Warner Bros Discovery Merger Idiocy Continues With Another Big Round Of Layoffs
from the rinse-and-repeat dept
Everyone thinks America’s favorite pastime is baseball. In reality, it’s mindless mergers and acquisitions that promise boundless new “synergies,” then deliver a parade of harmful consolidation, job cuts, closures, chaos, and competitive harms, all buried under a giant mountain of bullshit.
If you recall, AT&T’s massive $200 billion acquisition of DirecTV and Time Warner wound up being a monumental disaster, resulting in countless layoffs and the closure of popular brands like Mad Magazine.
After AT&T execs failed spectacularly at pivoting to streaming video and online ads, AT&T spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media then immediately turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.
Despite a series of acquisitions and name changes, the deal has been a giant, monumental, dysfunctional turd from the very beginning, showcasing all of the worst aspects of our nationwide obsession with mindless stock-fluffing mergers, acquisitions, and megadeals.
As usual with these kinds of deals, it’s the lower-level employees and customers who continue to pay the bill. Hoping to prove the amazing synergies of the deal, the freshly merged company has been consistently cancelling shows and pulling any show from its streaming catalog (like many episodes of Sesame Street) because it’s too cheap to pay residuals.
They’re also super excited to sock their customers with a wide array of price hikes, given the company’s CFO believes services like HBO Max and Discovery+ are “underpriced.” And they just keep implementing round after round of layoffs. Such as over at Warner Brothers Television, where around a quarter of the entire staff are being fired. Many of the layoffs involve closing projects intended to amplify up and coming voices:
While they were not specifically diversity programs exclusively for participants from historically excluded backgrounds, the Warner Bros. Television Workshop was regarded as an important pipeline of opportunity for such artists looking to break into the business. The writers’ workshop had been in existence for more than 40 years…
Again, there’s zero real evidence that the coagulated pile of freshly merged media companies are actually building something better than had already existed years earlier. They’re largely just engaged in a performative dance that serves no real function outside of goosing stock value, trimming tax burdens, and fattening executive compensation and “deal making” resumes, while lower level employees, consumers, and product customers get slapped in the face. Repeatedly.
Filed Under: acquisitions, layoffs, mergers
Companies: at&t, discovery, warner brothers discovery, warner media
Comments on “Warner Bros Discovery Merger Idiocy Continues With Another Big Round Of Layoffs”
Now you know why
PAPER Pushers get so Much money, they are over worked.
What ever happened to the old ways to building a business? It got to big to see its own feet. forget the private parts.
You start up a few Subsidiaries that do Other work or experiment with other ways, and Add that to What you already do. Why are they cutting and slicing and TO FIX the problem, Raise prices on the consumer.
Is it cause the IRS has been cut back and screwed so badly, that corps know they cant trace Squat to find where the money went?
Warner Bros Discovery was that their CEO is an idiot.
Re:
Wikipedia says “[CEO] Zaslav’s executive compensation package includes an annual salary of $3 million with an annual $22 million bonus. In his contract extension, Zaslav also received stock options valued at $190 million, making him one of the highest-paid entertainment executives in the world.”
So, I don’t know about “idiot”. There may be chaos all around them, but I suspect the view from inside the CEO bubble is pretty great. And if the chaos gets to be too much, a CEO can always jump to a higher-paying job before the whole thing falls apart.
Cartoon Network seems pretty much fucked.
No disrespect to Sam Register, who’s great, but getting rid of CN as a separate division and putting the whole thing under WB Animation kinda necessarily implies a lot less material coming out.
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They were fucked when they traded Megas XLR for a tax writeoff.
Re: Re:
God, do I miss Megas XLR
The report from Variety makes it sound like it’s not as bad.
The article that Cartoon Brew put out, if that’s one of the things you’ve seen, with its inflammatory headline among other things, was really bad.
People working at Cartoon Network, as well as other animators, have been calling out Cartoon Brew and its head honcho Amid Amidi for peddling garbage, both past and present. His trash has been known about for years now, this tweet I’m linking being from 2019, but still keeps getting clicks and exposure.
I’ve seen occasional hints of right-wing nuts suggesting that this is all a response to a ‘woke’ Velma trailer, and also therefore a good and wonderful thing because what it really represents is a clearing out of everyone who ‘pushes a woke agenda’. Bizarre paranoid nonsense, I know, but that unfortunately doesn’t prevent its real-world effects.
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Is that similar to the complaints that the Batgirl and Supergirl movies were canceled because they were “woke”?
Supposedly, the Batgirl movie was going to have Michael Keaton return as Batman but then kill off.
Then Henry Cavill as Superman was supposed to die off-screen in the Black Adam movie to make room for Supergirl.
So this would be 2 cases of killing off the legacy white male character in favor of the colored female character.
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I’m still getting over laughing at “superman comes in super girl”
🤣
Money me
I’m a bit confused about the phrase “outside of goosing stock value”.
Isn’t that the only point of these deals?
The problem her is the same it’s been for over a decade.
The top levels of command are stuck on multi-hundred-million dollar films headed to theatres where the may make 5:1 or 10:1 if lucky. Because it looks good on paper.
Despite proven returns for
Prime showings many first run films matching theatre ticket prices also matching returns.
According to NDRD the average first run prime release earns 7:1 within 6 months.
And while granted that average includes super films that earn 15+
And averages out flops, the system is there and works.
Right now the idea is to free cash to make the next hundred mil film.
That’s an axe for the little people.
The mergers aren’t the problem themselves, but a part of a larger problem.