GOT WOKE, WENT BROKE: Warner Bros Terminates 125 Positions in Their TV Division as Brutal Restructuring Continues.
This is just the latest big move from the company and likely not the last. Warner Bros seems to be on the warpath to right a ship that has largely gone off course. After its merger with Discovery, Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav began making moves to streamline the company and, more importantly, drag it back to an apolitical position.
These moves range from its silver screen outings all the way down to CNN. The firing of Brian Stelter and the demotion of Don Lemon from a prime-time position to co-hosting a morning show are high-profile moves, but possibly the larger action was completely trashing the finished “Batgirl” movie that the company had spent $90 million on and making it so that it would never see the light of day.
This seems to be a direct attack on divisive entities operating under the Warner Bros umbrella. Reports say that Batgirl was a burning pile of woke garbage that did so poorly with test audiences that the company wasn’t going to risk damaging its brand any further by releasing it. Stelter and Lemon were two names that continued to push away viewers from a network that was already mired in leftist radicalism. It was a huge signal that the company was trying to turn a new leaf.
The largest sign was a direct admission from laid-off executives from HBO Max, Warner’s streaming service, that the company was now trying to actively court middle America:
One former exec describes Discovery+ as a “more general audience platform that doesn’t have the specificity that HBO Max was tailored to. I think Discovery is just a very ‘all’ audience, [they] don’t wanna make things that are political, topical, alienate Middle America—more Chip and Joanna,” they said, referring to the home renovation show Fixer Upper: Welcome Home hosted by Chip and Joanna Gaines.
It’s an idea so crazy, it just might work.