It’s been barely four days since Warner Bros. Discovery announced its plan to carve up the company anew, and we already have some idea of what the strategy looks like behind splitting it into two successor companies, Streaming & Studios and Global Networks. The former will house the likes of HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO Max, and play the hits game — a studio business with a prestige streamer fit for the content king that David Zaslav envisions himself to be. The latter will be a debt-saddled workhorse made up of WBD’s declining but still lucrative cable businesses and its digital arms, like Discovery (and Discovery+), CNN (and its still-forthcoming streamer), and a string of sports and entertainment channels — TNT, TBS, TCM, and more. And they’ll be run, respectively, by the architects, leaders, and most visible Hollywood villains of WBD: Zaslav and CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels.

Having spent much of the past three years managing drops in their company stock, laying off large chunks of their business, and recently re-rebranding their flagship streaming service, WBD’s leadership telegraphed this, says Dr. David Offenberg, a professor of entertainment finance at Loyola Marymount University who closely follows media companies’ mergers and acquisitions. He points out that the AT&T deal that formed Warner Bros. Discovery in the first place helped set the template Zaslav and Wiedenfels are following into the future with Streaming & Studios and Global Networks. (They’re still working on sexier names.) In that deal AT&T loaded WarnerMedia, the cash-generating part of its business, with debt and took the cash for itself when it sold it to form Warner Bros. Discovery.

Importantly, that bet didn’t pay off: “I don’t think anybody would say that Warner Bros. Discovery has been a rousing success over the past three years,” Offenberg says. “It has been obvious to me that WBD would need to do the same thing, loading up the cable networks with debt and spinning them off, to alleviate the debt on the studio.” What’s less obvious is what the remainders of the company look like when the dust settles. Here are our questions.

What change will HBO Max subscribers see? Will Discovery content be pulled from the service?

As we’ve written before, Max’s recent branding decisions have signaled an identity shift for the streamer and its place in the streaming wars. Netflix is the everything service; the soon-to-be-renamed HBO Max will be the speciality service. In that scenario, it doesn’t need the Discovery+ content. Merging Discovery+’s library with HBO Max’s never paid off in the way Warner Bros. Discovery had hoped, despite Discovery+’s undeniable popularity with its own audience. With Global Networks getting custody of the profitable stand-alone streamer, expect much of its content to leave HBO Max. What remains on the service will come down to what HBO Max chooses to license, though it’s too early to say what exactly. The largest change for HBO Max subscribers may be not having Dirty Jobs and Naked and Afraid next to your The Last of Us and The White Lotus shows — even if they do sound like each other’s respective tethers. The brand-protective execs at HBO are probably quite happy about that.

Will subscription prices for HBO Max drop?

Surely you jest.

What does this mean for CNN’s future?

For any major corporation looking to push through the next four years, owning a prominent news channel probably feels risky. We’ve already seen Disney bow to the president, most notably through its $16 million settlement to close the ABC News lawsuit, and the key factors stalling Paramount and Skydance’s merger are an FCC ruling and Trump’s lawsuit against 60 Minutes. At the same time, news is still an integral part of most people’s entertainment diet. “CNN is sort of the linchpin that’s going to hold the whole thing together” for Global Networks, says Offenberg. It’s its most desirable asset among its selection of cable channels, a reliable revenue stream that cable providers want to keep in their bundles and an asset that he thinks Streaming & Studios should have considered keeping. “One of the main reasons I think YouTube is destroying Netflix right now is because YouTube has news and Netflix doesn’t. News keeps people coming back. And giving up news is, in my mind, kind of dangerous.” For now, CNN Max is offered with HBO Max as a 24-hour newsfeed. It’s undetermined if it’ll leave the streamer with Discovery+, but interestingly, Global Networks still plans to assume “CNN’s new streaming offering” set to debut later this year. Hopefully that’s executed better than the incredibly short-lived CNN+. It’ll have to be if Global Networks plans to show it’s worth its salt to potential investors.

How does this affect HBO Max’s sports strategy?

Sports on HBO Max could look a lot lighter, despite retaining its international sports offerings under the new deal. TNT Sports U.S. — which currently holds rights to the MLB, NHL, U.S. soccer, college basketball, college football, and NASCAR, among other offerings — is going to Global Networks along with digital properties like Bleacher Report and Golf Digest. The Streaming & Studios company will likely see this as a relief, Offenberg says. Warner Bros. Discovery was unable to renew its contract to run NBA games on TNT last year, a loss that embarrassed the company and prompted a lawsuit from its own investors. “They already showed in the last NBA negotiation that they couldn’t play ball with the Amazons and everybody else bidding big money,” Offenberg says. Beyond the cost-savings, staying out of the game may also help focus whatever HBO Max becomes in the future, he adds: “Because they’re trying to be a highbrow specialist brand, I don’t think sports really fits in with that.” And if they decide they do want to keep some sports on there, they have a friendly partner in Global Networks who could cut them a nice licensing deal.

Does this solve their debt problems at all?

No, but it restructures who pays for it and how. The majority of that debt will go to Global Networks, while “a not-insignificant portion” will go to Streaming & Studios, Wiedenfels said earlier this week. They haven’t ironed out how much yet, but doing that will allow Global Networks, the company with a lot more free cash flow thanks to its cable channels, to pay down the debt, “even though cable is a quickly melting iceberg,” Offenberg says. Streaming & Studios will still be responsible for some slice of the $37 billion left to pay, but that’s what all of Zaslav’s future box-office hits and streaming receipts are for. Offenberg gives the WBD strategy some credit: “I don’t think of debt as a bad thing. If you think you’re going to have money in the future, but you need it now, you borrow,” he says. And, “They have not gone bankrupt.”

So what’s the deal with Gunnar Wiedenfels?

Warner Bros. Discovery’s chief financial officer has been David Zaslav’s right-hand man for years, serving as CFO for Discovery, Inc., before its merger with Warner Bros in 2022, in a deal he helped strike with AT&T. Now, as Zaslav steps up to Streaming & Studios, Wiedenfels will be tasked with running Global Networks as its own company. But of course they’ll still be in business together: Global Networks will retain a 20 percent stake in Zaslav’s Streaming & Studios, and they’ll both be on the hook for the aforementioned debt. Critically, at WBD Wiedenfels has played the role of cost-cutter-in-chief, and a key force that’s helped the company pay down that considerable debt. So his new role at Global Networks isn’t as simple as Zaslav getting the cool studio job and his top finance bro getting the withering cable business: Wiedenfels’s goal is almost certainly to make Global Networks look as attractive as possible for a potential acquisition, which will mean lots more cuts — mostly likely to the new company’s sexiest yet incredibly expensive asset, CNN.

Are these new companies looking to sell themselves?

Consolidation is definitely coming for these companies, and Offenberg sees the spinoff as their next step, but not the last step of Zaslav and Wiedenfels’s plan. “It seems that Warner Bros. Discovery is making a bet that the shareholders are going to get value from the spinoff when the spinoff is acquired,” Offenberg says. Could Global Networks merge with Versant? Or get bought by some other company in the TV-networks business? Could David Ellison’s Paramount deal blow up and could Zaslav coax his billions over to HBO Max? We don’t know.

We do know that no matter what, Hollywood will have to endure more of Zaslav’s machinations for years to come, Offenberg says: “He’s going to get another year to keep his job while they go through this transaction — then probably at least another year after the transaction’s over to prove out whether he can be a Hollywood mogul.” Buckle up.

 Let’s talk about David Zaslav’s latest big idea.