It’s the worst of times for entertainment conglomerates, and the best of times. By most traditional metrics, shutting down half to most of your business for one to two years is the sort of business setback generally labeled “catastrophic” or, more subtly—”an extinction-level event.”
Fortunately, the asteroid wiped out half the country at just the moment when we were gearing up to head off to the Great Streaming War. So it’s an opportunity. Here we all are building the Hollywood of tomorrow.
So how’s that working out for everyone? Let’s take a few looks around the horn this week and see.
Max Factor
Death came to the phone company this week. In the great year of layoffs and downsized, tt was WarnerMedia’s turn to meet the reaper. Like the fallout from a slow-moving tropical depression—which is what this circulating disaster feels like—layoffs were heavy and widespread. But of course, best not to look at them as layoffs, but as opportunities, the hinge on which the pivot turns.
Most prominently in this week’s departures – the company said goodbye to Marketing Capo Blair Rich: the latest turn in the War of the Roses that has roiled the studio continuously since The Great Bake-Off blew up the old order way back when.
The fare thee wells to the shock of many did not, however, include the skull of Toby Emmerich. The production chief’s imminent ouster was perhaps the most ubiquitous rumor of the past decade. Tracking boards foretold that the axe had already fallen and the office was being packed. Yet as the dust settles, his rival for the Warners wheel is packing her desk while he remains non-fired. And with expanded duties, no less.
On one level, it’s a delayed reckoning for the rough patch the studio went through in the year pre-COVID. In retrospect, the departure of Sue Kroll from marketing turns out to be a real hinge point for Warners ability to open movies. Frankly though, re: the rough patch pre-COVID: Does anyone remember a time before COVID? Can we be sure Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey or The Way Back weren’t all a dream?
The Blair Rich news follows the dispatching of a good piece of the leadership of the rest of the marketing department, including JP Richards and Jim Gallagher, who were let go earlier this week. On the one hand, if you’re going to redo your marketing group, now’s the time to do it, given there’s no movies coming out. On the other hand, how are you going to put any movies out without a marketing group?
Or more to the point, the feeling is these moves seem to indicate another big half-step backward from the company’s theatrical business.
All around the company however the layoffs were filtering down and the bodies are piled up around Warner Media. Re-orgs are in the air. What an opportunity! As Jason Kilar put it:
In August, I first shared news about how we were going to meaningfully change the organizational structure of WarnerMedia (which entailed, among other items, simplifying how we organize our entertainment studios, elevating HBO Max, and consolidating our commercial activities into one organization)
All terrific things! Who could object to simplifying the organization of their entertainment studios! About darn time, I say! Consolidating commercial activities into one organization? I mean, how many times have I said you’ve gotta get on that?
Those magnificent leaps forward aside, it just leaves me wondering: How does any of this answer the question? The question being: What the hell are you going to do about the total trainwreck of a flaming disaster that currently is HBO Max?
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