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Warner Bros. Discovery Done Killing Content for Tax Write-Offs: CFO

As you've seen from our coverage, ever since David Zaslav and his crew took over post-merger, Warner Bros. Discovery has made some brutal decisions when it comes to its streaming/television & film areas in an effort to come up with $3.5B in cost savings. Those moves have ranged from scrapping HBO Max's completed Batgirl film and pulling TBS' Chad only hours before it was set to premiere its second season to canceling/pulling animated series from HBO Max (to name just a few examples). Now, with the company eyeing this year's streaming merger between HBO Max and Discovery+, Warner Bros. Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels revealed that the company has shifted from a "restructuring" mode to a "rebuilding plan," with the days of cutting content for tax write-off purposes over.

"I think we've come to great solutions, and most importantly, we're done with that chapter. That was really important to all of us," Wiedenfels shared while speaking earlier today at Citi's 2023 Communications, Media & Entertainment Conference Thursday. "We really have command and control over the business now. There were some surprises in the first months of the combination, as you know, but we put out the guidance for this year at the end of December, and I've been very, very pleased with all of our operating trends over the second half of the year," the WBD CFO added. As for the company getting "a lot of public noise about the content write-offs that we took," Wiedenfels made it clear that they were just doing what they had to do. In fact, if there is anyone to blame for the bloodletting that's been going on over the past few months? Well, it's everyone else. "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,'" Wiedenfels argued. And it was that "more, more, more" mentality that the CFO says forced WBD's new leadership to have to make tough choices that were "a reflection of an industry that went overboard and went on a spending frenzy."

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