How WB and Disney Botched Their Centennials

A company that doesn't care about its past, and one that cares too much.

Perhaps it was always going to be a bad time for media companies to celebrate their 100th anniversaries. The media industry is in such a state of upheaval that to look towards the past rather than the future was a mistake. But legacy media companies, especially ones that have been around as long as Warner Bros. and Disney, couldn’t let their centennials pass by without ceremony. After all, not every studio makes it to a 100th birthday. There’s no centennial celebration for RKO Pictures and there probably won’t be one for 20th Century Fox now that it’s owned by Disney. When you celebrate 100 years, you mark yourself as an institution with a storied history worthy of respect.

Any business celebrating its 100th birthday in this media environment is going to have a rough go of it (godspeed in 2024, Sony/Columbia). The studios are facing competition on a level never seen before. After finding a way to coexist with television and then the home entertainment market (two entities the studios considered threats until they realized they could use both as lucrative revenue streams), the Internet and streaming in particular have upended movies in such a way that any studio head would be hard-pressed to find a simple solution. You can’t easily pull people away from Netflix and TikTok just by making good movies.

Furthermore, all the studios had to deal with the strikes this year. The difficulties caused by streaming and studios rushing to hoard those profits (or hide their losses) led to both the writers and actors going on strike to extract huge concessions—not only on streaming revenue, but also on the use of A.I. During a summer where labor movements thrived both inside and outside of Hollywood, studio bosses only ended up looking weak and ineffectual every time they opened their mouths. There was no way to spin this as “greedy writers and actors” when we knew how much these CEOs were paid. You also couldn’t celebrate your legacy and then turn around and denigrate the artists who made that legacy possible.

And yet for Warner Bros. and Disney in particular, centennials this year marked not triumphant legacies leading to glorious futures, but key weaknesses of both businesses.

The Stuff That Content Is Made Of

I’m going to try very hard not to make this article into a litany of David Zaslav’s failures as the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery. So much has been written about his screw-ups that his reps had to threaten GQ to take down a story about said screw-ups. But I’ve read extensively about Zaslav this year, from a New Yorker profile to New York Times stories, and I’ve come away with an impression of a guy who desperately wanted to play mogul without having any real appreciation for the assets in his care. He bought Robert Evans’ old house and sits at Jack Warner’s old desk, but standing on the shoulders of giants does not make you tall. Zaslav may like the trappings of Hollywood, but he doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy what it makes.

Setting aside how unwise it was to take on massive amounts of debt for Discovery to purchase WarnerMedia in the first place (and I won’t go into how Warner Bros. keeps getting passed from incompetent corporate owner to incompetent corporate owner, but that’s pretty much been the company’s history for the 21st century), Zaslav’s strategy has been to buy a lavish home only to keep breaking stuff in it to collect the insurance money. The fact that he kick-started his reign by canceling nearly-finished movies Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt to take them as tax write-offs showed that he wasn’t particularly interested in the hard work of others. It’s one thing for a studio to not give a finished film a big marketing push; it’s another to shove it in a vault where no one who worked on it can point to it as proof of their talent. Maybe coming from the Reality TV world of Discovery, Zaslav doesn’t appreciate that artists in Hollywood have “reels” and when they take on work, it’s not just for a paycheck, but because they want to use it for the chance of obtaining future work.

But where Zaslav really showed his disdain for the entire operation was when he told EW in January that TCM was a valued part of the brand only to absolutely gut the operation six months later.¹ This wasn’t because TCM was particularly costly or didn’t align with a “vision” (that would imply having a vision in the first place). It was just a casualty of a guy who says he loves movies, but didn’t particularly care to employ the people who venerated and celebrated those movies. Other film studios will reach or have reached a centennial, but only Warner Bros. had an in-house subsidiary devoted to celebrating those 100 years. While Zaslav furiously backpedaled after incurring the ire of Hollywood legends like Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese, the damage was done, and it was done in the same sloppy manner that has defined his entire tenure. He is the Sideshow-Bob-Stepping-on-Rakes of Hollywood CEOs.

While it would be nice to simply say these were the tough choices a CEO has to make (and, embarrassingly, Zaslav went so far as to call himself courageous in a room full of people), the payoff has been a stock price that fell by 50% and congress looking into the pattern of killing finished movies for tax write-offs. For Warner Bros., its 100th anniversary was marked by a CEO who doesn’t seem to like the things Warner Bros. makes, or really much of anything other than people treating him like a mogul. And hey, if you want to write yourself into the annals of Hollywood history, burning down the WB water tower is certainly one way to do it. But what should have been a celebration of an iconic studio instead felt like a crime scene.

Only Nostalgia

I’ve gone on at length about Disney’s woes in 2023, from the massive backfire of Wish to CEO Bob Iger’s hollow vision of the company’s future. However, I wanted to echo the great insight that New York Times critic Alissa Wilkinson made recently about Disney losing its foothold in the popular imagination. Disney, as a movie studio, loomed larger than other companies, becoming a part of not only worldwide culture, but a key part of people’s identities and childhoods.

That’s no longer the case. For the reasons I’ve outlined (and that Wilkinson also mentions), Disney’s iron-fisted control on its own IP (as well as cringe-worthy attempts to communicate with “the youths” by addressing bad-faith arguments like “What happened to Belle’s mom in Beauty and the Beast, and hey, shouldn’t all those Disney princesses be traumatized?) has let it languish. The stubborn refusal to try almost anything new reeks of a studio too timid and staid to do anything it didn’t already attempt in the past 100 years. Successes like Zootopia and Encanto now seem more accidental, a way to slip through an original idea under the auspices of Walt Disney Animation Studios rather than a concerted attempt to try new things.

I’m sure Iger thought he was securing the studio’s future when he spent the last 20 years buying up Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Fox, but even in the streaming content wars, the inevitable merger of Disney+ and Hulu hasn’t quite come together to beat out Netflix, nor has it stopped the studio from the more lucrative avenue of simply licensing out its films and TV shows. Guys like Iger and Zaslav think the future is simply in amassing as much “content” as they can buy (hence the recent discussions of Zaslav looking to buy Paramount) without realizing that value comes from quality, not quantity. We can all only watch so many things, and having thousands of hours of movies and TV shows (that require a subscription or ad breaks) is going to have a tough time competing with the bottomless, user-created content wells of YouTube and TikTok. Instead of looking to compete on quantity, studios, with far more resources than any independent social media creator, should be leaning on quality rather than hoping that IP can carry the day.

Churning out hundreds of hours of forgettable dreck didn’t get Warner Bros. or Disney to their centennials. Not every movie these studios made over the decades was a masterpiece, and the people who ran these studios weren’t saints who only had the best taste. But they also weren’t weird little business guys who were either reckless with the things they made or so cautious they only made the same thing over and over again. Movies may never have the same place in the cultural conversation that they did pre-Internet, but that’s okay. TV didn’t kill movies, but movies had to learn to share space with a new form of visual entertainment. It can be that way with YouTube and TikTok. The real concern is that for the people running these studios, the legacy they’ve inherited is just a number, and the movies and shows they made are just a line on a spreadsheet.

What I’m Watching

My wife and I are rewatching Seinfeld for the first time in decades, and it still has its edge. While some stuff doesn’t work (we watched “The Chinese Woman” the other night, and….yeesh), a lot of the classic jokes are still brilliant and hilarious. I love how the humor can go from the grandiose (“The sea was angry that day, my friends…”) to the delightfully juvenile (“Poppie peed on my sofa!”).

What I’m Reading

I hit my Goodreads reading goal, so I’m not really planning on picking up any new book until the new year. However, I do recommend checking out the following articles I read over the past few weeks:

Who Would Give This Guy Millions to Build His Own Utopia? by Joseph Bernstein [The New York Times] - The tech set is kind of fascinating because they’re all these kinds of libertarian doofuses who think that they were the first to discover the childish desire to live without any obligation to anyone else. 27-year-old Dryden Brown has amassed $19 million to build “Praxis,” a libertarian/fascist city. The upside here is that Brown doesn’t seem to know how to do anything other than separate rich people from their money. Still, I got a big laugh out of this paragraph from Praxis’ internal documents:

Internal Praxis documents outline three “persona groups” who will populate the Praxis city. They are “warriors,” who are “muscular” and “clean” and protect society from threats; “priests,” who are “very thin,” and “define the values and beliefs of society”; and “merchants,” who are “portly” and “bearded,” and include venture capitalists and cryptocurrency professionals.

Just go play Dungeons & Dragons, my guy.

There Is No Mary Problem in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ by Clare Coffey [The Bulwark] - If you’re like me, you probably watch and love It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas season. A common complaint leveled at the film is that Mary’s fate of being an “old maid” is misogynistic, and that Mary’s too capable to be resigned to being a lonely librarian just because George Bailey didn’t exist. But as Coffey successfully argues here, Mary being an “old maid” isn’t because she couldn’t do anything else, but because no one other than George Bailey is good enough for her.

Behind the Scenes of Dismantling Roe v. Wade by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak [The New York Times] - This is a fascinating piece because it shows that the Supreme Court is a political entity just like any other branch of government. SCOTUS’ branding wants you to think that they’re somehow separate, and dispassionately adjudicate based on the judges’ reading of the Constitution, but as this articles shows, that’s not the case. Samuel Alito clearly played the politics of the court as well as the public (I’m 99% sure the leak of the Dobbs opinion came from him) to get his desired outcome. Furthermore, these are not legal geniuses at work. For example, Amy Coney Barrett asked about adoption during oral arguments, which shows a person who has completely bought the rhetoric that abortion is a matter of people who don’t want kids, and not, as we saw with the Kate Cox case, a woman who wanted another child, but didn’t want to lose her ability to give birth or her life due to a medical complication. The court badly needs to be reformed (not just because of how it can be used to play politics, but also the rampant corruption of some of its justices), but as long as conventional wisdom holds that SCOTUS exists above and apart from the other branches of government, we’ll see more cases like Dobbs.

What I’m Hearing

I’ve been listening to Edgar Wright’s Top 50 Songs of 2023, and I really liked this track “Pacman” by Fizzler and Stepz that uses sounds from the classic video game to serve as the beat.

What I’m Playing

I’ve been tooling around in Spider-Man: Remastered to take on some DLC missions I never completed back in 2018/2019, and I’m also eager to play some Super Mario Bros. Wonder for the next few weeks before The Last of Us Part II: Remastered arrives.

1. Full disclosure: I was one of the TCM people laid off in June, but I was a minuscule part of a much larger operation. The real crime was letting go of people who had been with TCM for decades and carried the institutional knowledge and relationships that made the channel such a beloved brand.