825 million was how much Warner Bros cut in content so far.
208 million dollars worth of employees were laid off.

Batgirl at 90 million
Scoob 2 at 40 million

Those were some notable names for projects nearly finished in production, but a large amount of existing shows and projects in pre-production were cancelled.

Today, another wave of cancellations were released, with a focus on animation.

The Steve Urkel movie
Several animated Batman projects
Several Looney Toon movies
About ten cartoon network spinoff movies.

All gone, where over 100 million was invested into them already, but won’t ever see completion.

Also, the biggest shock. HBO Max is removing originals or content they fully own.

200 episodes of Sesame Street
10+ cartoons
10+ live action series

In all fairness, I follow this stuff pretty carefully and have never heard of 90% of the names on the list.

That still doesn’t make a lot of sense though, on why they’d start removing content they already own.

For cancelling a movie like Batgirl, it makes some sense.

Prevent wasting money on a project that won’t work and get some tax benefit marking it as a loss.

For removing an existing show, that makes less sense.

No tax advantages
Borderline non existent costs to keep on platform.
Just reduces the content library.

The official excuse was they didn’t want to distract people with content they aren’t developing, so they’ll watch priority content.

I don’t think that’s actually it, but instead think it’s one of two reasons, or both.

Reason One-New streaming services

Before HBO Max, Warner Bros had a different approach to streaming, which was focusing on multiple platforms.

They owned HBO, but also launched a streaming service for DC Comics, called DC Universe and another streaming service called Boomerang+, focused on classic cartoons.

Both flopped miserably.

DC Universe had over 100 million put into content, but only had 140,000 people subscribe the first month and only 24% of those ever paid passed the free trial.

It was a giant flop, where even Quibi and the CNN+ flops weren’t as bad.

The next was Boomerang, which only hit 150,000 subscribers and didn’t last long.

These flops are why HBO Max became a full consolidation for Warner, which has been successful, but it looks possible that’s going to end and they might try another streaming service.

Warner merged with Discovery, which has 24 million subscribers on Discovery+. Most people are saying the plan is to merge Discovery with HBO Max, but there’s a strong chance the opposite happens. They focus on just owning two streaming services and splitting content, to try and getting more money.

Reason Two-Selling content

This one seems more likely, which would just be Warner to help make quick money sells projects to Netflix, Disney, Apple, Amazon and other streaming services.

An example being Sesame Street, where Warner has streaming rights, but could remove certain episodes and let Apple or Amazon pay to stream.

This feels like the most likely path, which I’d not be shocked if a lot of both the removed and discontinued content ends up having happen.

This is way more likely over the second streaming service idea and might actually be smart.

Paramount owns all the Nickelodeon content, which they license to Netflix, has Netflix grow the value of the IP for them and Paramount gets the long term rewards.

This might be just the case here, where Warner sells/licenses to other groups, cashes up and anything that becomes popular, they’ll get back eventually.

Final thoughts

Many people are actively talking about the Warner/Discovery plan and it does seem like some weird measures are being taken.

My gut feeling is Warner Bros financials under AT&T were worse than the company let on and this a byproduct of years of bad management.