There was a warning sign of a lot of the type of stuff he's doing now at the least earnings call. He said:
“I know we have the resources but we can plan on being careful and judicious,” Zaslav said. “As you’ve heard me say, we are not trying to win the direct-to-consumer spending war,” the WBD chief said, instead promising that the newly combined WarnerMedia-Discovery company would “invest in scale smartly.”
“Everything should be monetized,” Zaslav said. He plans to focus the company more tightly on “maximizing shareholder value” instead of the costly pursuit of subscriptions.
The CEO of the nation's third-largest entertainment player said he plans to avoid the pressure of meeting the spending of rival streamers
www.thewrap.com
Remember, this is a guy who pulled the plug on CNN+ just days into his tenure after they spent $300M on it already. It shouldn't be surprising that he pulls the plug on Batgirl, Scoob, or the upcoming LeBron James Produced movie "House Party".
Zaslav has shown us the type of guy he is. He comes off as very Wall Street. He's looking for every penny. Even though he's throwing away money left and right, he sees it as saving money. He's going to use CNN+, Batgirl, Scoob, and House Party as tax write offs. Also, he looks at it from the perspective of how much he saved the company. CNN+ was planning to spend over $1B building up that service, so he sees that as a $700M+ savings. He sees Batgirl and all the other as savings from the perspective of he doesn't have to promote them and/or he can sell off movies in some cases (House Party being a prime example of a movie that could be sold off).
Also, what about all of the HBO Max original movies that are being wiped from the service? So far, “Moonshot” “Superintelligence” “The Witches” “An American Pickle” “Locked Down” “Charm City Kings” have all been taken off and what that does is allow them to vault them and potentially sell those some day. It really seems like Zas hates the entire Max side of HBO Max and his preferred service would be HBO Max (without the Max stuff) along with a crap ton of Property Brothers from his Discovery+ side.
HBO Max has purged at least six Warner Bros. movies that were exclusively streaming on the service in an apparent cost-cutting move.
variety.com