Warner Bros. Discovery may be trying to get its hands on cash for its company by selling rights to its music publishing assets. These assets are behind the music for many popular movies and TV shows.
The catalog of music is believed to include Purple Rain, The Last Waltz, various Batman soundtracks, Sesame Street, Evita, Rent, Dick Tracy, Sweeney Todd, and more, it could even include songs like “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca.
This was first reported by HitsdailyDobule.com and confirmed by Variety. Currently, this catalog of music, themes, along with cues and is being managed by Universal Music Publishing.
This sale could help Warner Bros. Discovery free up cash to help pay off its $49.5 billion in debt or free up cash for its new Max streaming service.
According to reports, cuts include staff overseeing its cable networks like Animal Planet, Oxygen, Food Network, HGTV, TLC, Discovery, TBS, TNT, TruTV, and Science.
Streaming was not left untouched by these cuts, including Amy Introcaso-Davis, who was the EVP, Development and Production, Factual Programming, Discovery. She also oversaw some development of Discovery+ programming.
Exactly how deep these cuts will be is unknown at this time. This comes as Warner Bros. Discovery’s CEO David Zaslav said during the company’s 1st quarter 2023 earnings call that he wants to stop the bleeding in areas that are losing money.
“The key here is our streaming business is no longer a bleeder,” Zaslav said during the earnings call. “It’s hard to run a business when you have a big bleeder. And so getting this business under control, focusing on what people love to watch, how do we create content that people love? And now as we launch Max, we’ll be able to nourish and delight subscribers with the greatness of HBO, which on Sunday nights is really a cultural moment, whether it’s ‘White Lotus,’ ‘House of the Dragon,’ ‘The Last of Us,’ ‘Succession,’ and then put it together with Discovery content which has been really strong for us.”
Warner Bros. Discovery being in talks to sell its music catalog of movie and TV shows does not mean the sale will happen. For now, we will have to wait and see if a deal can be worked out.