Warner Bros. Discovery may be in the process of being acquired by David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, but its management is not taking its eye off the ball.
Gerhard Zeiler, president, international and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and Andrew Georgiou, president & managing director, U.K. & Ireland and sports EMEA at the company, took to the London stage on Thursday at the Enders TMT Leaders Live conference.
“Scale is important in today’s media world,” Zeiler said. “If someone tells you otherwise, he is not telling you the truth.”
Being well-targeted is the alternative, but being medium-sized is “not good enough” in the modern day, he highlighted. And he added: “To be scaled only in one country, even in the U.S.,” is also not enough anymore.
Zeiler also recalled on Thursday what WBD CEO David Zaslav said after the merger that created the conglomerate as it looks today, before the planned sale to Paramount Skydance. “We need to focus on great storytelling,” Zeiler quoted Zaslav. And he recalled him saying: “I want to produce new Harry Potter content.” The executive recalled that he and other managers thought that he would see how difficult that is, but now that company has done so and will premiere the much-anticipated Potter series this December.
“We have to get rid of this exclusivity mindset that many of us still have,” Zeiler added. Sure, HBO Max exclusivity for several months is key for huge new releases. But otherwise, licensing and short-form content is key, the exec elaborated, even if there is some form of cannibalization. “It’s always better to fragment yourself than being fragmented by others,” he concluded.
“Yes, our big theatrical films in the first six months, nine months will be exclusive on HBO Max, the House of the Dragons, the Euphorias we will not keep somewhere else,” Zeiler emphasized. “But with a lot of the other programs we do, it’s of importance that we also put them on other platforms, on non-traditional platforms, on YouTube – whether it’s long form, whether to play in clip form, whether it’s short form.”
Zeiler also shared that the box office in the U.S. is finally looking closer to overtaking its pre-COVID take, expressing optimism he keeps hearing in the U.S.
Georgiou shared on Thursday: “We’ve been really, really pleased with the way that HBO Max has landed in the U.K. We obviously track any number of different metrics, but when we look at even the ambitious targets that we had around engagement, around individuality, around view rates, brand awareness, we have done exceptionally well. … We didn’t surprise ourselves with how well it’s landed, especially because we were late to market.”
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