. Toby Emmerich, Casey Bloys and Channing Dungey, heads of Warner Bros Pictures, HBO and Warner Bros TV, respectively, have gotten votes of confidence.)Warner Bros Discovery Leadership Structure Is Set: Bigger Roles For JB Perrette, Kathleen Finch, Bruce Campbell
Despite being the minority stakeholder, Discovery has operational control of WBD. The company’s longtime CEO, Zaslav, has assembled a management team mostly from the ranks of his alma mater, with many of them with roots back to Zaslav’s run at NBC in the 1990s and 2000s. The nature of the deal, which did not involve a U.S. broadcast network or multiple movie studios, enabled it to pass smoothly through a 10-month regulatory process and close earlier than initial forecasts. There were never any serious rumblings of opposition to the combination, though it does create a colossus on the cable side, with TNT, TBS, CNN, Cartoon Network and others joining Discovery’s portfolio of 19 networks.
Streaming has hastened the commingling of WarnerMedia divisions and will also fuel many of the new company’s strategic moves. HBO Max, which launched in May 2020, will ultimately be combined into a single service with Discovery+, though that process will take months, if not longer, for a host of technological and logistical reasons. At the close of 2021, HBO Max had 73.8 million global subscribers when combined with traditional HBO.
Scripted film and TV projects are also relatively uncharted waters for Zaslav and the Discovery team, apart from OWN. Not only has Zaslav steered Discovery toward unscripted but he has derided the crush of companies entering the scripted space. As Discovery absorbed Scripps and its portfolio of lifestyle networks, he favored a metaphor of a kids’ soccer game, with a bunch of kids chasing the scripted ball and Discovery in an open part of the field looking to score unscripted.
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