It’s been a hellacious few months for the newly merged entity called Warner Bros. Discovery: multiple rounds of layoffs across a smattering of departments, including at HBO; beloved shows secretly removed from their streaming libraries; the cancellations of big bets coming with a struggling stock price and even worse PR hits. This week, the company’s public image took a big knock for canceling a prized writer-development program and for extensive layoffs in a consolidation of animation divisions, capped with the departures of marketing executives.

Dinner Party: So we got a headline from Cartoon Brew that pretty much announced the death of Cartoon Network Studios due to mass layoffs. Folks were rightfully upset. We found out later that that wasn’t quite the case. What did you think of the initial reporting?
Eric Vilas-Boas: Cartoon Brew has a reputation in the animation world of being kinda aggressive with situations like this. There’s a weird conflict: Like, it’s good that this news outlet exists, to talk about these issues and to pursue these stories. In this situation, they seem to have extrapolated the axing of development and production staff to say the studio itself was going away and being consolidated. What happened is bad for sure, but Cartoon Network animators and others came after them for “sensationalizing,” framing it as this existential threat. Cartoon Brew stands by their story.

Oof, sure yeah.
It’s a legitimately messy situation.

Let’s get into the numbers a little bit. So Cartoon Network Studios cut 82 jobs and 43 vacant positions for a total of 125 positions dropped. Which equates to like 26 percent of their animation division —
Twenty-six percent of the Warner Bros. TV group.

So across TV entirely.
I don’t know how many animation positions were cut, but it’s 82 employees across scripted, unscripted, and animation divisions. So they’re spread out a little bit.

That’s super-important. In addition to that, they initially axed their Writer’s Workshop and Director’s Workshop, which were important talent pipelines — but then rehoused them in their DEI unit.
Yes, and that announcement came the day after, so …

Haha, right, after some backlash from alumni. 
Yeah. Franklin Leonard, creator of The Black List, tweeted about it.

Since 2020, Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network Studios have been run by this guy, Sam Register. Warner Bros. Animation has historically focused on making the most of owned IP — your Harley Quinn, your Batman stuff, your DC stuff, Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes. These tentpoles of Warner Bros. as a company tend to go through Warner Bros. Animation.

Cartoon Network Studios launched in 1994, a couple years after Cartoon Network debuted. And they have historically focused on original IP. It’s the studio that created Dexter’s Laboratory, by Genndy Tartakovsky; The Powerpuff Girls, by Craig McCracken; Johnny Bravo, by Van Partible. Their history continues into recent years: Steven Universe, by Rebecca Sugar, and Adventure Time, by Pen Ward. A lot of animators used Adventure Time as a springboard to make more original Cartoon Network shows.

Cartoon Network has usually had some anthology program where new animators develop shorts and pilots. That’s how Adventure Time, Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Lab started. From the beginning, the idea was to develop something fresh, something new, something the world’s never seen before, it’s always been a part of Cartoon Network Studios’ DNA, and the worry — here’s where the Cartoon Brew headline comes in — is that there won’t be a place for this kind of thing anymore. For his part, Sam Register has said multiple times he wants to prioritize Cartoon Cartoons. He cited that in a Vulture interview with us earlier this year. He’s still in charge. So that’s a reason to be cautiously optimistic. But consolidation seems to dominate everything.

This is something we’ve seen across media companies. We’re seeing it at Netflix and Marvel too, where animation and animators are taking hits. What’s your read on this dual strategy to house both of these production studios — for them to be doing separate things but sharing the same resources? What do you think that says about the sort of future of animation on HBO, for instance? They’ve had a dope collection, historically.
Yeah, some of the best. If they were gonna destroy Cartoon Network studios, it would feel like looking at the Yankees and being told that there’s no future for the Yankees, right?

Right, silly shit.
Exactly. We’re in this position right now where everything is being consolidated. There are all these fears as we’re entering a recession. All the belt tightening is happening. And in the midst of that, Warner Media was laden with debt. That’s the piece of this that is important. $55 billion dollars of debt. It’s not a little debt. David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery — his job, like priority No. 1, is to cut at least $3 billion of that debt in 2022. As quickly as he possibly can. Yeah. So that’s where the cancellation of The Batgirl came from. Or, I should say, the tax write-off.

That debt was also accrued trying to compete with streaming, trying to compete with Netflix, right? 
It’s definitely a big part of it. Warner Media was already in debt before. But yeah, so that’s why, on the animation side, they canceled a Batman animated series by Bruce Timm, the creator of the Batman: The Animated Series, like one of the biggest cross-audience IP hits of the past 30 years.

It does kind of feel like animation is an easy target. Even though this is a company that has Adult Swim and tons of great animated properties, it feels like animation, when compared to blockbuster DC movies, can sometimes be seen as a juvenile line item you can easily cut out. Animation has always played second fiddle to live action. It shouldn’t; like, it’s bullshit, but that’s sort of the sense that animators and animation fans tend to feel. A lot of us grew up on these shows, on Dexter’s Lab and Powerpuff Girls. We have a different connection to those shows.

The timing of this is fascinating because they’re always trying to get the target audience of 18 to 35. That audience grew up on anime and animation. You would think that just the nostalgia play would be enough for them to consider investing in animation at scale. So many complaints people have about television being, like, staid and boring, fucking bland and very mid; I watch anime that’s being made in this time period, and it’s like, TV is actually very, very lit when you consider animation as a part of it. 
I was really surprised when they canceled the Batman show. I’m not in this industry — I only cover it — but that seemed to me like a clear financial win. They didn’t cancel Harley Quinn and Harley Quinn is super-popular. People fucking love that show. It took me a while to warm up to that show.

It’s one of the best that they’ve ever made!
A lot of TV is bad. A lot of TV is fucking terrible. Most of the Marvel shows follow a very similar formula; it’s just kind of made to be disposable. I look at shows like Falcon and The Winter Soldier, and I’m like, You spent so much money on this show. And then I look at Steven Universe, and I don’t think that they spent nearly as much money on Steven Universe, which ran for much longer than, like, one season, but it also did not have to pay all these movie-star actors like every Marvel show does. It’s apples and oranges, but the Steven Universe is about a small boy who’s actually a rock, but what it’s actually saying about like the human condition? About war and genocide. About like identity and queer theory and race? The resonance of the show is deeper and so different; it really bothers me. Steven Universe is an amazing show: Why does it not have way more cultural cachet than the latest Dragon show?

House of Incest! Marvel is feeling the impact of people being pissed off about their shit looking ugly as fuck. And the solution to that is to really encourage animators to do what they do and virtual-effects workers to do what they do. News like this is upsetting because it feels like across the board, different media companies are coming to the same conclusion about what animation and VFX actually mean — but if you’re looking from the outside, we actually care about this a lot. Audiences actually do care about how this shit looks visually. 
Yeah. But shows like Invincible Fight Girl and Genndy Tartakovsky’s Unicorn: Warriors Eternal are still happening, and also there’s a revival of Cartoon Cartoons, which was one of those anthology shows of shorts that were so good for creators, so there’s reason to be tentatively optimistic. The move itself is discouraging. It feels less like an appreciation for creativity and more like calculus, literal mathematical calculus where you’re just trying to make the numbers fit. These people are not numbers. The 82 people who got laid off, they have lives. The hope is that they go on to be successful in other ways, but this week their livelihoods are fucking gone. It’s rough.

➽ Over on Into It, Sam Sanders asks: Hey, whatever happened to Time’s Up, which was going to end misogyny in Hollywood? (You can also read all about it.)
➽ On with Kara Swisher brings Kara together with Stacey Abrams.

Dinner Party would like to congratulate the InfoWars Head Bozo in Charge, Alex Jones, for being the poster boy for comeuppance. That walking, talking bucket of piss and lard is holding one of the more massive L’s in recent courtroom history. After lying on the names of the Sandy Hook shooting victims and unleashing his collection of dick-riding circle-jerkers for years, that vapid mouth-breathing scalawag has been ordered to pay $965 million to those families. Along with other rulings, he’s probably gonna be hounded by the IRS for the rest of his loveless days. Extra points for Jones here, as the debt likely can’t be discharged in his bankruptcies, meaning every penny that human sweat stain earns is likely to be evaluated by the state. There ain’t a pair of drawers in his dresser that’s not gonna be rifled through and analyzed for necessity. And as strong advocates of not having your shit taken by the greedy-ass hands of the law, can’t say a better person didn’t earn all of this. Here’s to more and more financial pain levied against that guy.

Intelligencer’s John Herrman links the Metaverse’s inevitable use in workspaces to the wink-wink relationship between Mark Zuckerberg and corporate America.

Some folks believe that Jesus isn’t as popping as he used to be. He’s gotten too old, belief in Him is archaic, and his influence is waning quite drastically. For what it’s worth, I still believe the Christ was the first-ever influencer and respect should be put on his name for that alone. But a new campaign called He Gets Us, funded by Kansas-based Christian foundation Signatry, is looking to spend something like $100 million to do some damage control on the Lord of Hosts. And I’ll say this: Honestly, the folks behind this look exactly how you think: like a bunch of youth pastors that graduated to associate preacher and made it to the big pastorship. Except they ended up in finance, so there’s a sort of waiflike quality to their perpetual “golf dad” aesthetic. It takes that FinBro chutzpah to claim that you’re gonna redeem the Redeemer! But here’s to hoping $100 million is even enough. Christians have been touting Jesus as the Way the Truth and the Light for so long, and the only thing to come out of it is colonization, psychological warfare, and Easter-egg hunts, so, yeah girl, it’s an uphill battle.

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