News out of Hollywood’s fabled Warner Bros., and its parent Warner Bros. Discovery, this week revealed the state of legacy media in its Q2 earnings call: streaming losses, subscriber losses, linear TV declines and a studio down 25 percent from last year. What was up? Cuts (i.e. layoffs and programming) and savings that led to increased free cash flow (the new incentive metric used to bonus top executives). “Nothing was growing,” says Sean McNulty, joined by Elaine Low, Richard Rushfield and Janice Min. With entertainment barely mentioned the same day by Apple and Amazon on their earnings calls, and the AMPTP under pressure to settle with the unions, the team discuss the question of why the legacies stick together with their tech brethren: “They have as much business producing movies as Coke, Panasonic and GE did.”
Transcript here.
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WBD and the Struggle of Legacy Studios