The saga of the restructuring of Warner Bros continues with big moves happening on a relatively regular basis. This time, the WB seems to be axing positions in its television division, specifically focusing on its reality television area.
According to IndieWire, Tuesday saw the entertainment company wipe over 120 jobs off the rolls including animation jobs:
Warner Bros. Television Group has eliminated 125 jobs, IndieWire has learned. That tally includes 82 employees laid off across the scripted, unscripted, and animation divisions as well as 43 open positions that will go unfilled.
The 125 jobs represent a loss of 26 percent of the current and vacant positions at the company. The layoffs alone comprise 19 percent of the current WBTV workforce.
Some studios will either be closed down or consolidated. One of the projects getting the axe is Warner Bros. Television Workshop which had the goal of discovering and cultivating “emerging writers and directors” from “underrepresented groups.” Leadership says that this principle will continue without the project.
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.
This doesn’t mean they aren’t still releasing controversial shows. Mindy Kaling’s “Velma” dropped a trailer that garnered a lot of negative attention for its attack on fans who criticize the corruption and bastardization of properties that they like.
It’s unlikely that the infamy of this show will carry it to any kind of success, and if Zazlov’s goal is to begin shedding hyper-political products so the company can begin turning a profit from regular Americans than we probably won’t see too many more like it, especially with Warner Bros hacking and slashing its television departments apart.