Gingerly reopening this jar of rookery whelps for some financial and directorial news.
WB-D have just apprised investors of a $4.2bn (OUCH) writedown charge to their current assets. Movies and streaming not being the high-margin business they used to be, this now leaves a $50bn debt load, a reduced $9bn profit target (so now 5.5 to 1 loan gearing - not good), and only $30bn in market cap (the value of the company based on share price). That's not healthy.
As the FT article says, bad news doesn't age well, so dumping all of it into one financial year and betting on a good turnaround is a good trick. But I'm not seeing them gel into a slick moneymaking machine they promised the markets any time soon.
Black Adam at least is a palpable hit ($147m to date), though not anything like the size of a pre-pandemic Marvel blockbuster - and only roughly on par with Love And Thunder ($144m). They'd better have a hell of a slate coming up...
...which they just might do, having just hired James Gunn as creative director of DC Studios, a new entity - WB-D will write off and shutter the previous DC Films unit and rebuild corporate structures from scratch. Reliable big-budget producer Peter Safran (Shazam, Aquaman, The Conjuring, The Suicide Squad) will handle the business end of things.
Unless there's some kind of major falling-out with Zaslav (entirely possible), Gunn will be exclusive to DC for the next four years, with only the Holiday Special and GOTG3 (now in post-prod) left on the Marvel slate.
It's a bold move, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them.