A paralyzed Warners (with puppies!). A gloating Netflix. And some thoughts about the culture war backlash to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
LOSER: Warner Bros. Discovery Presentation. “That’s it?!” said attendees at the conclusion of WBD’s presentation, which was heavy on familiar clips and light on substance, stars, news and everything else. It was like HBO’s The Sopranos cut-to-black ending in upfront form. CEO David Zaslav? Absent. HBO boss Casey Bloys? Not on stage. Warner Bros. Discovery advertising president Bobby Voltaggio opened the show by pledging, with not-entirely-convincing cheerfulness, to address “the Ellison — I mean the elephant — in the room,” and then proceeded to essentially not do that (“We’ve been through change and challenges before,” he optimistically said of the pending Paramount merger).
It was surprising to see a company with so many hugely popular streaming franchises — Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC, Dune — not advance the conversation about any of them. The biggest reaction from the stoic Madison Avenue audience was when puppies were brought out on stage, infusing some oxytocin into the crowd’s upfront-numbed brains, courtesy of a company that’s waiting to be told what to do.
