Warner Bros. Discovery sold (or, more accurately, transferred) its stake in The CW two years ago, but the company is looking to revive one of the broadcast network’s hallmarks: the heavy production volume of WB television studios.
At a Bank of America conference on Wednesday, WBD Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Weidenfels said the company will explore opportunities to create synergies between studios and channels when Channing Dungey joins the company to oversee its TV networks at the end of the year.
“With Kathleen Finch retiring, Channing Dungey will be a little closer to the network business,” Weidenfels said. “I think there’s going to be some great cross-pollination between the two businesses. One of the great benefits of running The CW in the past is that it gave us a lot more scale and at-bats in the television production business, and we’re looking at what we can replicate. Kathleen has already announced that she’s bringing back scripted programming to TNT that’s completely different from what’s been done in the past, again with real value creation in mind, but there may be more to come.”
Indeed, even as the cable TV business continues to collapse, Weidenfels has identified content as one of the company’s big “opportunities.”
“The most important thing is that we face a challenge to our distribution ecosystem, not our content ecosystem. People are consuming more content than ever before. We produce some of the best content in the world, but the way this content is consumed is changing, and we see a huge opportunity,” he said. “Certainly, we’ve made a lot of tough decisions, and we’ve been focused on efficiencies and cost savings, but I see this as a professionalization of capital allocation for the company. Content is a front-and-center area where we’re increasing spending beyond the impact of last year’s strikes.”
Weidenfels described his job as “being stingy where it’s necessary, but generous with funding growth opportunities.”
Another growth area is gaming, which the company has positioned as a “strategic asset.” He noted that the games division has struggled following the huge failure of the Suicide Squad game compared to the massive success of Hogwarts Legacy last year, so it makes sense that the company is already considering a sequel to the game set in the Harry Potter universe.
“Like the film industry, it’s a hit business,” he said, “and of course a sequel to Hogwarts Legacy is one of our biggest priorities over the next few years.”
Film is another area of investment, with DC Studios a key part of it, with WBD’s CFO saying James Gunn and Peter Safran are “reinvigorating” the brand.
“That doesn’t just mean a unified storyline spanning 10 years of DC canon, but also a lot more consideration being given to each individual story: which stories lend themselves to interactive implementation, which stories, which characters are so important to us that we would never allow them on other platforms, which characters might make for a great story but are OK to produce for a third-party platform,” he said.
As for rumors that WBD may be exploring strategic options – a strategy outlined by Bank of America’s Jessica Reif Ehrlich – Weidenfels suggested the company is already exploring them but is now about to get serious about it.
“The board, and secondarily, management, has a fiduciary responsibility to evaluate these opportunities and we intend to make rational decisions,” he said, “But having said that, we’ve put in a lot of hard work and made a lot of investments in all areas of this company over the last two years and I think we’re now in a position to reap some of the rewards of that hard work.”
