This Thursday marks the deadline for bidders hoping to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Whoever ends up buying the powerhouse studio will become the steward of beloved franchises like Harry Potter, DC Comics (maker of Ben Affleck’s classic Batman movies), and, of course, Entourage (including the wider Queens Boulevard universe), along with prestige loss leaders like CNN, Food Network, and their crown jewel: Bill Maher.
Bidders include, Skydance’s David Ellison, who in addition to being Jake Busey’s understudy found enough change between the seats of his father’s winter jet to buy Paramount Studios and install Bari Weiss as head hall monitor at CBS News; cable operator Comcast, known to fans of 30 Rock as Kabletown, where the K stands for “kindness”; and Netflix, which you definitely know as being as relationship-damaging and impossible to get rid of as an STI.
All of these buyers are great options, especially Paramount Skydance assuming that Ellison’s dad lets him keep Warner head David Zaslav around, but puts him organizationally below Weiss to humiliate him and further ragebait underemployed journalists the world over. That Zaslav, or Zpaz as his friends call him, successfully got GQ editor Will Welch (a producer of a Warner Bros. project) to remove and memory hole a negative story bodes well for his potential collaboration with new boss Weiss, who doesn’t let journalistic norms and customs get in the way of doing the fucking news.
There’s also a strong case to be made for Netflix, a company that could merge Warner Bros. Discovery with some a generative AI-powered suicide-assisting bot to create a platform that literally amuses users to death, but I have a better idea.
You’re going to think I’m kidding, but as in any post tagged “satire” to indemnify us from legal liability, I’m being completely serious.
Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza should acquire Warner Bros. Discovery and run it as an always-on, digital-first, metaverse-ready entertainment and news multiplatform play. If attention is truly the coin of the realm in the streaming era, Nuzzi and Lizza have shown more skill than anyone at grabbing it and keeping it. No one — not even Zpaz’s would-be supervisor, Weiss — has shown Nuzzi and Lizza’s ability to ruthlessly, shamelessly, and, yes, successfully break the internet along with its users’ very spirits.
You want Max? These two take it there — and beyond it. You want Discovery? There is more (so much more) of Nuzzi and Lizza for customers to Discover. You want Entourage? They probably do, too, because through their elevated writing and generous worldviews, they have revealed the same sensitivity, empathy, and, above all, quality as the Mark Wahlberg-produced HBO series and its 2015 spinoff movie.
Do Nuzzi and Lizza have the estimated $74 billion to buy Warner Bros. Discovery? I don’t know. Maybe they can form some kind of consortium with the MyPillow Guy, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, and Elon Musk, who is always looking for constructive social good projects. As Sam Altman has shown us month after month, there’s funny money to be found all over; you just gotta be shameless enough to ask for more of it.
Honestly, the money thing is for someone with an MBA to write about. I don’t even really know what the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is (I had to Google it and just cut and paste from the AI Overview), but someone can figure this out.
What I do know after decades in the trenches of what we once called the news business (those of us still doing it now call it the news hobby) is engagement, and despite breaking theirs just over a year ago, Nuzzi and Lizza understand it too.
So, what will a Nuzzi-Lizza-Warner Bros. Discovery look like? Good question. I’m tempted to reach here for a lofty comparison, the kind of thing that the Internet used to thrive on before bot traffic took over.
I imagine it will be something like this description from a master of the form, the late great Nikki Finke (1953-2022), who wrote this upon the launch of the Huffington Post in 2005:
This “venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable… such a bomb that it’s the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one… It seems like some sick hoax… Misstep after misstep…”
That is not criticism: The Huffington Post was bought by AOL six years later for twice as much as Weiss’s Free Press; then to Verizon as part of its AOL buyout; then BuzzFeed; one day, perhaps the Saudi sovereign fund or MyPillow Guy will scoop it up. This model is undeniable.
Nuzzi-Lizza-Warner Bros. Discovery will be a company that meets the moment, combining entertainment, news, pornography, and gambling (why not?), a firehouse of content that speaks to all demographic quadrants, mostly because we are all messy, disgusting monsters who spend our days mukbang-ing rancid garbage as the Earth dies beneath our feet.
Like the bamboo that has taken over Ryan Lizza’s prose, choking the life and readability out of it, there is a rot in humankind and Nuzzi-Lizza-Warner Bros. Discovery will cultivate it, leaving only Bill Maher and Zpaz safely ensconced in Robert Evans’s 3,900-square-foot Beverly Hills home, rewatching Entourage as the bamboo takes over.
