Warner Bros. Discovery may have sold (or more accurately divested) its stake in The CW two years ago, but the company is looking to revive one of the network’s hallmarks: a ton of production for the WB television studio.
At a Bank of America conference on Wednesday, WBD CFO Gunnar Weidenfels said that when Channing Dungey takes over oversight of the company's TV networks later this year, he will look for opportunities to create synergies between the studio and the channels.
“Channing Dungey will now get a little closer to the network business when Kathleen [Finch] is retiring,” Weidenfels said. “I think that’s going to create a lot of cross-pollination between the two businesses. One of the great things about running The CW in the past was that it generated a lot of volume, more beats for the TV production business. And we’re trying to figure out what we can recreate. Kathleen has already announced that some scripted shows are coming back to TNT, very different than they’ve done in the past, again, with an eye on creating real value, but maybe there’s more to it.”
Indeed, Weidenfels called content one of the big “opportunities” for the company, even as the cable business continues to disintegrate.
“The bottom line is we're facing challenges in the distribution ecosystem, not the content ecosystem, people are consuming more than ever, we happen to create some of the best content in the world and the way that content is consumed is changing, but we have a huge opportunity,” he said. “Yes, we've made a lot of tough decisions, we've focused a lot on efficiency and cost savings, but I see this more as a professionalization of the company's capital allocation. Content is an area front and center where we're increasing our spending beyond just the impact of the strike last year.”
Weidenfels described his job as “making sure we’re stingy in the areas where we should be, but generously funding the opportunities for growth.”
Another growing sector is gaming, which has been classified as a “strategic asset” for the company. He noted that the gaming division is struggling, due to a major mistake with a Suicide Squad game, compared to last year's huge victory with The Hogwarts Legacy. So it makes sense that the company is already thinking about a sequel to the game set in Harry Potter universe.
“It is, just like the movie business, a success-driven business,” he said. “Obviously a successor to The Hogwarts Legacy is one of the major priorities in the coming years.”
And film is another area of investment, with DC Studios as a key element. WBD's CFO said James Gunn and Peter Safran are “revitalizing” the brand.
“That means not just an integrated story arc over a decade-long canon for DC, but also a lot more thought into specific individual stories, which stories lend themselves to interactive implementation, which stories, which characters are so fundamental to us that we would never allow them to be on other platforms, which characters might make for great stories but we might be willing to produce them for third-party platforms,” he said.
As for rumors that WBD might be exploring strategic options (a strategy outlined by Bank of America’s Jessica Reif Ehrlich), Weidenfels suggested that the company has explored them, but is just finding its stride.
“The board and, you know, secondarily, the management team have a fiduciary duty to evaluate these opportunities and, you know, we'll be rational in our decision-making,” he said. “But that said, I think we're at a point where a lot of the investments that we've worked so hard to make in every segment of this company over the last couple of years have put us in a position to get some of the fruits of that labor.”