Warner Bros. boss David Zaslav is the real ‘Man of Steel’ in shifting media landscape

They hate him in Hollywood, but increasingly they’re loving David Zaslav on Wall Street.

OK, maybe it’s not quite love but there’s definitely some canoodling going down.

Shares of Warner Bros. Discovery are up more than 53% over the past 12 months. Bob Iger gets endless kudos for turning around Disney following years of mismanagement and woke programming hated by much of the American public. His stock is up just 27% over the same time period.

Zas, as he is known in the media business, is a long-time media executive who landed at the top of major media by getting the telephone nerds at AT&T to offload its Warner Media subsidiary that they didn’t know how to operate to his company, Discovery, in 2022.

The deal was valued at $43 billion and contained lots of debt, a drag on its share price. Shares dipped to near penny stock levels (just above $5) last year. They closed at $13.17 on Thursday.

Hollywood’s skepticism toward Zas began with his lack of creative chops. He was a longtime NBCUniversal executive, an acolyte of Jack Welch when he ran the media company as head of the General Electric conglomerate.

He then became CEO of Discovery, a mid-sized media outfit with cable channels like the Food Network, Animal Planet and HGTV that were losing viewers in an era of cord cutting. They churned out profits based on Zas’s deft balance sheet management as opposed to top-notch programming, or so his Hollywood critics said.

Adding credence to the Zas’ haters’ world view: His reign as media mogul included a major branding misstep, renaming HBO’s streaming service “Max,” a moniker (for obvious reasons) that never stuck. He also alienated those in La La Land by canceling programs as he slashed through the balance sheet.

It became nearly impossible to defend Zaslav given his stock’s uneven performance and his massive $52 million pay package in 2024 – in an industry that is literally melting away because of seismic changes in the way people consume entertainment, news and sports.

But there’s a bullish Zas story when you sit with the business types – not crazy lefties in Hollywood who still haven’t forgiven him for pulling the plug on useless movies like “Batgirl” or refusing to overpay for NBA rights because he believed $2.6 billion a year could be put to better use.

Despite the name screw-up, his streaming service makes money, a near anomaly among traditional media companies. He’s breaking up WBD and will control the HBO Max streaming properties and Warner Bros. studios as CEO.

His current chief financial officer, Gunnar Widenfels, will get something named Discovery Global, a holding company for the Discovery+ streaming service and all the cable networks. Those include Discovery Channel, CNN and TNT.

The move lets Zas transfer some of his debt to a company that has better cash flow while he rebuilds the studio, or probably sells it. Smaller is always better in M&A, particularly if you’re looking for a Big Tech player like Amazon as a buyer, which he ultimately is, I am told.

Lately, Zas has even proven the creative snobs wrong. Warner Bros. Studios’ “Superman” is the smash hit of the summer. “Sinners,” a stylistic vampire flick, has been a surprise box office success. Plus, Zas admitted defeat and went back to HBO Max for his streaming channel.

Rich Greenfield, the “ax” or eminence grise of media analysts at LightShed Partners, says Wall Street may be starting to appreciate Zas as a survivor who will keep living to fight another day, and that day may well pay off for his shareholders.

“Obviously this isn’t an easy business.” Greenfield says. “But the brilliance of David Zaslav is that he got out of Discovery which was going nowhere and convinced AT&T to engage in a merger that gave it a second life. The question now is how he builds the Warner Bros. studio and HBO given this environment.”