Big Deal
Sometimes You Have to Destroy to Build
By Andy Marken
So far, WBD’s (Warner Bros Discovery) boss, David Zaslav, has relied heavily on the entertainment company’s past to move his deeply leveraged organization into tomorrow and that could be a good thing or … who knows.
He cancelled a number of DC projects, including Batgirl; borrowing from Orson Wells’ famous Paul Masson winery’s line (https://tinyurl.com/ywpatb4h) and telling financial and industry analysts, “We are not going to release any film before it’s ready…”
It may work better for movies/shows than it did for wine because even after years of making wine for the masses for nearly 100 years, the winery finally turned off the spigot to become a conferencing, events center.
However, Zaslav isn’t counting on a well-turned phrase to help him make the cobbled together entertainment entities – movie/TV studios, cable/linear TV networks and promising D2C (direct to customer) AVOD/SVOD streaming service – into a smooth running/profitable viewer-centric organization that can quickly pay down its $43B merger load and more than justify his hefty $246M salary.
Killing off Batgirl and a few other projects gave the
