Warner Bros. Discovery says it’s performed killing exhibits and films only for tax write-offs

Just final month, Warner Bros. Discovery adopted up on its determination to cancel Westworld by full-on yanking the present from HBO Max — a drastic, money-saving determination that was yet one more a part of CEO David Zaslav’s grand plan to get the corporate again within the black. Now, although, Warner Bros. Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels says the leisure conglomerate is on the brink of shift gears and put extra of its energies into creating new issues fairly than tearing aside what already exists.

Speaking at Citibank’s annual Communications, Media & Entertainment Conference as we speak, Wiedenfels was adamant about 2023 being a yr of “relaunching and building,” Variety reports. Wiedenfels stated that Warner Bros. Discovery felt the necessity to take “a little bit of time to make sure that we do it properly,” in reference to final yr’s gradual culling of titles from HBO Max’s library, and that “we’ve come to great solutions” — alluding to the corporate’s plans for a few of its content material to maneuver to different providers. In order to correctly transfer ahead, Wiedendels insisted, WBD needed to get its cost-saving cancellations out of the best way first.

“That was very important to all of us, to really use 2022 to leave the purchase accounting behind us, leave those initial strategy changes behind us, get it all out there in terms of our restructuring estimates and then be able to turn the page forward,” Wiedendels stated. “I think the team has laid a great foundation, and I’m really excited about the growth from here.”

The thought of HBO Max — which is ready to grow to be a brand new service as soon as it absolutely merges with Discovery Plus — going by a development spurt sounds a bit doubtful after a yr of watching the service lose so a lot of its collection. But Wiedenfels stated that each cost-cutting measure that Warner Bros. Discovery took in 2022 was “a reflection of an industry that went overboard and went on a spending frenzy” at a time when “there was a lot of thinking of, ‘let’s do more, more, more,’ not necessarily ‘let’s do the exact right things, let’s do what works.’”

It’s definitely good to listen to that WBD doesn’t plan on additional scorching the earth with content material write-offs because it gears as much as launch HBO Max and Discovery’s successor someday this spring. But Zaslav’s WBD is one which operates like a enterprise targeted on revenue above anything, and it wouldn’t be in any respect shocking if the write-offs had been really over simply but.