Warner Bros. is poised to change hands for the third time in six years, but it has never gone to a company like Paramount, which already owns a rival major studio. In looking Warner’s modern history, it’s worth revisiting the leaders behind the M&A deals, strategies and situations that have shaped the house built in 1923 by Jack, Harry, Sam and Abe Warner, four enterprising brothers from the Youngstown, Ohio, area.
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Steven J. Ross
Image Credit: WWD Warner Communications, chairman-CEO; Time Warner, chairman, 1969-92
The architect of the modern media conglomerate, Ross was a successful businessman who owned funeral parlors and parking lots when his Kinney National Co. acquired a very run-down Warner Bros.-Seven Arts movie studio for $400 million in 1969. He renamed the parent company Warner Communications and set out to expand its scope in entertainment. Ross rebuilt the movie studio, brought in DC Comics, revved up Warner Music and acquired Atari and Lorimar-Telepictures. His masterstroke came in 1989 with the agreement that created the world’s largest media company through the merger of Warner Communications and Time Inc., which owned HBO. The enlarged company was just starting to gain real traction when Ross, just 65, died in December 1992 from prostate cancer.
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Bob Daly and Terry Semel
Image Credit: Getty Images Warner Bros., chairman-CEO, 1980-99; Warner Bros., chief operating officer, chairman-co-CEO, 1981-99
The pair reigned for nearly 20 years as leaders of the town’s biggest plant and as such set the template for the modern Hollywood studio boss. Daly and Semel built Warner Bros. into a reliable factory of film and TV popcorn hits, from the “Batman” franchise, “Lethal Weapon” and “The Matrix” to “Dallas,” “Friends” and “ER.”
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Gerald Levin
Image Credit: FilmMagic Time Warner/ AOL Time Warner, CEO, 1990-2001
The Time Inc. veteran who embraced the potential of HBO in the 1970s was in the right position to become co- CEO of Time Warner after the merger in 1990. After Ross died, Levin consolidated his hold as solo CEO. In the ensuing years, Levin bought Turner Broadcasting, launched the WB network and championed the doomed 2000 merger with AOL. Levin could see that entertainment’s future was moving to online platforms, but he made too many wrong turns in trying to get there.
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Steve Case
Image Credit: Getty Images AOL Time Warner, chairman, 2001-2003
Case was the marketing ace who made AOL a household name in the late 1990s. He convinced Time Warner CEO Levin to join forces in a bold effort to bring entertainment to online platforms. But even together, AOL and Time Warner didn’t have the technical or financial firepower for the online empire they envisioned. And the rest is history. The AOL-Time Warner merger is widely considered one of the most disastrous corporate mergers of all time.
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Bob Pittman
Image Credit: Getty Images AOL Time Warner, chief operating officer, 2001-2002
The man who helped create MTV in the early 1980s had embraced the online revolution by the late 1990s. He brought a brash, move-fast- and-break-things mentality to the leadership of AOL Time Warner, which grated on Warner Bros. and HBO veterans from the start. He was pushed out after the company hit a post-merger financial iceberg in 2002, amid the collapse of AOL’s dial-up subscription business and allegations of financial fraud leveled against some senior AOL executives.
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Richard Parsons
Image Credit: Getty Images Time Warner, president, co-chief operating officer, CEO, chairman, 1995-2007
Parsons had a career in banking before he joined Time Warner. He was known for his skill at problem-solving and diplomacy. He was promoted to CEO in 2002 after Pittman’s ouster, and added stability to the helm after the rockiness of the AOL years. In 2003, he snipped “AOL” from the moniker, and the following year he sold off Warner Music Group to Edgar Bronfman Jr. and other investors for $2.6 billion.
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Jeff Bewkes
Image Credit: Stephen Lovekin/Variety Time Warner, COO, CEO, chairman, 2002-2018
After Pittman’s ouster, Parsons upped Bewkes to co-COO overseeing Warner Bros., HBO and the Turner cable networks. In January 2008, Bewkes was elevated to CEO, and began streamlining the core business. In 2009, the company spun off Time Warner Cable into a separate entity, and it did the same with AOL. After Rupert Murdoch made an unsolicited offer for Time Warner in July 2014, Bewkes began hunting for a buyer. He landed on an offer from AT&T in 2016.
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Barry Meyer
Image Credit: Getty Images Warner Bros., chairman-CEO, 1999-2013
The Warner Bros. lifer was trained at the knee of Ross, Daly and Semel. He was the steady hand who knew the studio well, having come up the ranks in the TV division. He had seen Warner Bros. at its worst, and he saw what Ross’ ambition had brought to the place. Meyer invested in the “Harry Potter” films and recruited Alan Horn as his film chief. He also charged up TV by OK’ing big-money development deals with star writer-producers including John Wells and J.J. Abrams.
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Kevin Tsujihara
Image Credit: Rob Latour/Variety Warner Bros., chairman-CEO, 2013-19
Tsujihara had been with the studio for nearly 20 years when he took over as CEO in early 2013, first in business development and then leading its home video and gaming units. Warner Bros. was flush in the early years of the streaming content boom as Netflix et al paid big bucks to license the studio’s content. After the AT&T acquisition closed in 2018, Tsujihara was in line for a promotion, but his rise was derailed by a sex scandal.
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John Stankey
Image Credit: Getty Images for Fast Company WarnerMedia, CEO, 2018-20; AT&T, CEO, 2020-present
The AT&T lifer came in swinging after the telco giant spent nearly two years fighting to close the $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. He could see that Warner Bros. and HBO were in a hurry to address the streaming revolution. In the lead-up to the deal, Bewkes, Stankey and others sought to convince Wall Street and studio employees that there were synergies to be found between the companies. But the mismatch became apparent.
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Jason Kilar
Image Credit: Dan Steinberg for Variety WarnerMedia, CEO, 2020-22
Kilar made sense as a digital-and marketing-savvy choice who had built Hulu into a successful streaming business. At WarnerMedia, one of his first major tests was how to handle COVID. After the company announced it would premiere Warner Bros.’ entire 2020 and 2021 film slates on HBO Max rather than save them for theatrical release later, directors like Christopher Nolan bashed his decision. Nolan bolted to Universal for 2023’s “Oppenheimer,” and Kilar exited in April 2022.
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Ann Sarnoff
Image Credit: Penske Media via Getty Images Warner Bros., chairman-CEO, 2019-22
The former BBC Studios America executive was a surprise choice as leader of Warner Bros. Sarnoff immediately faced a mandate to produce more content for HBO Max, the streamer that was gearing up for its May 2020 debut. Sarnoff had clout, but COVID was a curveball, and she was caught up in Kilar’s debacle with WB’s film slate. By the time AT&T and Discovery announced the Warner Bros. Discovery spinoff agreement in 2021, it was clear that Sarnoff’s tenure at WB was over.
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David Zaslav
Image Credit: Variety via Getty Images Warner Bros. Discovery, CEO, 2022-present
The executive known as the ultimate cable guy has waxed poetic about his love of the moviegoing experience, but his team from Discovery Inc. arrived with a mandate to trim fat. They had to make cuts quickly, because the spinoff deal left WBD with $43 billion in debt. While budgets and jobs were whacked, Zaslav’s large paycheck and lavish lifestyle became easy points of ridicule. Just as the studio and HBO started to turn a corner, Zaslav’s long-term plan was knocked off course by David Ellison.
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