Illustration: Cold War Steve; Photos: Getty Images, Courtesy Everett Collection, Warner Bros.
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David Zaslav is a member of a regular Zoom call that includes Howard Stringer, 83, who once ran Sony; Tom Freston, 79, who once ran Viacom; Walter Isaacson, 72, who once ran CNN and Time magazine; Graydon Carter, 75, who once ran Vanity Fair; Richard Cohen, 84, retired from his longtime column at the Washington Post; Nick Pileggi, 92, the GoodFellas screenwriter; Ken Auletta, 83, the Boswell to a former generation of media moguls; and Kenny Lerer, 73, the financial backer and co-founder of HuffPost, now retired from his investment business. At 65, Zaslav, currently the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is the youngest person on the call.
The group has met in some form and with a shifting cast for many years. At Zaslav's suggestion, it solidified into quite a defined club and a regular appointment during COVID — 10 a.m. every Friday. Health issues form a subtext here, though, given that these are all men of a certain age and sensibility; the full details of, for instance, their trips to the Mayo Clinic might not be directly addressed.
It is a social gathering, a "shooting the shit" opportunity in one member's more or less humblebrag, a kibitzing among men who have known the same people and shared much the same professional dramas over decades.
But the impossible-to-ignore friction in the group is that while few members, if any, in the characterization of one of them, "get up in the morning anymore and go to the office" or indeed have formal jobs of any sort, David Zaslav, whose ear they have, holds a significant share of the remaining power of the once all-powerful media business — their business. He is in a sense the last member of this generation to have his hand firmly on the wheel (74-year-old Bob Iger, at Disney, is always on the cusp of retirement) and, for the others in the group, their last brush with the era of the mogul, such as it remains — the age in which they grew up.
"David is the CEO," says one member of the group, many members of which themselves were not too long ago CEOs. "He just acts like a CEO. He talks like a CEO. He asks the questions. He moves the discussion along."
Members demur about how much they might influence Zaslav, but all of these men have singularly focused for their entire professional lives on many of Zas's daily issues and certainly believe they have achieved some sagaciousness. Kenny Lerer bought Martha Stewart's house in East Hampton so he could be across the street from his friend Zas, who had bought adman Jerry Della Femina's house; Zas and Kenny, who was once Michael Milken's PR man and, ex officio, advises his friend Zas on PR as well as other matters, speak to or see each other three or more times a week. Graydon Carter, showing his friend the social ropes shortly after Zas's takeover of Warner, convinced him to co-sponsor, along with Carter's newsletter, Airmail, and pay for the bulk of an over-the-top party in 2023 during the Cannes Film Festival at the Hotel du Cap, with, as it happened, unfortunate PR fallout for Zas (somewhat like, given the state of the industry, fiddling while Rome burned). Nick Pileggi's new movie, The Alto Knights, after being turned down at other studios, was made, at Zas's behest, at Warner Bros.
Zaslav, whose company recently posted unexpectedly strong earnings (followed almost immediately by the personal embarrassment of dire numbers for the Pileggi film), is a man charged with leading the media business into the future, navigating the business out of its cultural, generational, and technological obsolescence. It is a business, said Andy Lack, a close Zas friend and the former head of NBC News, that "we won't recognize in five years" and that, more immediately, faces the wrath and retribution of Donald Trump for its news division's slights against him — in WBD's case, CNN. And yet, as the world turns, here is David Zaslav regular ly convening a brain trust of white men, all of them New York liberals, with an average age of 80. Their Zoom call as a metaphor for being stuck in time — another time — is, in the view of the group, an inevitable, if churlish, interpretation. Yet couldn't it also be seen (if it needs to be seen in any way), some of them wonder, as a reminder of the values and sensibility that have for so long shaped the business — as an anchor, in fast-shifting waters, for Zaslav? Couldn't it?
In 2023, David Zaslav co-hosted a bash at the Cannes Film Festival that, in the words of a friend, became an "unforced error." Photo: Daniel Paik
The gradual decline of the media business has now arguably reached the all-at-once stage. Every aspect of the traditional distribution and revenue model is in some form, however extended, of extremis. The long sunset of network television and movie studios has more recently been joined with a new swiftness by cable television, whose 45 percent margins, supporting the industry for a generation, have now marched off a cliff.
Against this background, in 2020 when he was merely the head of Discovery with some of the highest profit margins in the cable industry — but with cable's primacy already clearly over — Zaslav, whom his friend Lack characterized as "not sentimental but a bit of a romantic," bought the Hollywood home of Robert Evans, the legendary Paramount chief who oversaw the making of The Godfather, Chinatown, and Love Story. (Hollywood nostalgist and Zoom participant Graydon Carter, who helped immortalize Evans in his documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture and has just published a memoir, When the Going Was Good, a paean to the media past, was a key broker in the purchase.) It was a hard-to-miss reach for the symbols and tropes of Old Hollywood status, for which Zaslav was duly skewered (he bought the home, he tells me, for its "architectural value").
A year later, Zaslav announced that Discovery, his much smaller company, was taking over WarnerMedia, the former Time Warner — long the dominant company in the media business (which AT&T, in some dumbfounding effort, had bought and then, at a loss to manage it, almost immediately regretted buying). The deal — appearing to be a case of the dog catching the bus — put Zaslav under a dark cloud of debt. But it gave him the Warner Bros. name, which he promptly restored, rebranding his company as Warner Bros. Discovery, and put him in Jack Warner's office (and, not incidentally, Kevin Tsujihara's office, Barry Myers's office, Bob Daly's office, and Ted Ashley's office — quite a lineup of Hollywood history) and behind Jack Warner's desk, which Zaslav hauled out of storage. Members of the Zoom call who find themselves in L.A. get a special tour of the Warner lot and glimpses into the bedrooms and back stairway where the Brothers Warner could nap during the day or do what moguls once did to the willing and unwilling (likely, too, across the selfsame desk).
There is hardly a more dismal characterization than "legacy media." Few ambitious types want to admit to being in it, and some of the biggest modern fortunes have been made upending it. Jeffrey Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner who engineered a top-of-the-market deal to sell his company to AT&T in 2018, is held in awe by his shareholders for getting out in time. Eight months later, seeing the writing on the wall, Rupert Murdoch followed suit, selling the bulk of his company to Disney. Recently, Comcast announced a plan to spinoff most of its cable-television properties into a new company temporarily called "SpinCo." but more colloquially, and perhaps accurately within the industry, "ShitCo." Still, legacy media is exactly what David Zaslav is do ubling down on. For better or worse, his is a theory of the case: The media business has consistently weathered transition after transition, and there is always a survivor, so why can't he be the last man standing? Technology comes and goes while entertainment and sports are forever. Aren't they?
Zas rises on a predawn schedule, to which he credits no small amount of his success (he says he built his relationship with Si and Donald Newhouse, major Discovery shareholders, because they too got up early), and, most days, after shooting off articles he reads in the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal to his staff and friends, starts out for his office at 6:30 or 7 a.m. While walking from his home on Central Park West (Conan O'Brien's former apartment, which Zaslav bought for $25 million), where he lives with his wife of 37 years, Pam, whom he met at synagogue at the age of 12 (they have three grown children — and Zas's mother is still alive), he'll make rat-a-tat checking-in phone calls, an hour and a half of walking and talking, down to his office on 19th Street. He is likely to s peak to a variety of WBD executives, "getting the plays for the day, how do we move the ball," but also regularly to Kenny Lerer, David Geffen (whose house, like Lerer's, is down the street from Zaslav's in East Hampton), and former Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein as well as the most significant investor in WBD, John Malone (speaking "often not about business, just what's going on in the world"). He talks too with other machers and gossips he happily lists, including Tom Freston; Allen Grubman, the entertainment lawyer and fixer (also an East Hampton neighbor); Bobby Kotick, the video-game billionaire; Brian Grazer, the billionaire film producer; Jason Blum, the horror-film impresario (and a hopeful one-day billionaire); Len Blavatnik, the Russian oligarch turned international businessman with extensive music and entertainment interests; and Richard Plepler, the former HBO chief (Zas did not, in our conversation, have any women on his call sheet). The media busines s may be among the last that still burns the phones, its true players dialing as fast as kids text. Indeed, at the top, it's still a business of talkers — hardly anybody ever opens a computer. They just talk, have always just talked. It's a constant conversation, a perpetual Barney Greengrass breakfast, part of a work-life continuum rather than the more au courant work-life balance (indeed, ever piercing the bubble of subordinates' weekends). The best talker, or at least the most indefatigable, wins.
Arguably, this existential struggle is not just to preserve the industry's profits but the tribal rituals of men (with few exceptions men) who have grown up in it. That might seem, for all the obvious reasons, to raise contemptuous eyebrows. But also, for better or worse, what is being preserved, in the view of many people in the highest show-business strata, is the nature, the very DNA, of entertainment, at least as we have known it. It would not be, among these men, such a great leap to see the fate of the media business as a cultural showdown between the younger, self-serious, wildly overconfident, flatly literal, bad-taste Midwest tech bros in their bid for the attention of the American (or world) audience and the old Jewish guys of New York and L.A. who have for so long in their striving and jokes and n euroses, dominated the business — that's entertainment. You could as well see Zaslav and his old-guy circle as a bulwark against all the too-liberal (arguably unprofitable) efforts of an angry younger-demo media hoi polloi to culturally transform the business (Zas is particularly proud of his early decision at Warner to cancel the release of the $90 million Batgirl, which featured a trans actor). Also, you can see Zaslav's rise in the business as part of an indefatigable courtship of his media betters and forebears. It is no small point that, within this circle — this deeply tribal community of show-business men, rich ones — Zas is regarded with great, one-of-us affection.
Of course, Zas — call it the Zas contradiction — is not really a show-business guy. He's a numbers guy. Less Robert Evans than Robert Evans's accountant (still, though, a show-business accountant, "Not artist friendly but artist aware and adjacent," in one producer's description). He may hold in awe the true figures of the media and show-business world, but he would fire them and cut their projects in a New York minute.
This has created, in the first year or two of his moguldom, a rearguard action of resentment and resistance within the industry — hence a largely unfriendly narrative (drowned out by chants of "Pay your writers" in a speech he made during the writers strike; hoisted for a critical article in GQ that suspiciously disappeared just as the GQ editor was developing a movie at Warner Bros.; ridiculed for his party at Cannes, where a phalanx of aides and security people rushed out to light the way after Zaslav took a small red-carpet stumble on the Hotel du Cap steps — "unforced errors," in the words of one Zoom-call member). Certainly, the takeover of Warner shone the media's own unremitting light on him and on the projects and personnel he has cut to pay down the company's whopping debt while taking for himself a whopping paycheck, indeed one of the biggest in the media industry — $52 million in 2024, $50 million in 2023, $40 million in 2022, all on top of a windfall of stock options in 2021 (around $200 million) prior to the Warner deal closing, amounts, in the face of the company's declining value, even his friends seem embarrassed by. Per one producer, "He is an avatar of the death of the middle class in Hollywood. In the old days, everybody did well. Now, all those people in the middle have been squeezed. Zas, though, is doing better than ever."
Beyond mogul economics, the criticism has a quotient of snobbery: The Brooklyn-born, state-university-educated Zaslav, a "very un-Tiffany kind of person" per a Tiffany-type producer, is a media upstart and wannabe who is fucking with, and fucking up, HBO, the new Tiffany Network. Zas, reaching for the mogul mantle, is certainly no Rupert Murdoch, nor is he the wry, ironic, brainy Bewkes or a Bob Evans–type showman and golden-gut hitmaker. Zas can seem more like a sales manager who has memorized the PowerPoint deck ("We are on offense … We got a leadership team that is on mission …"). He is famous for his wide-of-the-mark efforts to dress for the mogul part, wearing, when I visited him recently in his suburban-looking office on 19th Street, a blue blazer over a hoodie over a T-shirt. His performan ce at the company's virtual town hall after the L.A. fires, a video of which his comms team offered me, was more halting and unsure than the man who had it under control, and whom Hollywood could gratefully turn to, who he likely wanted to appear to be.
"He's a very effective manager and strategist in these businesses," said Blankfein about the hodgepodge of cable, movie, and streaming plays that uncomfortably compose modern media ("which, by the way, are terrible businesses," Blankfein added). Zaslav's comms team has put Blankfein on the phone with me to push back against what Zas seems to feel may be my suggestion that he is less than a true mogul. "But does that mean he should walk among the giants of Hollywood? It wouldn't occur to me to put him there," Blankfein said, meaning, I infer, that moguldom may not be the most relevant skill set for this moment in media time.
One member of the Zaslav Zoom call, professing personal affection for Zas, also expressed surprise that "a guy like Zas" had become among the most important people in the media business, by which he seemed to impute (putting aside the paycheck) an uncharacteristic normalcy for a mogul, a lasting middle-classness. Or, as another longtime observer put it, "David has made a career out of being underestimated."
Zaslav's early career, along with being an immersion course in the dense legal, logistical, technical, and personality tapestry of the nascent cable industry, was deep training in the art of dealing with the big man — which he surely hopes to be but is not quite yet.
In 1986, Zaslav left his job as a junior associate at a large New York law firm and joined the counsel's office at NBC, then owned by GE and wholly dominated by Jack Welch, the GE CEO who, with only minor exaggeration, was largely regarded as among the best businessmen who had ever walked the earth (similarly, he is now regarded, with only minor exaggeration, as among the worst). Welch created a generation of media executives in the GE — that is, in his own personal — mode. "After years spent working with Welch and presenting to him … you start to think like him," Zas says proudly. Zaslav was hardly unique among executives at NBC in embracing the Jack Welch way, but he seemed to have a special taste for it, requiring quite a leap for a Jewish boy into GE's macho, tight-lipped, towel-snapping, Cat holic-boy culture. Zas became a favorite of both Welch ("one of my very best friends") and Welch's top lieutenant, Bob Wright, with frequent references to both men continuing to pepper his conversations and, as almost a résumé bullet, the reminder that he was a pallbearer at Welch's funeral.
At John Malone's invitation, Zaslav left NBC in 2006. Holding NBC's major-cable portfolio, Zaslav had had many dealings over the years with Malone, an early cable-system mogul. While making vast profits off the business, Malone has not shown any discernible interest in media influence, power, glamour, stars, or stories. He is an engineer by training, quite a cerebral one — media is for him an engineering, rather than an operating, problem, a strategy of spinoffs, debt, and more or less opaque financial arrangements — with a trader's keen sensitivity to when markets are moving, telephony to cable to broadband. In 2005, when Malone's Liberty Media spun out Discovery into an independent company, though one still controlled by Malone, Zaslav, with his long relationship with Malone, became his choice fo r CEO.
Meaning that Zaslav, even with the vast sprawl of his mass-entertainment products, principally has an audience of one: The 84-year-old Malone, who has just announced his retirement as WBD chairman but remains the most significant shareholder, is perhaps the last person in the media business who people still assume knows what he is doing. Which gives Zaslav quite a runway — Zas must know what he is doing because John Malone knows what he's doing, right?
But while Malone famously gives great authority and autonomy and an open checkbook to his closest protégé-lieutenants, he is also like a greater force of nature: If tectonic plates shift in Malone's crustal sensitivity, billions of dollars in media assets could, overnight, be reordered. In that sense, Zaslav is trying to outrun not only his competitors but John Malone's timeline (a shifting one).
Indeed, the 2022 deal to buy Warner might well have been due as much to Malone's desire to sell Discovery — but finding no buyer, he merged it into what was, in fact, a spinoff of Warner by AT&T, whose shareholders retain a large interest. Management passed to the Discovery side, making Zaslav the CEO and, in some sense, the accidental mogul.
The Warner Bros. television and film business once made $3 billion a year — last year, it made $1.7 billion. AT&T paid more than $100 billion for Time Warner. Three years later, when AT&T spun the company off to Discovery, its valuation was roughly 40 percent lower. Post-merger, WBD started trading at $25 a share — at a $60 billion value. Now, says Zas's friend (and one of his biggest individual shareholders — 30 million, he says bullishly) David Geffen, who was also enlisted by WBD to offer me his Zas endorsement, it's at around $9 a share (and has gone as low as $7), even combined with Discovery. "What a bargain!" That's the bracing reality that both Malone and Zaslav wake up to every morning — a curse or an opportunity.
The assets of the media business circa 2025 are, in effect, all for sale. Shortly after Comcast announced its ShitCo. spinoff of MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Oxygen, E!, Syfy, and the Golf Channel, along with its digital fancies Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow, and SportsEngine, WBD followed suit with a reorganization plan of its own, separating its streaming (HBO, Max, and Discovery+) and content-creating (studio and library) businesses from its "global linear networks" — including TNT, TBS, the Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Animal Planet, and CNN, it's "ShitCo." In other words, escape is on everybody's mind. And getting out at the highest price may be, given all, the most reasonable move for John Malone.
Zas, in the mission of his life, is determined not to let that happen.
The Zaslav play — now, finally, after three years, out of the box and front and center in the company's messaging — is a simple and, to some extent, clear Johnny-come-lately one: Take HBO, the Time Warner gold-standard entertainment asset, and infuse it with a miscellany of other broad-appeal content (that is, basic-cable stuff, or "tonnage" in programming talk), and, risking extreme brand confusion, create an international streaming service called Max that might go head-to-head with Netflix. Or even take on network television: The Pitt, a medical drama with the old ER star Noah Wyle, is a 15-episode series with another season just commissioned for next year (no precious, streaming-style few episodes every few years). "The best storytelling content on a global platform," Zas pronounces as his str ategy.
In any conversation with Zaslav, he uses the words storytelling and storyteller — the media is the "storytelling business" — to an all-purpose excess that is surely confusing to actual storytellers. What is meant here, it seems, in a psychic sense, is a connection to the long history of Hollywood and a way to emphasize, which WBD execs do, "We are not in the widgets business" — a dig at the tech people (though widgets are the opposite of digits). But also meant is the dollars-and-cents value of the libraries the media business owns and the future, even perpetual, exploitability of that IP. And further, in the blanket use of storytelling as a virtue and an idiom, is the new fungibility of media, neither wedded to theaters, particular screens, or any defined form. We are not in the movie business, we are not in the television business, we are certainly not in the publishing business (Time Warner jettisoned its magazine company — the world's largest — in 2014). It's analog, it's digital, it's news, it's docudrama, it's fantasy, it's games, it's a podcast, it's a series. That is, content — that mulch of video, audio, digital, and written culture — with storytelling the newer, softer word.
And we — WBD — are the biggest producers of it. And the best at it (four Apple TV+ hits are produced by Warner Bros. — Bad Monkey, Shrinking, Ted Lasso, and Presumed Innocent — notes Zaslav, making the point that the tech community lacks serious creative chops). "And in the end, that's what wins, the best content." But best in media-business language does not necessarily mean best in a creative sense — rather, it is closer to most, and all things to all people, and hits. "We have the greatest writers and storytellers — Chuck Lorre, J. J. Abrams, Bill Lawrence, Mindy Kaling — we have 80 of those people," says Zaslav, as though to add them like weapons to his soldiers on the field.
This is the up-to-the-minute media dream to supply content anywhere, anytime, on any device. That's the central Zaslav proposition, to make Max a must-have worldwide streamer and with him — deeply committed to the lore and thrall of the media business but at the same time a hard-hearted bottom-line executive — the man to do it.
This has so far involved, "on our Max journey," as J. B. Perrette, WBD's streaming chief who has worked with Zas for 25 years, calls it, a two-year platform build-out — which can also be read as being waylaid and stalled for two years — an international dealmaking spree, and a deep investment in big new franchises. It has also involved an industry sense that this has come at the expense of HBO, a downgrade in its stature and resources. ("They entirely misunderstood the HBO brand," says one former studio executive. "They thought it stood for linear-subscription TV while it stood for the highest quality of television available.") Zaslav seems pained by this but resigned: This is the breaking-eggs phase. And by the way, even if HBO and its vast success and sui generis place in modern entertain ment may be part of the linear-television past, in fact, "HBO has never been bigger or more successful," says Zas. Its longtime management team is still largely in place, and the company vigorously argues for HBO's continued quality: The Penguin, Hacks, The Last of Us (which was the biggest HBO series since the last season of Game of Thrones), Succession, and, indeed, The White Lotus, which might reasonably claim to be the moment's true Zeitgeist hit — its recent finale was 50 percent bigger than the season before. But at the same time, while HBO might yet be the gold standard, in its mixed messaging, Max (an incomprehensible elevation of the company� ��s also-ran–never-was Cinemax brand) is the future-looking (and Hail Mary) reboot.
On this, the company's position is wholly bullish: In the past six months, Zaslav says, Max has added 20 million subscribers (it's actually 19 million) — "growing, accelerating, and profitable and will generate more profit every quarter," Zaslav emphatically makes the point — bringing it to a worldwide 117 million yet being in only half of the markets that Netflix, with its 300 million subscribers, is in. Max is growing at a rate that, if sustained (a big if), as it reaches 100 percent penetration will overtake Netflix. And this is before a series of big new franchise investments has come online.
The recent announcement of its quarterly results showed nearly $700 million in profits from streaming and direct to consumer. The company's estimate of $1 billion in 2025 was raised to $1.3 billion. Management has been feverishly circulating a column in Puck — often a gossipy thorn in Zaslav's side — by William Cohan arguing the company has turned the corner by paying down debt and increasing its streaming cash flow. Cohan, echoing the WBD message, extolled the Zaslav strategy of "internationalizing" Max. And, indeed, it is a certain leap out in front of the loud chorus of the past few years that predicted nothing but a doom spiral.
The ceiling, though, may already be fixed. Max's best hope, if all its dreams come true, may be only to become the sixth streaming service, behind Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, and YouTube. That is better than all the other also-ran streamers but not necessarily good enough to stand alone. It's in danger, in other words, of becoming no more than another piece on the board, waiting for future media asset builders to determine its future.
Even a truly over-the-top success for Max might not do it. The streaming business, which great tech companies can afford to support, at its best produces 20 percent margins, which hardly replace cable's 45 percent margins that media investors — like John Malone — have come to expect. How do you support streaming while keeping investors happy? Can streaming, even with increased subscribers, higher prices, and international reach, ever perform at the level of the old network mass-reach and mass-advertising model or the cable bundle, dual subscriber, and ad-rev stream? Indeed, how do you hold investors' belief in the very idea of a media company?
Well, there is no answer. There is no model — with the possible exception of Disney with, uniquely, its theme parks; its Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm franchises; and dominance in the family market — of a media company that can, at this point in delivery-system time, promise sustainable growth.
David Zaslav may be looking forward to a streaming afterlife and a place at the table among the streaming giants, but he is still, alas, and even principally, in the ShitCo. cable business.
And yet … the trick of the ever–transitioning media business has always been to manage decline while you pray for better days. Technology companies only exist as of today; the media business is a tension between past, present, and future. The past doesn't ever go away, television didn't wipe out radio, cable didn't wipe out network, streaming won't wipe out terrestrial — you just have to be fast enough and ruthless enough to adjust your management of it.
While Zaslav may from a certain angle look like a parody of a wannabe media mogul, and not necessarily a very good parody, there is at the same time a view that Zaslav, fairly rare among the mogul set, possesses a level of business self-awareness, an understanding that, together with his mogul dreams, his day job is being a real nuts-and-bolts guy on a tight timetable. His circle, even without prodding, notes his prodigious work ethic — "pragmatic, straightforward, straight shooting," says Zas's friend Bobby Kotick, the gaming billionaire, delegated to offer an encomium — while brushing past his episodes of ostentation and glamour grabs. "He really is not an asshole," defends another friend.
As Zaslav works his present streaming strategy, seeking to talk about nothing else but, he is, too, less publicly, deeply attentive to the cable past. For one thing, cable's profits, while bleak in the future, are still strong in the present, and Zaslav's astute management of them has, in a surprise to the industry, helped bring down what seemed to be WBD's unsustainable debt to quite reasonable levels. What's more, ShitCo. may now present quite an opportunity. The FCC has had under Obama and Biden an antagonistic view of media mergers. The Trump age opens the possibility of creating a big industry utility of shit — a massive combination of cable properties to maximize efficiencies, margins, and leverage with cable providers.
It may obviously seem to be a competitive disadvantage that, while the technology business builds the future, the media business is more often than not surprised by it. Yet that, in a way, is the nature of media — of the Zeitgeist, of a hit, and of show business. If you can't roll with it, you shouldn't be on the boat ("Getting to the other side of the river" is how a weary-sounding Casey Bloys, the 20-year HBO veteran, now CEO, puts it). The future, in the traditional media model, always holds unknown fortune, whether that be the conversion to DVDs that supported a generation or the wild margins in the cable bundle or … WBD's Harry Potter series, which the company is massively investing in and is billing as the biggest launch in streaming history.
Or its other big number, Superman (the first of a dozen superheroish movies slated over the next ten years to try to turn Warner's ownership of DC Comics into something like Disney's gift-that-keeps-giving Marvel and make the studio, just like Disney, a repeat franchise machine). Zaslav is putting a lot of hope in Harry Potter and Superman — oh, and Cat in the Hat as a central piece of its kids' build-out — as both part of the branding makeover for Max (not your father's HBO) and wishes for an endless franchise future. Hits, at least temporarily, solve all problems.
This may seem like a slim reed, but in the past, it has always worked for somebody. Why not Zas? And it's not as though anyone else has a better plan.
Media mogul is not necessarily a job too many people want anymore and not necessarily a job that truly exists (even if the paychecks still do). It's a cautious industry now and a stripped-down one. What is a media mogul compared with Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos? (In the case of David Ellison, who is buying Paramount Global with his father Larry Ellison's multi-hundred-billion-dollar fortune, what is a media mogul compared with the coddled child of a tech titan?)
But Zaslav wants the job, arguably may appear to want it too much, and believes in it, which, given how many people seem to want nothing to do with it, is quite a significant stake in the ground.
In our conversation in his New York office — leather couch, re-created exposed-brick walls, and pictures of the Beatles and Hendrix — Zas is vastly more earnest than flashy, concentrating hard on the details of how he's going to lead his business over its complicated hurdles. This may seem like his more natural place: David Zaslav, the office guy. He works earnestly, if somewhat less convincingly, at trying to be the other thing, too — power broker, nabob, kahuna. But he is still the office guy who, miraculously, found himself sitting in the seat, and can't believe it, and certainly doesn't want to get out of it — its existential condition be damned. "I don't know if I would be doing this stuff if I were him, but guess what, he loves it!" says his friend Blankfein.
Moguldom, even if Zas is an unlikely mogul, is what he's trying to preserve and restore. And he is playing the part — or learning it. (In the new Apple+ series The Studio, Seth Rogen says he modeled the studio overlord, a rapacious moron played by Bryan Cranston, on Zaslav.) Indeed, every studio, including Warner, had passed on Zoom-call member Nick Pileggi's script about Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, The Alto Knights. Pileggi is a beloved figure in the entertainment business by virtue of his contributions to the industry-staple organized-crime drama and mythmaking and his marriage to Nora Ephron. In today's fraught world, where any green-light demands consensus, Zaslav — in an example of old-school mogul behavior not seen in many years — proudly pushed the film into production. Peculiarly or m eaningfully, the project has been in development since 1974. Irwin Winkler was the producer then with Michael Cimino signed on as director and James Toback as screenwriter — but then, in a footnote of ancient Hollywood history, it was put into turnaround when Alan Ladd Jr. took over the Twentieth Century Fox film division. Irwin Winkler, at 93, is still the film's producer, recruiting in his long, heroic effort to make the film for his 92-year-old writer, Pileggi; Barry Levinson, at 82, is the director; and Robert De Niro, at 81, is the star, playing both Costello and Genovese. Prior to the film's disastrous $3 million opening last month, the green-light decision was being touted by some in the industry as both Zaslav's boldness over committee caution and a return to the great age of Hollywood dramas.
Now, in similar mogul fashion, blame is being spread around, with Zaslav disclaiming responsibility and with the expectation that heads, though not Zas's, will roll. Now The Alto Knights just confirms the Zaslav strategy: Film drama is dead, and building franchises is film's future. A Minecraft Movie, in which Warner has a 75 percent interest (Legendary has 25 percent) opened in early April bigger than Barbie — the biggest movie of the year so far! This too is a key mogul skill: surviving flops. That's show business (said with a shrug). And who knows? Fifty years from now, someone may pull out the Zaslav desk.
And a coda.
What about … Trump? In the endless cascade of existential variables in the media business, now Trump!
Even if you can will hits into being, and somehow hold together broken business models and achieve new global breakthroughs, now you have to deal with, at some very personal mogul level, Trump. While much of the tech world has decided to meet the Trump phenomenon with obsequiousness, and other media companies are making ignominious deals (at ABC, at CBS), and Comcast, doubtlessly, has a sense of relief that their ShitCo. spinoff includes the lefty MSNBC, David Zaslav remains, uncomfortably, the owner of CNN, Trump's longtime and consistently most hated media target.
This is a confusing place for Zaslav to be because nothing about his career would indicate an interest in news. Nor, in the grand scheme, does CNN seem to be a particularly integral part of his vision for WBD (Zaslav insists it is). In one of his few direct expressions, John Malone has even opined about his distaste for the polarization of cable news, which, awkwardly, is cable news' bread and butter. One of Zaslav's earliest decisions in the takeover of Warner Media was not to support CNN chief Jeff Zucker, a Zaslav friend from the NBC days (Zucker was also a Jack Welch favorite). In the interregnum period during the deal with AT&T to take control of Warner, Zucker, accused of a corporate infraction for not reporting his relationship of many years' standing with a colleague, was ousted in apparent p olitical payback by AT&T enemies. Zaslav's choice not to save the high-flying Zucker may reasonably be read as an effort to downgrade CNN's profile and importance. His subsequent appointment of Chris Licht, quite a lightweight, to take over one of the key spots in American news happened without a real search, and Licht's rule collapsed in about a year. Then Zaslav, again without much of a search, turned to Mark Thompson, the retired CEO of the New York Times, for his reputation as an adult in the room with keen corporate acumen who might be counted on to understand the nuances of the moment. But Zaslav is still stuck not only with a fast-declining business and what can seem like the day-by-day erosion of one of the world's most iconic brands and all the negative media attention that brings, but because of CNN, he now has Trump as a Damocles potentially threatening the entire WBD business.
This is too against the background that Time Warner, in its modern history, has been one of the great liberal-bulwark companies, the true home of the New York and L.A. media elite. Trump might have noticed, or surely will, that one of Zas's key lieutenants is Robert Gibbs, Obama's former press secretary. What's more, everyone on Zaslav's Zoom call is a liberal Democrat, with a required part of their conversation, after their close reading of the New York Times and the Washington Post, about the daily depredations of Donald Trump. Zaslav, a card-carrying G5 liberal, has sought, as everyone in his circle has, Manhattan cred — among other things, that has previously included prodigious support for Democrats.
And now, as he and John Malone look to trade their way out of the tight spots of the business, they may need Donald Trump. WBD confirmed that a company representative recently reached out to the Trump orbit seeking advice about how the company might advantageously interact with the White House and improve its Trump-age odor. The reported message was to look at the example of Amazon and Jeff Bezos paying Melania Trump $40 million to participate in a documentary about herself. Don Jr. might like a hunting and fishing show on the Discovery Channel, they were told. And that CNN could have more pro-Trump voices — suggestion provided.
Zaslav, who was notably photographed at the U.S. Open in September with Elon Musk, does not, to say the least, seem like a man for a moment that may require a face-off with this president. Zaslav's neutral, largely meaningless comments about CNN — "The most important thing to me … the metric that is most important to me … is how trusted is a brand is CNN … We believe in journalism … Journalism is fighting for the best version of the truth, as Carl Bernstein would say," invoking Christiane Amanpour and the tanks rolling into Moscow in 1991 — may seem to indicate that he is rightly not looking forward to that moment's coming. Which it will.
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