LOL. Don't completely disagree with you! But the good news is that Zaslav has contracted Casey Bloys and his team in place heading up HBO for another five years and he's promised to increase the money that flows to that division for more hours of HBO and Max Originals. (Yes, some of the Max Originals are reality dreck but a lot of them are very good scripted shows.) I'm not too worried about HBO. I think Zaslav clearly understands that it's the crown jewel of Warner (along, of course, with the WB film library).
I do think that when HBO Max and discovery+ combine next year, the combined service is going to look somewhat different than HBO Max does now. I think it'll shed a lot of its licensed content and maybe drop the kids section completely. It's going to look like less of a "something for everyone" service trying to compete head-on with Netflix and something focused more on its two core brands, HBO and Discovery (which is probably why it leaked out that a name they're considering for the service is HBO Discovery).
Beyond that, the current chatter is that Zaslav is just positioning WBD for yet another merger come 2024 (the soonest it'll be able to start another round of M&A discussions). And the conventional wisdom -- which I agree with -- is that it'll be Comcast who acquires WBD to merge into their Universal unit and then spin off as a pure media/theme parks business that can globally compete against Disney. At that point, I suspect Zas and most of his crew (other than the HBO team) will be shown the door. It'll be Universal running the show then, just as Discovery folks are running the show now after taking over Warner from AT&T. Poor ol' Warner. They've really been through the wringer...
