Update, August 13: A week after these earnings, Supergirl came under fire for AI, with an official BTS video revealing Lobo was designed with AI. WB pulled the video.
Update: David Zaslav has now responded on the earnings call, hyping Man of Tomorrow and insisting there’s no DC strategy shift coming — here’s why there’s nothing left to shift.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s own numbers just confirmed what the box office spent six weeks telling us.
After Supergirl left theaters as the lowest-grossing DC movie of all time, WBD told Wall Street how much money it made from April through June.
The answer: a lot less than expected, and Deadline put Supergirl right in its headline as one of the reasons, next to losing the NBA.
WBD brought in $8.7 billion for the quarter, down 11 percent from a year ago and short of the $9.2 billion analysts were looking for.
Profit fell off a cliff: $149 million, down 91 percent from $1.6 billion last year. The only real silver lining is that Wall Street expected WBD to lose money this quarter, and it didn’t.
A $96 Million Quarter For The Entire Studio
The damage is concentrated exactly where you would expect.
The movie and TV studio side of the company brought in $2.3 billion, down 39 percent. Its profit — measured by the yardstick WBD uses to grade each of its divisions — didn’t just drop, it cratered 89 percent, from $863 million a year ago to $96 million.
Ninety-six million dollars. For the entire Warner Bros. studio operation. In a quarter. That’s less than the budget of a single superhero movie.
WBD says ticket-sale money dropped 46 percent, mostly because last year’s quarter had A Minecraft Movie, Sinners, and Final Destination Bloodlines, and this year’s big swing was Supergirl.
TV revenue also fell 45 percent, mostly a timing issue with WBD licensing its own shows to itself.
Buried in the fine print is the word “impairments.” In plain English, that means WBD officially wrote down the value of at least one of its movies this quarter, an admission on paper that a film is going to lose money, with the loss booked now instead of later.
Supergirl opened June 26 — inside this reporting window — with a $37 million start against a net $170 million price tag. WBD doesn’t say which titles took the hit. Do that math, though, and the obvious candidate names itself.
Deadline, for its part, is now running the same math CBN ran this morning, noting Supergirl‘s $126 million worldwide finish is the lowest for any DC release since 2004’s Catwoman.
A Batman Game Is Carrying The Studio
Here’s the part that should sting in Burbank: the only thing that grew anywhere in the studio was video games, up 45 percent because of LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight.
A Batman game is propping up Warner Bros. while the DCU still can’t put a Batman movie in front of cameras.
James Gunn spent last summer pointing at Batman’s absence to explain Superman‘s box office, and has spent this summer insisting the DCU Batman isn’t even cast. His own company’s earnings just made his argument for him.
And now we know there may be a paperwork reason for the stall. As CBN broke down, the merger contract explains the Batman freeze: while the Paramount deal is pending, Warner Bros. can’t lock an actor into a long-term, multi-movie franchise deal on its own.
The Half Zaslav Would Keep
The bright spot was streaming.
HBO Max and the streaming side brought in $3.1 billion, up 10 percent, and turned a $512 million profit — up 75 percent — as HBO Max keeps rolling out in new countries, with Deadline crediting Euphoria, House of the Dragon, Hacks, and The Pitt.
Quick refresher on why that matters: Puck News’ William D. Cohan reported this week that if the Ellison deal dies, David Zaslav’s backup plan is to chop WBD in two — Zaslav keeps the movies-and-streaming half, and the cable channels go off on their own.
This quarter is a preview of what Zaslav’s half would look like — a streaming business finally making real money, chained to a film studio that Supergirl helped drag down to a $96 million quarter.
The rest of the bad news is basketball-shaped. WBD lost the NBA to NBC, and it shows: advertising money fell 22 percent overall, and the cable channels’ revenue slid 17 percent to $4 billion. In a split-up world, that becomes the cable company’s problem — not Zaslav’s.
Every Number Is Now A Court Exhibit
All of it lands with the $110 billion Paramount deal stuck in court.
Twelve state attorneys general and the Writers Guild are suing to block the merger, with the trial set for March 2027.
On Tuesday’s Paramount earnings call, David Ellison said he is “absolutely open” to settling the case while insisting Paramount will win if it goes to trial. A judge also just tossed a separate consumer lawsuit against the deal, though the plaintiffs can refile.
Overseas, it’s a different story: the UK just cleared the deal, making it 66 governments worldwide saying yes — leaving that March trial as the only real obstacle left.
And don’t forget who is already holding the pen. As CBN reported, Ellison already has veto power over DC’s future — before he even owns it — because big commitments now need the buyer’s sign-off while the deal is pending.
The merger is also expensive just to sit through. WBD says the costs of the deal and the planned split ate roughly $350 million this quarter.
Then there’s the Netflix money.
Back in February, WBD walked away from a signed deal with Netflix to take the Ellisons’ bigger offer. That triggered a $2.8 billion breakup fee owed to Netflix — and Paramount wrote the check on WBD’s behalf.
The catch: that $2.8 billion technically sits on Warner’s books until the merger actually closes. If the deal dies the wrong way, WBD could end up having to pay it back.
Underneath it all, WBD still owes about $29.7 billion after counting its cash.
Which is why Zaslav can sleep fine either way: if the Ellisons end up walking away, Warner collects a $7 billion breakup fee — enough to knock that debt down to around $22 billion.
James Gunn might not.
His DC future hinges on how this deal shakes out, and earnings day handed him a brutal scoreboard: his movie is the one getting named in the studio’s collapse, the character he can’t get made is the only thing growing there, and every one of these numbers is now evidence — for Wall Street, for the attorneys general, and for whoever ends up owning Warner Bros.
