Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Facing Crisis for American Culture

film and television properties like Turner Classic Movies, he sold off WarnerMedia’s Crunchyroll and Rooster Teeth (which together bring in about 20 million streaming subscribers) to the Sony subsidiary Funimation. This may have been a wise move in the face of streaming-service saturation and intensifying competition from Disney and Netflix, but it also doesn’t indicate good stewardship when Zaslav deprived Warner… Discovery of streaming-customer inlets as the industry kept consolidating. It also can’t have been good for America when fewer WarnerMedia and Discovery content was available in a bottlenecked streaming market—an issue that only exacerbated with the 2025 layoffs that followed, most prominently at CNN. Discovery Communications has been known for its laid-back, substance-abusing culture, so watching Zaslav’s controlled selloff of company DNA has been painful to watch. He’s no longer the 16-year Discoverer who waddled into the WarnerMedia wreckage three years ago.

Will Zaslav’s hesitation to unite and his new decision to divide WBD into two companies alarm his investors? Will HBO Max, previously led by Zaslav, stain its name further by now dissociating from Discovery and entering further competition with streaming powerhouses like Netflix and Disney+? Or was the Discovery period simply a grandly washed-out chapter in the streaming wars, whose closing leaves America—and the world—with a fragmented streaming landscape and media ecosystem?

It’s unclear how Warner Brothers will forge ahead without Discovery as a singular content provider. Maybe that accounts for the bizarre HBO reversion from last month, or maybe Zaslav just had a change of heart after the Trump reelection narrative fell apart. But Zaslav did declare that historical synergies between Discovery, WarnerMedia, and HBO Max—synergies that had distinguished Warner Bros. Discovery as an industry giant—why, those would last forever. In all his years of being a media CEO, Zaslav finally admitted, Discovery properties have been the most surprising converts to digital or to streaming, and he looks forward to making even more history with them. But what history? Isn’t it ironic to reshape pop culture for millions and then dump much of it while the people are still absorbing it?

Maybe Zaslav’s divided Warner Bros. Discovery isn’t as absurd as it looks from the outside. Maybe HBO will thrive in its new independence, and Global Networks will flourish as a more niche platform. But for now, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that David Zaslav is not in control of the situation, despite the veneer of confidence he puts out every time he builds himself up. The company’s future—in the meantime, stuck between two cultures—remains uncertain for those who still want David Zaslav to take George Clooney’s lead and say good night to all this mess.”