{"id":393430,"date":"2025-11-21T00:36:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T00:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/393430\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T00:36:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T00:36:11","slug":"david-zaslavs-starry-dinner-party-oprah-winfrey-margot-robbie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/393430\/","title":{"rendered":"David Zaslav’s Starry Dinner Party: Oprah Winfrey, Margot Robbie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhat a way to prepare for an auction: Warner Bros. Discovery<\/a> CEO David Zaslav<\/a> hosted a star-packed dinner at his Beverly Hills home Wednesday night, hours before he took a redeye flight to New York to consider the first wave of preliminary offers for the entertainment conglomerate that he has headed since 2022.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe guest list would have been impressive at any red carpet premiere: Oprah Winfrey, Lorne Michaels, Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley, Al Pacino, Sandra Bullock, Jonah Hill, Bette Midler, Kristen Wiig, Bryan Lourd and Nancy Meyers. In total, about 20 people joined in for a casual discussion about movies and various projects in the works at the studio. <\/p>\n

\n\tOne source with direct knowledge of the evening said the mood was light-hearted and fun despite the gravity of the situation that Warner Bros. Discovery faces. The auction process, kicking off less than four years after the company went through its latest mega-merger \u2014 the union of WarnerMedia and Discovery completed in April 2022 \u2014 is sparking dread and anxiety among the rank and file at Warner Bros., HBO\/HBO Max and staffs at CNN, TNT, TBS, Discovery, Food Network, HGTV and other linear cable channels brought under the WBD umbrella by the Discovery merger.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Wednesday night, however, the dinner party conversation was said to have kept the emphasis on new projects in the hopper. There wasn\u2019t much open conversation about the sale process. But one source said it was made clear that Zaslav and his key lieutenants expect to the process to be essentially concluded by Christmas \u2014 which struck some as ambitious.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne source said that Zaslav, as ever, was a gracious host and animated in his discussion about the industry and its future. After the last course was served, Zaslav bowed out to get himself to a plane. The WBD CEO left the crowd with the impression that his plan was to sleep during the flight, then \u201cwake up, shower and wait for the bids to come in at noon,\u201d per the source with direct knowledge.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe field of expected bidders for WBD that has emerged in recent weeks includes Paramount, Comcast and Netflix. The specifics of who actually submitted what Thursday are still unclear. Warner Bros. Discovery representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What a way to prepare for an auction: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav hosted a star-packed dinner…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":393431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,47781,67,132,68,27281],"class_list":{"0":"post-393430","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-david-zaslav","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us","13":"tag-warner-bros-discovery"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115584891882895355","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}