David Zaslav says scrapping films for tax write-offs took courage

David Zaslav says scrapping films for tax write-offs took courage.

“What content is going to help us win? The content that wasn’t, we made a strategic decision on. It was difficult & painful… But it was necessary.”

“We’re at a very hard time that requires hard decisions, and many of them are unpopular,” Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav said in reviewing the trajectory of a company that has slashed staff and shelved content in an landscape that’s completely transformed from when the Discovery-Warner Media merger was announced in 2021.

“We said no sacred cows,” he told Andrew Ross Sorkin during a Q&A at The New York Times’ DealBook conference.

“If we were going to start today,” he added, “what content do we need? What content is going to help us? How many people do we need? What should HBO look like? What should Warner Brothers look like?”

He called WBD’s first big layoffs “brutal” but said “these are companies that have never really been restructured for the future. And so we really decided that we have to have courage, we’ve got to figure it out.”

In another maneuver by the David Zaslav-run Warner Bros Discovery to kill movies, we hear on very good authority that Warner Bros will not be releasing the hybrid live-action/animated Coyote vs. Acme, with the conglom taking an estimated $30M write-down on the $70M production. We understand the write-down for the pic was applied to the recently reported Q3.

This reps the third time that Zaslav’s Warner Bros has pulled the plug on a movie greenlighted by the previous Warner Media administration, the other two being the Max-destined Batgirl and the animated Scoob Holiday Haunt!