Endgame: WBD and Streaming Wars' Final Scenarios
Zaslav is days away from being allowed to sell. Now M&A is inevitable or impossible also for Disney, Apple, Comcast and Paramount
Ready or not, here it comes.
After years of build up, positioning, circling, denying and taking measure, the star charts suggest we are heading for the endgame of this round of the Great Entertainment Semi-Finals.
This isn’t the end of Hollywood, but it will mark the final fallout of the inevitable consequences of the Streaming Wars and all the dislocation it’s wrought — combined with a lot of damage Hollywood was doing to itself in the Big IP Era, which pre-dated streaming.
In the past few weeks there’s been murmuring about a bunch of things that suggest the tectonic plates are finally about to shift. The approaching WBD transaction deadline creates yet another tantalizing moment to start the dealmaking carousel. Plus there are the Iger succession murmurs, the Paramount sale . . . and where it will stop, nobody knows.
So let’s take a look around town and see where things stand for the different players on the board as the game could be reset yet again.
Warner Disco: Looking for the Silver Bullet
David Zaslav’s merged company is digging its way out of debt, as promised, on the back of two years of brutal cuts, cost-controls and pullbacks from the madness of the streaming era, which hit some extravagant heights under the Kilar/AT&T regime.
Nonetheless, digging out of a money pit is a slow, painful process, one which Wall Street has shown little interest in coming along for the ride.
While the film division is cranking out a steady retinue of eye-catching announcements, the timeline on turning those announcements into tickets sold at the box office is not short. Neither will the promised Harry Potter series materialize overnight. When it does — and when the A-list films appear — how much are some hits already baked into the assumptions here?
It’s all enough to make one wonder if there aren’t visions of Project Popcorn redux dancing in the heads of some stock-conscious executives there . . . some Hail Mary pass that’s designed to goose the share price and Max.