The financial impact of ongoing actors and writers strikes has a number on it now, or one at least, as Warner Bros. Discovery said today it’s looking at a hit of $300 million to $500 million in adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) for 2023 due to the work stoppages.
In a filing this morning with the Securities and Exchange Commission, WBD said “it is expecting lower adjusted EBITDA for the full year in the range of $10.5 to $11 billion, reflecting the company’s assumption that adjusted EBITDA will be negatively impacted by approximately $300 to $500 million, predominantly due to the impact of the strikes.”
WBD execs indicated on a qarterly earnings call in August that their full-year financial guidance assumed the strikes would be resolved by early September. But with no resolution in sight, it is revisiting and quantifying that guidance now.
It will be interesting to see if and how the tone starts to shift heading into the fall, and if other studios will also start to revise earnings guidance. The earnings hit that WBD announced today is already baked in for 2023 — meaning it wouldn’t really change even if the strikes resolved soon.
Especially since I believe the estimated cost of agreeing to the requests would’ve been ~47M USD, which is literally less than a tenth of their current losses.
My feeling is this is not about the short term costs, but is about:
[Insert Joker meme about sending a message]
I also heard an interesting take from a union organizer: that companies have been able to go so long without having to negotiate in good-faith that they’ve lost the institutional knowledge of how to do it.
Imagine needing institutional knowledge in order to do something in good faith. That sounds a lot like they’re full of dehumanized ethical corruption.