According to Deadline, David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery for a few more hours, posted a three-minute farewell video to the company's internal portal on Monday. The Paramount deal is expected to close today.
In it, Zaslav sits in a stiff-backed chair in the "scenic loft" on the Warner Burbank lot and opens by noting that, "for the uninitiated, it might look like an empty room. But the people here know what a space like this can become." The video then cuts to a montage of still photos, and multiple employees told Deadline the photos skew hard toward award shows, red carpets, and the movie and TV stars Zaslav has shaken hands with. A WBD rep declined to share the link. The video is for employees only. The transcript is for everyone else.
The room is doing the PR work. A departing chief cannot film a goodbye in a full office, because full offices imply tenure, and tenure implies continuity, and the deal kills both. But an empty loft "where worlds have been built" is flexible. The room is a placeholder for the whole company. The staff are the ones who make it mean something. It's a farewell that tells 30,000 people they are the building and he is the vacancy.
The rest of the math is in the filing. Zaslav leaves with hundreds of millions in deal compensation, on top of the $7 million per day ticking fee he has been collecting from Paramount since October 1. The studio he is handing over absorbs $80 billion in new debt under Skydance. "The past is prologue," he says, which is to say: the past is now your problem.
YOUR TURN: A farewell video shot in an empty room. Is that a goodbye, or an inventory count?
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