Total PANIC IN HOLLYWOOD! WILL NEVER Be The SAME! WARNER BROS CFO Named "Villain Of The Year"!

The Hollywood creative community will never be the same after the strict discipline of the new WARNER BROS management. Gunnar Wiedenfels, Zaz’s hatchet man, became the avatar of Hollywood’s perilousness in 2022 and managed to turn Warner Bros. and HBO, two of the industry’s premier brands, into objects of scorn and suspicion in the creative community.

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Let’s call 2022 the year of the write-off. Or maybe the year that most entertainment people would like to write off. Or, if we’re really being honest, it was the year that Hollywood itself was written-off—and not like when a TV star bails on a hit because he thinks he’s a movie star.
We don’t need to rehash the awfulness of 2022 in this space. Suffice to say the Roaring 2010s finally ended, media companies lost a combined $500 billion in value, per the Financial Times, layoffs and cutbacks ensued, everyone freaked out, and a pall of anxiety and confusion took hold. “A perfect storm of bad news,” the analyst Michael Nathanson said. “I’ve been covering this sector a long time and I’ve never seen such a bad collection of data points before.” Happy holidays.
Against that backdrop, Netflix all-of-a-sudden discovered that advertising was cool and fun, and Disney panic-swapped its Bobs. But I think we can all agree that no company represented the industry’s perilous state more than Warner Bros. Discovery,—a mashed-together content Frankenstein born of AT&T desperation and investor John Malone’s fear that Discovery wasn’t big enough to transition from cable to streaming. Launched in April (yes, it’s only been eight months) and saddled with more than $50 billion in debt, its C.E.O. David Zaslav may have moved into Robert Evans’ house and sat behind Jack Warner’s desk, but he arrived in Burbank with a mandate to cut $3 billion and cut fast. To Zaz’s credit, he was never coy about that.
Layoffs, yes; thousands of them in a slow-moving mass execution. Synergies and redundancies everywhere. Reduced content spends, almost certainly. That was all expected, but there was an added element of indignity that few in Hollywood saw coming: the abrupt scrapping of films and shows that had already been greenlit. Some of them after they were finished. And nobody at WBD better personified that controversial strategy than Gunnar Wiedenfels, the company’s genial chief financial officer, whose moves managed to turn Warner Bros. and HBO, two of the industry’s premier brands, into objects of scorn and suspicion in the creative community.
This isn’t necessarily a knock on Wiedenfels; calling the machete-wielding C.F.O. of an over-levered company a “villain” for Hollywood people is somewhat akin to saying he’s doing his job. Arguably, Zaslav is more villainous here, given he’s Gunnar’s boss. Or John Stankey and Jason Kilar, the AT&T braintrust whose decisions created many of the problems that are necessitating all these cuts. Or Malone, whose willingness to give up his controlling shares in Discovery enabled the WBD transaction in the first place. Or maybe this is all, just as Zaz has said, the tough love that the company needs for long-term health. We’ll see.
But like it or not (I think he likes it), Gunnar has become the face of the cuts and content shrinkage both at his company and even industrywide, thanks to his public role defending the Warner Discovery strategy at investor events, including at the Citi conference on Jan. 5. He’s Public Enemy No. 1 to creative people, and a potential hero to those watching the increasingly troubled bottom line. “Gunnar is probably one of the best C.F.O.s that I’ve seen in my career,” the analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich said in September. “He’s very detail oriented, he does the work, takes the time and goes over all the details.”
OK… but his more aggressive moves have created reputational consequences for the company and its brands that may linger beyond the annual spreadsheets. They also just feel shitty, in an industry where the perception of shittiness can be the difference between landing the next big hit or seeing it go to a rival. The headlines fly every couple days, so we’ve kinda become numb to it all. But Wiedenfels executed an $825 million write-down in content during his first quarter in the gig, including a $496 million “impairment” on content. That meant stuff that was already made or in production, like those shows at the Turner networks that were shooting one day and then not shooting the next. Hell, even the SAG Awards got kicked to the curb. The SAG Awards!