5 ms·

Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer

72 points by carlycue 3y ago

ThrowawayR2 3y ago
> "Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021,..." Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.
- ok_dad 3y ago
  “Average“ means there are a few who make millions and the rest make like 40-80k. JK Rowling would still be considered a writer, for instance, pushing the average up for her few movies.
  - bestnameever 3y ago
    While what you say is possible, I would think there could be some members who are not working very often making much less than 40K, having the opposite effect.
  - neffy 3y ago
    Another issue is that it tends to be very bursty. They will often get a big payout, but then nothing for several years. There aren't that many writers who get a reliable pay check, so it is more (in common with acting) a lot of people getting occasional big payouts and then drifting off to be replaced by the next batch of hopefuls. I doubt average amounts are in any way meaningful in this context.
    - zimpenfish 3y ago
      Also, if I am understanding things correctly, that's gross pay which means Uncle Sam will be taking a fair old chunk plus they're effectively self-employed which means agents, managers, lawyers, etc. will also be taking a chunk. One page I saw suggested ~50% of it will go in tax and expenses before the writer even sees any. What we really need to know is median pay per year but I suspect that's going to be a difficult set of numbers to find.
- terrytwillstein 3y ago
  You read a story about an exec being paid half a billion over five years and you lose sympathy for the people making $260K? I barely make $45k myself, but my takeaway isn't that the people asking for fairer compensation don't deserve it because they make more than me already. What a reductive view. Labor unionization sucks in this country for opinions like this.
- eesmith 3y ago
  How little do they need to make before you feel outrage? Can you still have support and sympathy without outrage? What are some of the strikes in the last few decades where you have felt outrage, and how did that help the strike effort?
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    > How little do they need to make before you feel outrage? Certainly it would have to be a small enough amount that they might face some kind of financial hardship under normal circumstances. If a company is paying all their employees (which to be clear I know is not the case here, but just as a hypothetical example) enough that they can comfortably raise a family in even the most expensive cities in the world, I'm not going to spend my time criticizing that person regardless of how much they make.
    - gamblor956 3y ago
      Like most project based employees, writers make their money when they work, and nothing when they don't. This means that the years they are making an "average" of $260k needs to offset the years when they aren't landing any writing gigs at all. And indeed, this is part of how Hollywood pay is structured: the seemingly inflated pay is adjusted for the fact that the work itself is highly sporadic.
      - prepend 3y ago
        > Like most project based employees, writers make their money when they work, and nothing when they don't. Isn’t this all jobs though? I don’t get paid when I don’t work either. I’m not sure how to fix this as no one is going to pay someone when they aren’t working. I’ve done software contracting and it’s super common to not get paid when you don’t have work and to bank a cushion to compensate for this. This is a huge chunk of the economy and includes lawyers, plumbers, electricians, etc. Also, good people in this field aren’t sporadically employed and keep a pretty good book of business. If my attorney went a year without work, she would probably change careers as that means something is wrong.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I thought they were some sort of starving artist making near minimum wage... But 260k on average... Either there must be someone earning millions there... Or it really isn't that bad. Not that CEOs aren't hugely overpaid either...
- gamblor956 3y ago
  The average (mean) pay is inflated by the pay that goes to the top writers making several millions annually. The median pay is far less than $260k; the WGA estimate it is now around $70k. I know plenty of writers that were making comfortable upper-middle-class lives 10 years ago that now make less than $100k/year despite working more, on multiple shows each year. EDIT: One of my friends was a writer on a FOX broadcast show a few years ago. With the writer's room salary and residuals from one broadcast episode script, she and her husband were able to buy a house in LA near El Segundo. She's a showrunner now for a streaming show, but makes less now than she did as a staff writer. For a tech analogy: imagine if you made it to CTO and made less than you did as a junior programmer even though the company was making even more off of your work than it did before. Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy. Yes, this is how everyone outside of tech thinks about tech people these days... Remember that you said this the next time you're out of work and looking for sympathy and people are talking crap about you.
  - prepend 3y ago
    The minimum wga wage is about $7k/week [0] so if someone is making $70k/year that means they are working only 10 weeks per year. So there’s lots of free time there. [0] https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-minimums-1235564920/ https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-min...
    - gamblor956 3y ago
      No, you're misreading the article. The rate for a writer-producer is $7.4k/week. That is for a writer that also does producing duties. Most writers are not also employed in production capacities. Staff writers make a lot less, and seasons are a lot shorter than they used to be, so there is a lot more downtime between gigs (since few writers have the clout to work on multiple shows at the same time).
- sanp 3y ago
  This is exactly what the elites are relying on. Complete lack of labor solidarity. Writer earning $260k (median for writers in Hollywood is probably far lower) and someone making $40k are both labor and need to be united against capital with resources to get its way with legislature and courts.
  - prepend 3y ago
    The guild minimum is currently $6,967 per week [0]. Not all writers write for 48 weeks per year, but that’s the minimum. So it’s fair to say that writers are well paid. But the median is probably pretty close to $260k. [0] https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-minimums-1235564920/ https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-min...
    - gamblor956 3y ago
      Nope, sorry that's dead wrong. As the article notes: "The staff writer’s weekly minimum — $4,546 — would likewise need to rise 10% to equal the minimum in 2019-20 in inflation-adjusted terms." And the article notes the average annual earnings of writers as well: "The median staff writer on a network show works 29 weeks for a wage of $131,834, while the median staff writer on a streaming show works 20 weeks for $90,920." Or in other words, less than half of what you claim. Writers were well paid, they're not anymore.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- arp242 3y ago
  It's not really clear to me that number is correct; looking on the internet I also see other (much lower) numbers, as well as mentions that ~25% goes to overhead in the form of agents and such. I can't really find a good source on what the yearly net income of a WGA writer really is. But the strike is really about increasing the minimum wage, not the average. The "average wage" isn't really a good metric in the first place.
- xracy 3y ago
  First off, other people have mentioned average. But I'll just throw in that this sentiment is dangerous. Squabbling over the difference between 40k and 260k, is missing the mark, and exactly what CEOs want you to think about because ultimately... The difference between the CEO pay and the upper end of the writers is 0.26/76.8M vs. 0.04/76.8M Or 0.3% of CEO salary for the average, and 0.05% of CEO pay for the lower end. You can bet the CEO wants you to be fighting about how much more pay the other writers are getting over you, and not how much they're getting over everyone else. Like, yeah, by all means let's worry about how one writer is making 15% of another writer sometime after we've dealt with the obviously larger problem. Also, what have they legitimately added to the company to deserve that much pay?
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  Those are the writers who get paid, and while they’re working. A lot have to write for “credit,” hoping that next time they can get a contract that pays
iancmceachern 3y ago
And they probably didn't even write a single script
missedthecue 3y ago
That's eye watering but turns out most of it was given in performance based stock options a few years ago, staggered over seven years, at prices (judging by today's stock value) that will never be hit. Not to say he doesn't make a lot of money...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pyrophane 3y ago
Zaslav, of course, is famous for killing a lot of in-production Warner Bros. projects to take a tax write-off on them when he took over. This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time. Crazy to think how many people worked for years on that film only to have it all thrown away at the end like that. If I'd been heavily involved in making it I might have left the industry after that.
- aetherane 3y ago
  That's not how business taxes work. You are taxed on profits.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    Section 181[1] seems to grant tax benefits based on the expenses incurred in making a film and, presumably, any losses you get from shelving it. [1] https://www.productionhub.com/blog/post/the-return-of-section-181-how-filmmakers-can-capitalize https://www.productionhub.com/blog/post/the-return-of-sectio...
- blitzar 3y ago
  > This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time. They screened it and it was so bad they threw it and the 90mil they spent on it in the bin as there was nothing salvageable. Sometimes, despite all hard work and good intentions, the final result is still trash. If it was going to make a billion at the box office, they would not "write it off" for tax purposes.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > it was so bad [...] there was nothing salvageable [1] disagrees. Do you have a better source? "Batgirl’s test score, which was for a director’s cut, is comparable to scores for the first It (2017), which wound up grossing $700.3 million globally, as well as an early score for the upcoming Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Both of those films tested in the 60s." (SFOTG is, admittedly, a bit of a flop sitting on about $130m gross currently.) [1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/batgirl-hbo-max-movie-dc-canceled-1235191932/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/batgirl-...
ksec 3y ago
Let's ignore the 384x average writer for a second. A company with a current market cap of $28B paid half a billion to its CEO over the past 5 years?
- pcurve 3y ago
  As a shareholder of WBD, I wish I had kinder words to say other than he's grossly incompetent and negligent. Considering how fragmented and diversified the WBD divisions are, I really question the need of this guy's role altogether. "Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021, the Times reports" That's actually higher than I thought. Good on them. Writing is hard.
- 1123581321 3y ago
  I do not like the CEO but his pay is part of their high revenue and high expense industry that doesn’t sustain a huge market cap. The total expenses of the combined companies over five years are in the ballpark of two hundred billion (someone please correct this.)
- HWR_14 3y ago
  More importantly, a CEO who has repeatedly made widely criticized decisions that have been driving the stock price down repeatedly was paid half a billion.
- SilasX 3y ago
  Yeah and the stock plummeted in that time.
pard68 3y ago
Who did he piss off to get this written?
- labster 3y ago
  Everyone at CNN, who work for him, so some reporter probably fed it to colleagues at CNBC.
- dmonitor 3y ago
  the writers
stcroixx 3y ago
Similar gap regardless of industry. Fix should not be industry specific.
voisin 3y ago
It is crazy that anyone can make this level of wealth without taking massive risk with their own capital.
projectileboy 3y ago
The average writer made over $1M? Even for TV or cinema that sounds high. What’s the median?
- MattRix 3y ago
  A million over five years.
  - projectileboy 3y ago
    Ugh, I’m a moron. Thanks, somehow I missed that.

72 points by carlycue 3y ago

> "Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021,..." Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.

ok_dad 3y ago
“Average“ means there are a few who make millions and the rest make like 40-80k. JK Rowling would still be considered a writer, for instance, pushing the average up for her few movies.
- bestnameever 3y ago
  While what you say is possible, I would think there could be some members who are not working very often making much less than 40K, having the opposite effect.
- neffy 3y ago
  Another issue is that it tends to be very bursty. They will often get a big payout, but then nothing for several years. There aren't that many writers who get a reliable pay check, so it is more (in common with acting) a lot of people getting occasional big payouts and then drifting off to be replaced by the next batch of hopefuls. I doubt average amounts are in any way meaningful in this context.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    Also, if I am understanding things correctly, that's gross pay which means Uncle Sam will be taking a fair old chunk plus they're effectively self-employed which means agents, managers, lawyers, etc. will also be taking a chunk. One page I saw suggested ~50% of it will go in tax and expenses before the writer even sees any. What we really need to know is median pay per year but I suspect that's going to be a difficult set of numbers to find.
terrytwillstein 3y ago
You read a story about an exec being paid half a billion over five years and you lose sympathy for the people making $260K? I barely make $45k myself, but my takeaway isn't that the people asking for fairer compensation don't deserve it because they make more than me already. What a reductive view. Labor unionization sucks in this country for opinions like this.
eesmith 3y ago
How little do they need to make before you feel outrage? Can you still have support and sympathy without outrage? What are some of the strikes in the last few decades where you have felt outrage, and how did that help the strike effort?
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  > How little do they need to make before you feel outrage? Certainly it would have to be a small enough amount that they might face some kind of financial hardship under normal circumstances. If a company is paying all their employees (which to be clear I know is not the case here, but just as a hypothetical example) enough that they can comfortably raise a family in even the most expensive cities in the world, I'm not going to spend my time criticizing that person regardless of how much they make.
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    Like most project based employees, writers make their money when they work, and nothing when they don't. This means that the years they are making an "average" of $260k needs to offset the years when they aren't landing any writing gigs at all. And indeed, this is part of how Hollywood pay is structured: the seemingly inflated pay is adjusted for the fact that the work itself is highly sporadic.
    - prepend 3y ago
      > Like most project based employees, writers make their money when they work, and nothing when they don't. Isn’t this all jobs though? I don’t get paid when I don’t work either. I’m not sure how to fix this as no one is going to pay someone when they aren’t working. I’ve done software contracting and it’s super common to not get paid when you don’t have work and to bank a cushion to compensate for this. This is a huge chunk of the economy and includes lawyers, plumbers, electricians, etc. Also, good people in this field aren’t sporadically employed and keep a pretty good book of business. If my attorney went a year without work, she would probably change careers as that means something is wrong.
Ekaros 3y ago
I thought they were some sort of starving artist making near minimum wage... But 260k on average... Either there must be someone earning millions there... Or it really isn't that bad. Not that CEOs aren't hugely overpaid either...
gamblor956 3y ago
The average (mean) pay is inflated by the pay that goes to the top writers making several millions annually. The median pay is far less than $260k; the WGA estimate it is now around $70k. I know plenty of writers that were making comfortable upper-middle-class lives 10 years ago that now make less than $100k/year despite working more, on multiple shows each year. EDIT: One of my friends was a writer on a FOX broadcast show a few years ago. With the writer's room salary and residuals from one broadcast episode script, she and her husband were able to buy a house in LA near El Segundo. She's a showrunner now for a streaming show, but makes less now than she did as a staff writer. For a tech analogy: imagine if you made it to CTO and made less than you did as a junior programmer even though the company was making even more off of your work than it did before. Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy. Yes, this is how everyone outside of tech thinks about tech people these days... Remember that you said this the next time you're out of work and looking for sympathy and people are talking crap about you.
- prepend 3y ago
  The minimum wga wage is about $7k/week [0] so if someone is making $70k/year that means they are working only 10 weeks per year. So there’s lots of free time there. [0] https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-minimums-1235564920/ https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-min...
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    No, you're misreading the article. The rate for a writer-producer is $7.4k/week. That is for a writer that also does producing duties. Most writers are not also employed in production capacities. Staff writers make a lot less, and seasons are a lot shorter than they used to be, so there is a lot more downtime between gigs (since few writers have the clout to work on multiple shows at the same time).
sanp 3y ago
This is exactly what the elites are relying on. Complete lack of labor solidarity. Writer earning $260k (median for writers in Hollywood is probably far lower) and someone making $40k are both labor and need to be united against capital with resources to get its way with legislature and courts.
- prepend 3y ago
  The guild minimum is currently $6,967 per week [0]. Not all writers write for 48 weeks per year, but that’s the minimum. So it’s fair to say that writers are well paid. But the median is probably pretty close to $260k. [0] https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-minimums-1235564920/ https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-min...
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    Nope, sorry that's dead wrong. As the article notes: "The staff writer’s weekly minimum — $4,546 — would likewise need to rise 10% to equal the minimum in 2019-20 in inflation-adjusted terms." And the article notes the average annual earnings of writers as well: "The median staff writer on a network show works 29 weeks for a wage of $131,834, while the median staff writer on a streaming show works 20 weeks for $90,920." Or in other words, less than half of what you claim. Writers were well paid, they're not anymore.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
arp242 3y ago
It's not really clear to me that number is correct; looking on the internet I also see other (much lower) numbers, as well as mentions that ~25% goes to overhead in the form of agents and such. I can't really find a good source on what the yearly net income of a WGA writer really is. But the strike is really about increasing the minimum wage, not the average. The "average wage" isn't really a good metric in the first place.
xracy 3y ago
First off, other people have mentioned average. But I'll just throw in that this sentiment is dangerous. Squabbling over the difference between 40k and 260k, is missing the mark, and exactly what CEOs want you to think about because ultimately... The difference between the CEO pay and the upper end of the writers is 0.26/76.8M vs. 0.04/76.8M Or 0.3% of CEO salary for the average, and 0.05% of CEO pay for the lower end. You can bet the CEO wants you to be fighting about how much more pay the other writers are getting over you, and not how much they're getting over everyone else. Like, yeah, by all means let's worry about how one writer is making 15% of another writer sometime after we've dealt with the obviously larger problem. Also, what have they legitimately added to the company to deserve that much pay?
barbariangrunge 3y ago
Those are the writers who get paid, and while they’re working. A lot have to write for “credit,” hoping that next time they can get a contract that pays

iancmceachern 3y ago

And they probably didn't even write a single script

missedthecue 3y ago

That's eye watering but turns out most of it was given in performance based stock options a few years ago, staggered over seven years, at prices (judging by today's stock value) that will never be hit. Not to say he doesn't make a lot of money...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pyrophane 3y ago

Zaslav, of course, is famous for killing a lot of in-production Warner Bros. projects to take a tax write-off on them when he took over. This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time. Crazy to think how many people worked for years on that film only to have it all thrown away at the end like that. If I'd been heavily involved in making it I might have left the industry after that.

aetherane 3y ago
That's not how business taxes work. You are taxed on profits.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  Section 181[1] seems to grant tax benefits based on the expenses incurred in making a film and, presumably, any losses you get from shelving it. [1] https://www.productionhub.com/blog/post/the-return-of-section-181-how-filmmakers-can-capitalize https://www.productionhub.com/blog/post/the-return-of-sectio...
blitzar 3y ago
> This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time. They screened it and it was so bad they threw it and the 90mil they spent on it in the bin as there was nothing salvageable. Sometimes, despite all hard work and good intentions, the final result is still trash. If it was going to make a billion at the box office, they would not "write it off" for tax purposes.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > it was so bad [...] there was nothing salvageable [1] disagrees. Do you have a better source? "Batgirl’s test score, which was for a director’s cut, is comparable to scores for the first It (2017), which wound up grossing $700.3 million globally, as well as an early score for the upcoming Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Both of those films tested in the 60s." (SFOTG is, admittedly, a bit of a flop sitting on about $130m gross currently.) [1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/batgirl-hbo-max-movie-dc-canceled-1235191932/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/batgirl-...

ksec 3y ago

Let's ignore the 384x average writer for a second. A company with a current market cap of $28B paid half a billion to its CEO over the past 5 years?

pcurve 3y ago
As a shareholder of WBD, I wish I had kinder words to say other than he's grossly incompetent and negligent. Considering how fragmented and diversified the WBD divisions are, I really question the need of this guy's role altogether. "Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021, the Times reports" That's actually higher than I thought. Good on them. Writing is hard.
1123581321 3y ago
I do not like the CEO but his pay is part of their high revenue and high expense industry that doesn’t sustain a huge market cap. The total expenses of the combined companies over five years are in the ballpark of two hundred billion (someone please correct this.)
HWR_14 3y ago
More importantly, a CEO who has repeatedly made widely criticized decisions that have been driving the stock price down repeatedly was paid half a billion.
SilasX 3y ago
Yeah and the stock plummeted in that time.

pard68 3y ago

Who did he piss off to get this written?

labster 3y ago
Everyone at CNN, who work for him, so some reporter probably fed it to colleagues at CNBC.
dmonitor 3y ago
the writers

stcroixx 3y ago

Similar gap regardless of industry. Fix should not be industry specific.

voisin 3y ago

It is crazy that anyone can make this level of wealth without taking massive risk with their own capital.

projectileboy 3y ago

The average writer made over $1M? Even for TV or cinema that sounds high. What’s the median?

MattRix 3y ago
A million over five years.
- projectileboy 3y ago
  Ugh, I’m a moron. Thanks, somehow I missed that.