David Zaslav Says He May Be ‘Overpaying’ Writers Post-Strike — His Comp Package Was $39.3 Million Last Year

Christian Blauvelt
·3-min read

In a new New York Times profile about the last 18 tumultuous months at Warner Bros. Discovery, company CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said “you don’t make friends” via the studio’s now-infamous cost-cutting approach. His boss, CEO David Zaslav, certainly has not.

Take the comments Zaslav gave the NYT about the WGA strike. No sooner than he seemed to start courting the creative class he needs to fuel his company’s future (“They are right about almost everything,” he said of the writers and their demands during the strike), the CEO steps in it by implying the same scribes might now be overpaid: “So what if we overpay? I’ve never regretted overpaying for great talent or a great asset.”

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Nice negging. Yes, he’s calling those he says he’s overpaying “a great talent,” but he’s also suggesting they’re not worth the pricepoint — at least that’s the way it’s being taken by many, and perhaps that’s all that matters. Paging Dale Carnegie and “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

Let’s put this in perspective. Moody’s puts the combined cost for the studios of the new, post-strike WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts at $600 million — for all of the AMPTP studios and for both guilds. That roughly tracks with what WGA estimated, pre-strike, as the cost of its proposed contract.

In May 2023, the WGA said top streamers and studios could expect a $343 million increase per year in costs from the contract the guild wanted. In a chart the WGA sent its members (and unverified by a third-party analyst), the guild said that would cost Disney $75 million per year, Netflix $68 million, Paramount $45 million, NBCUniversal $34 million, and Amazon $32 million. Warner Bros. Discovery would be right in the middle of the pack with a $47 million lift.

By comparison, Zaslav’s 2022 comp package set as $39.3 million, only $8 million short of the entire increased expenditure. He didn’t actually reach that number — Zaz’s realized pay last year was $27.2 million — but he was supposed to! Either way, one individual gobbled up much of what an entire union wanted for all of its members working for his company.

(Zaslav infamously was set up with $246 million comp package in 2021, ahead of the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger, with $203 million coming from stock options tied to closing the deal. The headline number also proved overinflated — Zaslav realized $69.6 million that year.)

Zaslav’s comp package is not an outlier in Hollywood, or even among his fellow strike negotiators. Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos is at $50 million; Bob Iger is expected to earn up to $27 million this year. However, it hits different when you consider the devaluation of Warner Bros. Discovery under Zaslav’s leadership. WBD stock has lost half its value since the April 2022 merger, and a huge selloff occurred after the earnings call earlier this month. While Warner Bros. Discovery has done an admirable job to pay down debt — paying off $12 billion — it still has $44.5 billion of debt to go.

None of this accounts for the intangible of creatives feeling burned by deleting “Batgirl” and “Scoob! Holiday Haunt,” by instituting mass layoffs at Turner Classic Movies (a couple of the top execs were rehired following backlash), and most recently by pulling the plug on Dave Green’s John Cena starrer “Coyote vs. Acme.” After that backlash, Warner Bros. Discovery agreed to at least attempt to shop the film to other distributors to release.

To work in Hollywood is to work in the business of creativity. Right now, the only thing that feels creative in WBD’s approach is finding new ways to burn bridges.

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