Dominating the headlines in the back half of 2022 were stories about Warner Bros. Discovery’s multi-billion dollar cost-cutting measures which began with the bang of the “Batgirl” scrapping and continued on with numerous high profile shows being pulled from HBO Max, and ‘unrenewals’ of existing series orders.
Stories were frequent enough that it has become a serious question as to whether anything at Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO Max was safe from this night of the long budgetary knives. Well, according to Warner Bros. CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, everyone can now rest easy.
Even though the cuts were significant in an effort to fulfil the post-merger company’s $3.5 billion target in cost savings over three years, Wiedenfels says it’s reflective of an “industry that went overboard” in terms of content overspending and “an irrational time of overspending with limited focus on return on investment.”
Speaking at Citi’s 2023 Communications, Media & Entertainment Conference on Thursday, Wiedenfels says that last year the company was restructuring and so focused on layoffs and content write-offs, whereas in 2023 the plan is for “relaunching and building”.
“We took a little bit of time to make sure that we do it properly. For some of the titles, we’ve found new homes elsewhere. That’s why this took six or seven months. But I think we’ve come to great solutions and, most importantly, we’re done with that chapter.
That was very important to all of us, to really use 2022 to leave the purchase accounting behind us, leave those initial strategy changes behind us, get it all out there in terms of our restructuring estimates and then be able to turn the page forward. I think the team has laid a great foundation and I’m really excited about the growth from here.”
He does note that some of the cancellations received “a lot of public noise”, as did the pulling of entire series from the streaming platform, which reminded people of the impermanence of SVOD platforms despite being sold on readily available massive catalogs of content.
The company still has a debt of around $50 billion, but no debt repayments are looming.
Source: Variety
