David Zaslav said goodbye to Warner Bros. Discovery employees on Monday in a three-minute video, a day before Paramount Skydance was set to complete its takeover of the company he has run since 2022.
Zaslav recorded the message alone in a director’s chair at the Warner Bros. Burbank lot’s Loft warehouse. A company source said he chose video over a written memo to capture the visuals. The clip includes a montage of Warner Bros. productions and is available only on the company’s internal portal.
“I can’t wait to see what you do in the years ahead,” Zaslav tells staff. He calls his time at the company a great honor and thanks employees for the stories they created together.
The tone landed badly with some of the people he addressed. Employees and creative union workers described the farewell as out of touch, according to entertainment trade reports, pointing to a tenure defined by thousands of layoffs, aggressive cost reductions and the removal of older titles from streaming services.
The money adds to the friction. A regulatory filing indicates Zaslav stands to receive at least $551.5 million in compensation under the merger, plus a tax reimbursement whose value shrinks the longer the deal takes to close. Critics in Hollywood have seized on that figure as a symbol of the gap between the executive suite and the workforce.
Zaslav’s defenders argue he deserves credit for stabilizing a company that carried heavy debt after the 2022 merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, and for installing new leadership at the studio. He also tried to restructure the company by splitting it into a studio-and-streaming business and a cable networks division. That plan died when the sale to Paramount went through.
The path to Tuesday’s closing ran through a bidding fight. Netflix first agreed to buy the Warner Bros. studio and streaming assets. In February, WBD’s board then ruled that Paramount’s revised offer, valued at $31 a share and about $110 billion, beat the Netflix deal. Netflix stepped aside, and regulators spent months examining the merger’s potential effects on theatrical distribution and cable markets.
The combined company will take the name Skydance Corp. and inherit a heavy debt load, overlapping cable operations and the task of integrating studio campuses in Burbank and Melrose. David Ellison, Paramount Skydance’s chief, will lead the new company.
