In a new bid to cut costs, Warner Bros Discovery is to lay off nearly 1,000 employees. Its CEO David Zaslav, paid $49.7m last year, will remain in post.
Warner Bros Discovery is reportedly about to embark on a major round of staff cuts, with almost 1,000 employees across the various arms of its business set to lose their jobs.
According to Variety, the cuts will affect finance, business affairs and production; in a curiously specific detail, the outlet adds that ‘less than 10’ employees working on streaming platform Max will be let go. Last week, around 100 workers lost their jobs at the Warner-owned news network CNN according to Deadline.
Reports of the cuts come just a few months after news emerged that Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav was awarded a salary of $49.7m for his work in the year ending 2023. It was a year that saw the high-profile deletion of three either complete or almost-complete movies, including Batgirl and Coyote Vs Acme.
That same year also saw Warner subjected to more staff cuts – “pockets of refinement” was how it was described at the time – across its portfolio of cable networks, including Adult Swim, Discovery and TCM. The cuts were necessary, Zaslav said at the time, due to the corporate restructuring required after Warner Bros and Discovery merged in 2022.
“Worst day on the job was the first day that we laid off a huge number of people – a lot of people I knew and worked with for many years, a lot of people I respected,” Zaslav said last year. “The business had changed. It used to be that you could have 80-100 people at every cable channel, but now you have one marketing team running all of it.”
Some outlets have put a positive spin on the latest rounds of layoffs, arguing that they’re less drastic than the cuts made in previous years. Well, try telling that to the employees who are about to lose their jobs, we’d suggest.
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