A toxic combination of short sellers and the nattering nabobs of negativism have really got their hooks into the Warner Bros. Discovery stock these days. It’s now trading below $7 a share, around the all-time low, and down a whopping 15 percent in the last week. Overall, the stock is down 73 percent since David Zaslav’s Hollywood experiment began, in April 2022, and the company’s enterprise value is around $55 billion, 45 percent less than the $100 billion Zaz paid for WarnerMedia alone. As my partner Matt Belloni reported on Monday, there is also a growing frustration inside WBD, where Zaz has been likened by some to Michael Scott, Steve Carell’s comic boob of a manager from The Office. 

Clearly, Zaz et al. are still absorbing the fallout from WBD’s brutal second-quarter performance that I wrote about on Sunday, during which Zaz wrote off $9 billion of the goodwill related to his linear TV assets and his other businesses after a rough three months. And yet, there have been some underappreciated events at the company. WBD has just expanded its streaming offerings globally in the last few months. And it’s reaping the rewards of that move—4 million new subscribers outside the U.S. in less than two months. And that doesn’t yet include the new Olympics-related subscribers who signed up during July and August—the third quarter—in Europe.