OCTOBER 23, 2025

Welcome back to Buffering, where we’re still processing the news that HBO Max is raising prices again, just weeks after ending its CNN on Max feature (no more live news) and just as subscribers who don’t follow industry events too closely are realizing that there will be no NBA games (or even Inside the NBA) on the streamer this month. Yes, Peacock, Apple TV, and Netflix also recently announced price hikes, but they’re at least giving customers new content (mostly sports-related). By contrast, HBO Max owner Warner Bros. Discovery has spent the past few years figuring out how to give subscribers less non-HBO content while charging them more. Maybe it’s time to just call the whole thing HBO again?

Speaking of WBD, this week’s newsletter starts out with some thoughts on this week’s Z&A news, i.e., the not surprising but still important announcement that David Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery is considering bids to be acquired, either by Paramount or, perhaps, some other media giant. Also, my colleague Eric Vilas-Boas has a look at Tubi’s Looney Tunes acquisition and why FAST platforms make sense for cartoons. Plus: Netflix’s Stranger new marketing ploy, Wicked on TV, and some thoughts on Blumhouse at the box office. As always, thanks for reading.

—Joe Adalian, Vulture's West Coast editor

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The Davids are duking it out — and Hollywood stands to lose. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images

Perhaps as soon as next week, upwards of 2,000 workers at CBS, Paramount Pictures, Pluto, Paramount+, and iconic cable networks such as MTV and Comedy Central will be told that they no longer have jobs. A letter will go out from Paramount CEO David Ellison or one of his underlings expressing sadness over this turn of events and likely lamenting that these layoffs were unavoidable, the result of “radical shifts in the entertainment industry” that necessitated dramatic cost reductions. And then, without missing a beat, and without any sense of irony, Ellison will go back to work figuring out how to spend billions that Paramount supposedly doesn’t have so he can buy up an even bigger company, Warner Bros. Discovery; mine it for intellectual property; combine two major studios and TV-network operations into one — and then cut even more jobs.

While there’s no stopping the looming layoffs at Paramount — Ellison telegraphed the scale of his planned reductions before he even had control of the company — the part where he and his even-richer dad (Oracle founder Larry Ellison) also conquer and downsize Warner Bros. Discovery is not inevitable, at least not yet. A month after the news broke that Paramount had started preparing a bid for the company behind everything from Casablanca and CNN to Friends and Abbott Elementary, Zaslav finally acknowledged this week that there is “interest from multiple parties” in acquiring all or some of WBD, issuing a statement saying that the company is now exploring options “to identify the best path forward to unlock the full value of our assets.” And while Zaslav made it clear he still wants to move forward with previously announced plans to divide WBD into two companies — one focused on streaming, the other on legacy businesses like cable — the statement essentially said the company as it currently stands is now very much for sale.

What is less clear, however, is whether any person or company other than Ellison’s Paramount is actually interested in buying WBD or even any of its parts. During Netflix’s earnings interview this week, co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters both continued to pour cold water on the idea of the streaming giant going after other content companies, particularly those with “legacy networks” (of which WBD has several). On the other hand, they didn’t say anything about snapping up strategic assets from its rivals — like, for instance, the IP-rich WB movie and TV library — and made the usual pro forma comments about “reviewing all options.” Plus, Netflix is the company that famously said it would never take advertising dollars — and then changed its mind on that within the space of a few weeks. That may be why CNBC on Tuesday reported that Netflix might actually be interested in picking up some spare parts from WBD, even if it doesn’t want the whole thing. There has also been some speculation about Comcast having some internal conversations about doing something with WBD, though one industry veteran familiar with the company’s thinking told me such supposed interest is imaginary.

WBD’s decision to formally hang up a “For Sale” sign, and all the media rumors about suitors other than Paramount, could also be nothing more than a play by Zaslav to boost WBD’s stock price (mission accomplished) and either make Ellison pay a lot more for WBD or delay things long enough that Zaslav can go forward with his plan to divide WBD in half and perhaps ensure he continues to have some sort of company to run. There’s often a psychological component to mergers and acquisitions, particularly contentious ones, and Zaslav is plenty experienced at using selective leaks and public statements to help shape the narrative he wants. 

But Ellison is no novice on this front, either. He spent over a year working to make his acquisition of Paramount seem inevitable (and sucking up to Team Trump in order to speed up regulatory approval for one and maybe two mergers). And the likely reason he launched his bid to create Para Bros. almost immediately after taking over Paramount was so that he could short-circuit the plans of other suitors as well as Zaslav’s spinoff strategy: shock and awe. Indeed, Ellison may well agree with Zaslav’s thinking that WBD is worth more after a split than it is now, which is why he’s rushing to snap it up now while the stock price is (relatively) cheap. 

So what happens next? On Wednesday, the New York Post started speculating that Ellison may decide to turn his quiet overtures to the Paramount board into a hostile-takeover attempt, something that doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. Not long after, the New York Times got its hands on letters Paramount sent to the WBD board making its case for a deal; in one, Ellison suggested he is willing to share his CEO title with Zaslav, the paper said. And WBD-sympathetic sources have already started leaking word of other buyers with interest in its assets: Both the Times and Bloomberg floated Amazon as a possible suitor, while Bloomberg reported that Zaslav had told WBD staffers that Apple had interest as well. 

As of now, the only thing that seems certain is that Ellison’s Paramount appears to be the most motivated buyer of all of WBD and that there’s a lot of money and momentum behind its bid. If Paramount succeeds, it will be a profitable deal for Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders who have seen the company’s stock price sag under Zaslav. Unfortunately, one group would be a very big loser: the hundreds, or even thousands, of WBD employees who will almost surely join their peers at Paramount on the unemployment line should Ellison’s dreams of megamoguldom come true.  

“Yoiks!! And awayyyyyy.”

In 1958, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig starred in “Robin Hood Daffy,” which imagines the duck as the worst outlaw ever — a “Yoiks!”-ing catastrophe who repeatedly fails to live up to or capitalize on his popular name. But Daffy’s buffoonery has nothing on Warner Bros. Discovery’s recent stewardship of Looney Tunes: Under CEO David Zaslav, new films like The Day the Earth Blew Up and Coyote vs. Acme were, respectively, offloaded or canceled (before being rescued), and the classic Looney Tunes library was cut from flagship streamer HBO Max entirely in March, swept up in a broader retreat from animation and kids’ programming. Looney Tunes content and merch never went away entirely, but aside from YouTube compilations and the niche upstart broadcaster MeTV Toons, gems from the so-called golden age of American animation had effectively been locked away in the vault again.

Then came Tubi. The free, ad-supported streamer was already hosting some recent Looney Tunes content, but in August it secured 789 old-school shorts — classics like “The Great Piggy Bank Robbery” and “Long-Haired Hare” all the way up to shorts from the early ’90s. Two months later, the streamer says the toons are a hit: “On its own, Looney Tunes is a huge win for us,” Samuel Harowitz, Tubi’s head of acquisitions, tells me. By total viewing time, Looney Tunes is in Tubi’s top-ten best-performing series, the company says, popular with viewers across generations.

Just as Netflix learned years ago that it could introduce new audiences to shows like Breaking Bad and Suits, Tubi has given one of Warner’s most enduring brands what HBO Max couldn’t: a natural streaming home. “Classic animation is one of the biggest fandoms that we serve on the platform,” Harowitz says. In addition to Looney Tunes, Tubi licenses after-school and Saturday-morning staples like DuckTales, Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When Harowitz’s team saw that Warner had removed hundreds of shorts from HBO Max, Tubi picked up the phone and put in an offer, scooping up as many of the Looney Tunes shorts as Warner would release. “We are in active negotiations to ensure that Tubi can be the home of Looney Tunes for quite a while,” Harowitz says. “Likely years.” Importantly, it doesn’t have every classic short. Around 200 or so of the theatrical shorts remain in the vault owing to “cultural sensitivities” around their frequent offensive stereotypes, which Harowitz calls “a Warner Bros. Discovery decision.” Still, with nearly 800 available to watch on demand, Tubi’s collection constitutes one of the largest publicly available releases of Looney Tunes in any format. 

On Tubi, that Looney Tunes library feels special, accessible, and marketable in a way other license-holders can replicate, and the FAST of it all is key. “In my mind, AVOD and FAST is ad-supported TV in a different candy wrapper,” Harowitz says. “I get to experience it through the eyes of my kids but also evoke the same emotional response I remember as an 8-year-old sitting in front of a CRT Toshiba TV.”

To that end, Tubi chose the ideal delivery format for cartoon comedy: the 30-minute episode. You can cherry-pick your favorite shorts, of course, but watching episodes with a mix of characters and scenarios allows for surprises and makes them easier to throw on casually. The “seasons” (strictly a label as these were all originally released theatrically) are organized in mostly reverse-chronological order, apart from some stray entries that redditors have put back in order. Chronological wonkiness aside, the viewing experience harkens back to old-school linear TV and is a lot more digestible than the paid catalogues of HBO Max and Disney+ deployed — which sometimes committed the grave sin of autoplaying the next short before the current one had ended. And where other services might interrupt their programming with commercials, the Looney Tunes ads count down unobtrusively and play in between each entry, preserving each punch line accordingly. On a classic like “Rabbit Fire,” you won’t have to worry about an annoying ad interrupting Daffy getting repeatedly shot in the face.

That particular cartoon, alongside numerous others, also looks pristine in HD. That’s because they were meticulously restored for Warner’s Blu-ray and DVD collections before they were licensed. “If they’re restored, they can look day-one brand new, as the Looney Tunes should,” says Jerry Beck, an animation historian who worked on the physical releases and currently works for MeTV Toons, which also licenses Looney Tunes content. He confirmed that Tubi used the restored editions he worked on. “I take delight when others tell me that they notice the difference,” he says. “We were doing this for decades in order to now put this on television en masse.”

But Looney Tunes, one of Warner’s most recognizable intellectual properties, never felt like premium programming on Zaslav’s streamer, which was likelier to bury classic cartoons under rows upon rows of Discovery+ content and House of the Dragon promos. Disney, on the other hand, prizes its animation tremendously, is capable of lovingly restoring its classics, and has put dozens of Mickey, Donald, and Goofy animated shorts on Disney+, but they represent only a fraction of the hundreds of cartoons that the company has made over the decades. And they’re just two of the major studios that control decades’ worth of American animation. It’s an opportunity for both of those studios as well as FAST channels like Tubi, Pluto TV, and the Roku Channel — which all license some amount of cartoon programming — eager to capture the eyeballs of new fans and ad dollars along the way. 

You just have to package the cartoons neatly. After watching a few episodes of Looney Tunes, Tubi serves them front and center alongside recommendations for The Pink Panther, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Popeye the Sailor. The company also welcomes opportunities to license new content within the Looney Tunes IP, Harowitz says, maybe even a shot at streaming the upcoming Coyote vs. Acme, though “there have been no conversations to date.” But the FAST channel’s approach should serve as a model for every beloved older cartoon, many of which are collecting dust in the libraries of studios or other collections.

For the classic shorts it does have, Tubi could probably do more to add context or curation around the shorts for the animation diehards, but it has done the most important thing, which is create access. Beck, who has written several books on the characters over the years, is just happy they’re out there. “In a way, I’m kind of glad that they took them off HBO Max and allowed other networks to use them,” he says, “so we can all see them.” That’s all folks really want.

➼ The final episode of Stranger Things will premiere in a few hundred movie theaters at the same time it drops on Netflix at 8 p.m. ET this New Year’s Eve. It’s a pretty small release, and only for two days, and it’s not even the first time the show has played in movie houses: As Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva smartly noted, Netflix booked the ST season-four finale to air on a (much smaller) number of screens back in November 2022 for its made-up Stranger Things Day. But that stunt came more than four months after the episode premiered on Netflix, and the scale was much smaller. This will definitely be a much bigger event, though it’s still more of a promotional gimmick than a shift in distribution strategy: You can bet local TV stations across the country will have live reports from theaters showing die-hard fans dressed up in ST costumes and waiting in line to see the finale. Honestly, Netflix should be paying theaters for the free PR. 

➼ Even in the glory days of network TV, big box-office hits generally didn’t land on broadcast TV until two or three years after they played in theaters. But Wicked, one of last year’s biggest movie hits, will air on NBC on November 19, not even 365 days after its November 22, 2024, theatrical premiere. This isn’t some paradigm shift: NBCUniversal is doing this to help sell tickets for Wicked: For Good two days later. But it is a very smart idea nonetheless, one that will help market the sequel and likely give a nice little ratings boost to NBC and its local stations. 

➼ Vulture movie maven Chris Lee has an interesting look at whether Blumhouse movies have lost their bite at the box office.

➼ Sir Paul McCartney talks about his transition from Beatle to Wings-man in an excerpt from his new book about his other band. 

➼ After watching the trailer for Apple TV’s new Vince Gilligan series, Pluribus, I have no idea what the show is about — and can’t wait to watch every minute of it.

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