In the wake of large-scale staff reductions across Warner Bros. Discovery that largely tailed off earlier this year, the marketing department at Max has now also experienced layoffs.
The tally of workers let go in the streaming unit is a double-digit number, a person familiar with the situation told Deadline. Because of the need to integrate the HBO Max and Discovery+ streaming outlets into the combined Max service that launched last May, no reductions had been seen in the marketing group up to this point. In the immediate aftermath of the $43 billion WarnerMedia-Discovery deal, billions of cost savings were promised, with the total rising from $3 billion initially to beyond $4 billion earlier this year.
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WBD has not identified specific subscriber trends related to the launch of Max, though the company reported a total of 95.8 million across all services as of June 30. That represented a sequential loss of 1.8 million subscribers, though some decline had been projected given the merging of the two streaming services. (Discovery+ is still offered on a stand-alone basis.)
Since the April 2022 close of the merger, execs at WBD have been signaling their efforts to achieve billions in cost savings from the deal. Many in management, especially CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, have criticized the “excesses” of the management team running WarnerMedia when it was owned by AT&T as well as what the CFO has called the industry’s “streaming exuberance.”
In some instances, WBD decided to jettison finished film or TV titles in order to hew to cost-cutting objectives, eliciting objections from the creative community.
“We got a lot of criticism, especially in the press at the time,” Wiedenfels said at a Wall Street conference earlier this year. “At this point, I think a lot of our peers and others in the industry have kind of made similar decisions. So we haven’t abandoned anything that made sense, and we’re very committed to continuing to invest.”
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