Warner Bros Discovery is under pressure to have another big hit, but there is no sign fans are calling for a new portrayal of the boy wizard The original Harry Potter series starred Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint. Photo: Warner Brothers Entertainment conglomerate Warner Bros Discovery is in trouble, and leaking money like a sieve. Earlier this month, at the unveiling of the company’s quarterly results, Wall Street was told that WBD’s television business is worth $9.
1 billion less than was previously believed. The man delivering the bad news was its CEO David Zaslav, who came up with the idea of a merger between Discovery and the historic movie studio back in 2022. He’s also the one being blamed for WBD’s current woes, which include losing the television rights to live NBA games — a very, very big blow in the US.
Normally, the average viewer probably couldn’t care less about mergers and acquisitions, stocks and shares or profits and losses. Such things are the stuff of business and finance pages, not the entertainment section. Until, that is, they start to have a negative impact on the TV shows and films people love.
For those of us to whom the business dealings of major corporations are as baffling as quantum physics, WBD’s sharp fall from financial grace is hard to fathom. We live in an age when, rightly or wrongly, owning an established intellectual property (IP) that’s immediately recognisable to the general public and can be plundered for n.