Late Night Host Accuses Warner Bros. Discovery Of Pulling A Scam
A late night host that is critical and very topical has commented on the moves recently made by Warner Bros. Discovery, even going so far as to state they are running a scam.
Late-night hosts are certainly the type of people to be critical of practically everything that is in the news currently. Topical humor is usually high on the list for any of these hosts when jokes are being written. That is certainly the case for John Oliver, who hosts Last Week Tonight. The controversial host slammed Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and its handling of the Batgirl film. What makes this joke hit harder, is Oliver’s show is on HBO, which falls under the umbrella of WBD. He refers to the company as his new “business daddy.” He also compares WBD to the growing concern of Monkeypox, that is now sweeping the U.S. You can see the full clip of his bit below:
The bit about Warner Bros. Discovery comes along at the 12:05 mark. John Oliver takes the chance to compare the U.S. not giving out the Monkeypox vaccine in the same way, “We let the vaccine sit unused on a shelf in our reserves, like an expired Chobani or a $90 million movie on HBO Max.” He added, “Hi there, new business daddy seems like you’re doing a really great job. I do get the vague sense that you’re burning down my network for the insurance money, but I’m sure that that will all pass.” The scam he is commenting on is that WBD is destroying everything for the “insurance money.” He does have a point in that it seems WBD is sort of burning things to the ground. That is certainly the case for the DC division that seems to be in trouble. Batgirl is the first of many cancelations that is on the horizon.
CEO of WBD, David Zaslav, has publicly stated that there is going to be a new plan in place for the DC division of the company. This new 10-year plan is meant to shape itself after what Marvel did with the MCU. The issue with that is fans were more than excited about future releases, especially Batgirl. DC was finally getting away from the Zack Snyder-built universe and giving everyone something that was fresh. However, it appears that WBD did not see the same thing. Batgirl was said to be nearly finished and cost the studio some $90 million dollars to make. That was part of the criticism laid out by John Oliver. That is a ton of money to throw away. Hopefully, something can be worked out and another streaming service can purchase the rights to the film.
John Oliver had been critical of previous owners, AT&T. He critiqued ownership, and once compared the company to that of the right-wing network, One America News. Especially when AT&T was silent on Texas banning abortion. He also recommended that WBD follow AT&T and just “leave us the f*** alone.” One would hope that would happen, but it appears as if WBD is not going to follow the same loose ownership that AT&T had with Oliver’s show. There are rumors that the network is going to be getting away with all its scripted programming.
WBD might just be destroying everything so that it can restart. David Zaslav has already stated that HBO Max and Discovery+ are going to merge into one service by the summer of 2023. That could mean we are going to be seeing a ton more reality television content. What that means for John Oliver, we don’t know However, his show is popular enough that he might find an easier time over at another network with a rebranded show. Either way, things are going to get much more interesting in the coming weeks with how WBD handles its rebuild.
