Warner Bros. Discovery to Lay Off Fewer Than 1,000 Staffers in New Round of Job Cuts
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. It may not quite be four figures, but it’s still sizable.
About 1 percent of them — or fewer than 10 employees — will be let go from the company’s core streaming platform Max, we’re told. Other impacted divisions include finance, business affairs, and production, with finance getting it the worst of all.
At this time of this writing, not all impacted staffers had yet to be 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 Warner Bros. Discovery 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. (Like, more than $40 billion of it.)
This is not the first time Warner Bros. Discovery has used a reduction in staff as a means to reduce costs. It’s not even the first time this year: WBD shuttered digital-content pioneer Rooster Teeth in March, resulting in the loss of its 150 staff members.
But the WBD 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 later that year, and more still 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. Warner Bros. Discovery, like other legacy media companies, is simply too tied to linear television in a streaming world. A streaming world, it should be noted, in which most streamers are not very profitable. (Max is somewhat profitable.)
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. For a minute there, it looked like he might go after Paramount Global. It was only a minute.
Zaslav has also cut costs by canceling fully completed or nearly completed films like “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs. Acme,” and removing content from Max’s library. That hasn’t exactly made him a popular guy among the Hollywood commoners. (It probably didn’t help when he said it took “courage” to make those cuts.)
Nor did this: Zaslav’s pay package for 2023 was nearly $50 million.
Warner Bros. Discovery is far from the only media company slimming down to stay afloat. It also isn’t the only one to write off existing content for a tax break — it is just the most egregious user of the practice.
