials The categories in relation to the strategic restructuring of content following the merger are reflected in the restructuring and other charges in the Studio, Network and DTC segments.
All of the above speaks for the accountant “there’s a lot of material in the WBD that it doesn’t think makes sense for the new business and will get rid of it to write it off on the company’s taxes.”
bat girl Wasn’t the only thing falling victim to the too-sharp pen of the accounting department. Over the past few weeks, the company has quietly removed dozens of shows and movies from HBO Max — often without warning its creators. an audience ledge Spoke to Twitter only to learn about the removal of his show.
The reason for the removal appeared to be that the content was not reaching enough audiences, and that most of the content is of no interest to the audience in the new Warner Bros. Discovery: Kids. Sources told CNBC that “Warner Bros. Discovery has decided to move away from this category with its future investment budget.” earlier this week The Daily Beast reported that most such killings, including the layoffs of the divisions that oversee HBO Max’s Unscripted, Children & Family, and international content, led Zaslav’s Real Money Cow: Service and Company to better advance Central America. Had to reorient.
“If David Zaslav had the will, he would just program Chip and Joanna throughout the day,” an unnamed executive told The Daily Beast. “There was just a giant, ‘We don’t need you. You’re not offering the things we’re focused on.'”
And that’s what Warner Bros. is doing with Discovery. But Zaslav’s goal, to create a company that can make money by hand by catering to the largest potential audience with a predictable (and cheap) slate of content, is exactly what none of us want.
Over the years, we’ve enjoyed a renaissance of TV. So much TV has been made so quickly and for so much money that there is now a dearth of qualified listeners. So much TV has been made that every company scrambles to populate its new streaming services with the stuff to watch, that many people who rarely – if ever – have the opportunity to represent their lives on TV. If so, they have got that opportunity.
Ten Years Ago, Gays Preferred Queerbaiting Fare Rizzoli and the Islands Just for the idea of two women being so close friends that they could be romantic. Two weeks ago, Amazon Prime gave us a league of Their Own, A TV show featuring an almost complete cast of queer women and their stories. The glut of material, by its very nature, has produced a variety of material.
But at Warner Bros. Discovery, Zaslav is shutting down the content spigot and turning the company into something a little more fiscally (and potentially culturally) conservative. The company’s stock is trending downward, but it could very well be a good thing for investors in Warner Bros. It won’t be as good for the rest of us.
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)