Interested audiences could catch it on CNN’s cable broadcast, stream it via HBO Max (fka Max, fka HBO Max), or, if they subscribed to neither service, view it for free on CNN’s website.
Now, however, he’s given up everything from Discovery, just two years after his HBO Max–to–Max rebranding set the stage for HBO and Discovery properties to exist together online.
As I noted late last year, Zaslav had already spent much of his 2024 chipping away at the Warner Bros.
(Zaslav’s excuse is that sports apparently don’t drive HBO Max subscriptions; I’m less convinced that that’s why some customers may be avoiding Max.)
The future of Warner Bros.’ film-and-TV biz is even less certain.
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Warner Bros. appeared to have a successful weekend this weekend. Exploration. The entertainment behemoth planned a highly anticipated, publicly accessible livestream of the show’s penultimate performance on Saturday night after securing the national broadcasting rights for Good Night, and Good Luck, the smash Broadway play based on George Clooney’s 2005 movie. Those who were interested could watch it on CNN’s cable broadcast, stream it on HBO Max (fka Max, fka HBO Max), or watch it for free on CNN’s website if they didn’t have a subscription to either service. With the explicit consent of Warner Bros., Good Night and Good Luck, the first Broadway play to ever receive a live telecast on American TV, crystallized the corporate synergy between the Cable News Network and its name-shifting digital counterpart, (HBO) Max, by reintroducing the morally upright tale of Edward R. Murrow’s fight against McCarthyism at a pivotal moment. The story was broadcast both traditional and digitally. David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery.
Or so it appeared. CNN and HBO will no longer be jointly owned, Zaslav and WBD CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels informed investors on Monday. the entire process of closing the deal that combined WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc. WBD will be divided back into two distinct businesses by the summer of 2026, effectively nullifying their intellectual property that was brought under Zaslav’s supervision just three years ago. Warner Bros. will be the first company, which will be run by Zaslav and called Streaming and Studios. movie and TV properties, the DC Studios library, and HBO’s TV and streaming services. Wiedenfels will lead the second, which will be called Global Networks and will acquire the company’s cable properties, such as Bleacher Report, CNN, Animal Planet, TLC, Food Network, TBS, TNT Sports, CNN, Discovery, and U.S. A. rights to broadcast on different European channels and sports like NCAA basketball. Tens of billions of dollars’ worth of corporate debt will also be assumed.
The redivision of WBD, when combined with the HBO Max reversion that took place just last month, may be yet another clear sign that Zaslav shouldn’t be in charge of so much American cultural heritage. Prior to Discovery Communications’ 2022 merger with WarnerMedia, Zaslav served as CEO for 16 years. Two years after his HBO Max-to-Max rebranding paved the way for HBO and Discovery properties to coexist online, he has now shed all of his responsibilities with Discovery. David Zaslav, who acknowledged last month that perhaps it wasn’t the best idea, is simply dumping Discovery in its tracks and taking the esteemed divisions for himself.
That’s not the only questionable aspect. Zaslav voiced some overt hope following the 2024 presidential election that a second Donald Trump administration would create a more hospitable business climate for media-industry agreements, such as the possible 2023 merger he had considered between WBD and Paramount. But Zaslav started reducing employee benefits as a result of the economic uncertainty brought on by the Trump 2.0 tariff crisis, in part because a large portion of WBD’s revenue comes from Chinese movie releases. Instead of further consolidating, he is now un-consolidating his media empire, probably in order to protect the company’s present and future revenue streams from economic shocks and to ease his concerns about the $43 billion debt incurred during the acquisition, whose repayment installments are still subject to those exorbitant interest rates. Trump has only been in office for a few months.
Zaslav had already devoted a large portion of his 2024 to trying to improve Warner Bros., as I mentioned late last year. portfolio for discovery. The executive suite at WBD began selling off many of its international cable channels and terminating ongoing agreements with organizations like Sesame Street, in addition to removing iconic shows like Looney Tunes from the HBO Max corpus (and then utilizing the tax write-offs). Zaslav also made clear that he disapproved of one of WBD’s most costly but worthwhile benefits: the domestic rights to NBA broadcasts on TNT. He first asserted that WBD didn’t require the NBA, but when the league naturally turned to Amazon for future broadcast rights, he became enraged and filed a lawsuit against it. The fallout: a settlement reached in November that gave Bleacher Report and TNT Sports permission to broadcast games in select foreign markets but took away their rights to broadcast live games in the US. (Disney, Comcast, and Amazon will have those rights for the next ten years under the NBA’s new contract. ().
Along the way, a number of prominent individuals became enraged, including NBA commissioner Adam Silver and TNT panelist Charles Barkley, who probably noticed that Zaslav frequently attends Knicks games from the courtside. Zaslav, however, has nothing but disdain for the sports industry, which is currently one of traditional TV’s last reliable revenue streams, as can be seen from the proposed split. (Zaslav’s justification is that sports don’t seem to be the main reason people subscribe to HBO Max; I’m not sure if that’s the case but it’s a plausible explanation. All of Global Networks’ athletics, cable channels, and (the majority of) the financial debt accumulated during the 2022 merger and Zaslav’s rule afterward are now under Gunnar Wiedenfels’ control. Wiedenfels may be able to benefit from a spike in March Madness viewership, but he will no longer have domestic NBA live games as his main bargaining chip. Additionally, he acquired CNN, also known as President Donald Trump’s least favorite news channel, which is one of Zaslav’s more politically awkward offerings. On behalf of George Clooney, Zaslav may have consented to disseminate the pro-press message of “Good Night, Good Luck,” but he most likely didn’t want to deal with the Trump administration’s ruthless persecution of news organizations that the president considers to be “very unfair” to him. particularly when that could impede the larger company’s ability to close deals, as it did in the case of Paramount.
The problem is that WBD’s action doesn’t contradict more general trends in entertainment. Last year, Paramount devalued its cable offerings by billions of dollars and closed and laid off employees from its in-house TV studio. After a reorganization of its executives, the troubled studio laid off an additional 3 to 5 percent of its American employees just this week. Comcast kept its streaming and movie-going businesses, Peacock and Universal, in-house while spinning off the majority of its traditional TV assets—apart from Bravo, Telemundo, and the main NBC brand—into a “SpinCo” company (now known as Versant).
Zaslav’s media group, Streaming & Studios, is more focused, but he will unavoidably further reduce HBO Max’s once-rich library if he keeps it in his control. According to Zaslav himself, the combined viewership of the TV networks he is spinning off accounts for 25% of HBO Max. Warner Bros.’s future. The film and television industry is even less certain. To his credit, despite Ryan Coogler’s contentious demands for film ownership, Zaslav did what other studios wouldn’t and placed a bid for the film Sinners, ultimately awarding Warner Bros. the most successful non-IP film of the decade so far. It might be a good match for the second-highest-grossing movie of the year, A Minecraft Movie, which is a WBD video game adaptation. However, a large portion of his time has been characterized by finished films that are canceled before they are released, the clumsy debuts of new works by seasoned filmmakers like Clint Eastwood, the customary over-reliance on intellectual property that Zaslav has stated will persist, and the capricious favors requested for personal friends—such as Nicholas Pileggi, the Goodfellas-inspired writer whose most recent Zaslav-approved film, The Alto Knights, bombed pretty drastically.
Perhaps Zaslav believes that by selling his cable channel stack, news and sports holdings, and a sizable amount of debt to “Global Networks,” he will be able to get rid of the feds and haters. However, there’s no reason to think he’ll perform any better in the future given the whole story of his WBD takeover, his choices and retractions, and now, at last, the dissolution of the media megamerger he was meant to build up even more. He has run out of ideas, and American culture has suffered as a result. We all wish you a good night and luck.
