Warner Bros. Discovery has entered a new round of layoffs. This time, fewer than 1,000 staffers will see their jobs cut, a person with knowledge of the plan tells IndieWire.
About 1 percent of those — or fewer than 10 employees — will be let go from the company’s core streaming platform Max. Other impacted divisions include finance, business affairs, and production, we’re told, with finance getting it the worst.
At this time of this writing, not all impacted staffers had yet been notified.
Warner Bros. Discovery did not immediately respond to IndieWire’s request for comment on the layoffs.
Deadline first reported the news of the layoffs.
Cost-cutting has been one of President & CEO David Zaslav’s (pictured above) primary objectives since merging his Discovery, Inc. with AT&T’s WarnerMedia in April 2022. The merger brought with it roughly $50 billion in debt; Zaslav and his CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels have chipped away at it, but there is still a long, long way to go.
This is not the first time Warner Bros. Discovery has used a reduction in staff as a means to reduce costs. The layoffs actually began before WBD did: In anticipation of the mega merger, the brands that now make up Warner Bros. Discovery shed thousands of what Zaslav & co. felt to be employment redundancies. More layoffs came in 2023 amid the writers and actors guilds’ strikes. None of it has been able to save WBD’s stock price, which is now one-third what it was at the time of the merger.
Still, Zaslav is not done with consolidation — and we don’t just mean of his own headcount. He is on the hunt for more M&A activity to scale WBD into a large enough media company to survive industry trends.
Not for nuthin’, but Zaslav’s pay package for 2023 was nearly $50 million.
More to come…
