Former CEO of Time Warner Jeff Bewkes is not keeping his displeasure with AT&T's handling of Warner Bros. hidden. In 2016, AT&T entered talks to acquire Time Warner which after two years became official on June 14, 2018. AT&T renamed the company WarnerMedia and former CEO Bewkes, who had been CEO of Time Warner since 2008, stepped down from the company and was proceeded by AT&T’s John Stankey as CEO.
In the three years since AT&T took control of WB, the company has seen some major shake-ups. Longtime HBO Executive Richard Plepler stepped down in 2019, as he was reportedly had less autonomy after the AT&T merger. In August 2020, just a few days before the first-ever DC FanDome event, WarnerMedia laid off one-third of the staff of DC Comics. In November 2020, it was announced that Wonder Woman 1984 and all of WB's 2021 films would release in theaters and on HBO Max day and date which alienated many of the studio's longtime filmmakers and saw Christopher Nolan depart from the studio and move over to Universal Pictures for his latest film Oppenhiemer.
In a recent profile by the WSJ on the book Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuits of New Frontiers by writer James Andrew Miller, an expert features the former CEO of then named Time Warner Bewkes discussing his disappointment with AT&T handling of the Warner Bros. While Bewkes doesn't regret the sale to AT&T, he is disappointed with how AT&T said they would leave the various divisions alone and how that didn't happen. Both he and the board of directors thought AT&T would trust the various division heads who had more experience. Bewkes said:
“We didn’t think they would go to such a level of malpractice as to not listen to anybody…even though they themselves had no experience in those areas.”
In May 2021, AT&T announced they were spinning off WarnerMedia and would be merging it with Discovery to create Warner Bros. Discovery. The merger is expected to be completed in mid-2022 and will see AT&T shareholders maintain a 71% stake in the new company. There are currently talks to merge HBO Max and Discovery+ together as one streaming service, a likely move to bolster the appeal of both services and allow them to rival the likes of Disney+ and Netflix.
Warner Bros. has had a rocky road as far as corporate owners go, as the short-lived acquisition by AOL was described by Bewkes as the biggest mistake in corporate history. The time under AT&T has been short, but in those three years, the company has changed quite a bit with the launch of HBO Max and the expansion and embrace of a DC Multiverse to justify various incarnations of the same hero existing across different platforms just to name a few. Yet also in the past few years, the company has also alienated top creatives, fired off a large number of their staff, and failed to deal with toxic workplace environments from the set of Justice League. Warner Bros.'s reputation has taken a hit in recent years, and it needs a lot of work to repair that trust.
Source: WSJ