These days, the average person needs to know way too much about massive corporate dealings just to follow entertainment news. Why did Fantastic Four and X-Men characters only now appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Doctor Strange 2Doctor Strange 2? It’s because Disney bought Fox, which previously had the cinematic rights to those franchises. If you’ve been following Warner Bros. corporate shenanigans, though, you’ve seen headlines much more alarming than just “Finally, Scarlet Witch meets Professor X.”
The beleaguered Warner media giant has been in the news for dumb reasons (turning Zack Snyder opinions into a moral referendum), as well as increasingly horrifying reasons (everything surrounding Ezra Miller). But arguably the biggest news is the continued fallout from the WarnerMedia/Discovery merger earlier this year, resulting in a new conglomerate: Warner Bros. Discovery.
Corporate mergers are bad because monopolies are bad. They leave redundant employees out of work, leave customers with fewer options, and consolidate more power into the hands of a few elites. But I naively hoped that at the very least Warner Bros. Discovery would combine the power of its two video streaming services, Discovery+ and HBO Max, to create the subscription service to end all subscription services. Alas, instead of empowering HBO, Discovery+ seems poised to destroy it. And that’s a shame, because we could have had it all.
Fusion Dance
Discovery and WB each has a video streaming service. They aren’t quite Editors’ Choice award winners, but they're strong in their respective categories. HBO Max has all the premium shows that made the HBO brand synonymous with the Golden Age of Television. Besides Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and The Wire, the service leverages Warner’s other, varied properties (that we still want to see fight in MultiVersus). There's everything from Batman and Game of Thrones, to Rick and Morty and Studio Ghibli anime. Plus, HBO Max has a top-notch collection of new and classic film. It’s an appealing service for mainstream adults, and it has the Snyder Cut, which I’m genuinely glad exists.
Meanwhile, the wide world of reality show garbage on Discovery+ is so irresistible we’ve already written a love letter to its trashy delights. Nerds may not understand this, especially if they’ve spent years nursing grudges over folks who don’t take comic books as seriously as they do, but reality TV is extremely popular. Between Guy Fieri’s cooking shows, questionable dating advice from Oprah Winfrey, outlandish true crime documentaries, and the endless pleasure of the 90 Day Fiancé universe, Discovery+ has this incredibly important part of the streaming market locked down.
Unfortunately, Discovery is so formidable that it has apparently taken the reins on the WarnerMedia merger. Discovery’s CEO David Zaslav has become the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO, and his recent moves threaten to wreck what remains of Warner Bros. and throw the entire union out of balance.
Discovery Minus
Zaslav isn’t building up HBO Max, he’s cutting it down. He’s backing away from the (admittedly controversial) COVID-era policy of releasing movies on streaming and in theaters on the same day. But he’s also deemphasizing HBO Max’s original scripted programming. He’s removing “underperforming” content from the platform without warning, even if HBO already owns it. Most egregiously, he’s cancelled two nearly finished films: BatgirlBatgirl and Scoob!: Holiday Haunt. And for what reason? A possible tax write-off.
Like many CEOs, Zaslav wants his company to make more money while spending less. Discovery+, while entertaining, provides him a very cynical way to achieve that on HBO Max. Don’t worry about fostering high-quality original shows, just pump in cheap, addictive reality TV that costs peanuts to produce. Who cares if you tarnish the HBO brand if the subscriber numbers go up? It’s the kind of lazy, artless, reductive, shortsighted thinking you’d expect from management that tells investors “HBO is for men and Discovery is for women.” These are the actions from a greedy corporate lawyer-turned CEO who hires like-minded, money-grubbing executives, all while peddling trash TV and claiming POC-led media isn’t good enough to release.