{"id":483975,"date":"2026-05-14T08:31:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T08:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/483975\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T08:31:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T08:31:17","slug":"the-warner-bros-discovery-upfront-felt-more-like-a-funeral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/483975\/","title":{"rendered":"The Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront Felt More Like a Funeral"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe 2026 Warner Bros. Discovery<\/a> upfront lacked any spark, and not just because it took place at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n

\n\tToday\u2019s event, ostensibly to sell television-commercial slots to the advertisers in attendance, felt more like a wake for WBD. That\u2019s probably because, in some ways, it was. <\/p>\n

\n\tBarring any unforeseen bumps in the regulatory process, Warner Bros. Discovery, formed in April 2022 through the merging of Discovery, Inc. and WarnerMedia (owned at the time by AT&T), will become part of Paramount Skydance sometime this fall. So what happens when a major media company has no fall slate to sell at a trade show almost entirely about buying fall slates? You get a quick \u2014 and very forgettable \u2014 upfront.<\/p>\n

\n\tWBD\u2019s heaviest hitters sat this one out. CEO David Zaslav was not seen on-site (let alone on stage). HBO chief Casey Bloys was in attendance, but nothing more than that. Bruce Campbell, the company\u2019s chief revenue and strategy officer, and Gunnar Wiedenfels, CFO, came to the press lunch immediately following the event. Look, you might as well eat on the company\u2019s dime while you can.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat left Warner Bros. Discovery advertising\u00a0presidents\u00a0Ryan Gould\u00a0and\u00a0Bobby\u00a0Voltaggio to open the show, to, in a press release\u2019s words, \u201creaffirm the company\u2019s commitment top partnership, performance\u00a0and\u00a0storytelling across every screen.\u201d For, like, the next four or five months they mean, I imagine.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn that promise of \u201cpartnership,\u201d Voltaggio opened with a joke<\/a> about the unusual circumstances.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGood partnership is what drives us here at Warner Bros. Discovery. So before we go on, we do want to address the Ellison \u2014 I mean the elephant \u2014 in the room,\u201d Voltaggio said.<\/p>\n

\n\tOK, so he\u2019s no Jimmy Kimmel<\/a>, but it was better than pretending we aren\u2019t all thinking the same thing.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cListen, we don\u2019t deflect, that\u2019s not who we are,\u201d Gould added. \u201cEveryone here knows that there\u2019s change ahead and that there\u2019s change at our company. But there\u2019s change across the entire media industry. And we\u2019re well aware that your business is changing, too. But we believe that success is a team effort, so our best-in-class organization, the team and people you know and trust so well, are here to help guide you through this transition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe others there to help guide the clients in the room included household names like Karen Bronzo, chief global\u00a0marketing officer for U.S. Networks & News,\u00a0Dana Nussbaum, co-head of Global Motion Picture Marketing, and\u00a0Shauna\u00a0Spenley, global chief marketing officer of Direct-to-Consumer (streaming and linear HBO). They each commenced to interview for their jobs share the latest measurement gibberish, which is not at all unique to WBD\u2019s upfront, and present whatever crumbs of content<\/a> there were left to announce, respectively.<\/p>\n

\n\tNo shade on any of the executives who went through the motions this morning. They did what they had to do in a difficult situation. But the total lack of star power carried over to the near-total lack of stars<\/a>*. The Warner Bros. Discovery lineup came down to Abby Phillip, Adam\u00a0Lefkoe, Anderson Cooper, Brian Posehn, Craig Ferguson (he was funny), Dan Schachner, Francois Arnaud, John Ross Bowie, Kaitlan Collins, Katherine LaNasa, Kevin Sussman, Lauren\u00a0Lapkus, Leslie Jones, M. Night Shyamalan, Morgan Spector, *Noah Wyle, Robbie Graham-Kuntz, Shaquille O\u2019Neal and Terry Crews. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe morning\u2019s red carpet probably could have just remained rolled up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2026 Warner Bros. Discovery upfront lacked any spark, and not just because it took place at 10…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[265],"tags":[18,117,19,17,128,203039,31461],"class_list":["post-483975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-tv","tag-upfronts","tag-warner-bros-discovery"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116572001820054781","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}