The Dish: Amid Layoffs, How David Zaslav Might Deal With J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, DC’s Walter Hamada & New Warner Bros. Pictures Chiefs Mike De Luca & Pam Abdy
08.08.2022 - 02:43
/ deadline.com
If there was one thing that the turbulent week at Warner Bros. Discovery displayed, it’s just how quickly conventional wisdom can change from one regime to the next, when each is trying to gin up the stock price for Wall Street.
WBD chief David Zaslav was busy. On the eve of a rumored layoff bloodbath across the company to cut at least $3 billion of debt off the books, there was the abrupt and cruel cancelation of Batgirl and the HBO Max animated feature Scoob! with the latter message delivered while the co-directors were in Morocco as one of them was getting married.
There has also been rampant speculation there may be further trims of the HBO Max development slate of J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot after Abrams’ big-ticket series Demimonde was scrapped in one of the new regime’s first moves. It’s clear that current DC Films head Walter Hamada is hanging by a spider web (sorry, wrong superhero franchise) as Zaslav enlisted former Disney chief Alan Horn to try and find a Kevin Feige to replicate the success that the Marvel superhero factory had at that studio.
All this is evidence of just how serious Zaslav is in turning things around. Wall Street was less than impressed, with the stock price dropping 16% after Zas delivered a weak short-term forecast and promised to get under the hood and overhaul.
Here is what’s fascinating to anyone who has watched that studio since the acquisition by AT&T, when John Stankey, Jason Kilar, Ann Sarnoff, Bob Greenblatt, and Toby Emmerich were going to make WarnerMedia a worthy rival to the streaming juggernauts Netflix and Disney by leaning in and creating content for HBO Max. None of those people hold those positions anymore, as AT&T bolted after discovering how incompatible the high cost of content
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.