When Warner Bros allied with Discovery in April, we all believed it would be for the better: new series, new opportunities, an alliance that could -and should- be beneficial for both. In fact, his new slogan, taken from ‘The Maltese Falcon’, would be “The stuff dreams are made of”. Four months later we know that the material in question is tears of authors who have seen their series deleted, anger of the followers and, in addition, a fall in the stock market that is not going to help the confidence of investors.
Zaslav, in the whole mouth
The idea behind the cancellation of ‘Batgirl’, the elimination of all existing traces of ‘Infinity train’ or the wholesale of Looney Tunes themselves was to save money. Zaslav, the director of the company, promised 3 billion savings by cutting children’s programmingdoing away with direct-to-HBO Max movies and focusing only on popular franchises…for right after advertise the sale of various products of these franchises to the highest bidder.
It has been risky, it has lost the trust of the fans and the image of the company has been damaged for decades to come, no matter how many ‘House of the Dragon’ they release trying to alleviate the disaster, but it will have been worth it, right? Well… If we look at the market value, Warner Bros Discovery has lost 7% or $2.39 billion since Friday alone. If we zoom in we can see that from April to now it has lost half of the market value. Good job regaining investor confidence, Zaslav.
Warner Bros. is being so erratic in recent weeks that even their director’s biggest defenders when the tough decision was made to cancel ‘Batgirl’ they don’t really know what’s going on. Maybe it’s all a smart long-term strategy and in 2025 we’ll be talking about a company that makes non-stop profits thanks to its wonderful reality shows, but everything seems to indicate that Warner Bros Discovery is even more destined for bankruptcy than before… Only, in addition, having lost content. Good work.