Warner Bros. decided Batgirl wasn't worth releasing. The boss who binned it just made $606 million
David Zaslav's $606 million payout from Paramount Skydance's Warner Bros. Discovery takeover, the executives' $1.1bn windfall and where DC lands now.
The man who binned a finished Batgirl for a tax write-down has left the home of Batman and Harry Potter with $606 million. DC Comics, meanwhile, has been filed next to the merchandise.
David Zaslav is out of a job and into a fortune. An SEC filing on 8 October shows the former Warner Bros. Discovery CEO collected $606.1 million for his shares when Paramount's roughly $110 billion takeover closed on 6 October: $381.7 million in stock options plus about $224.4 million in shares and restricted stock units turned into cash. Spread it out and it comes to $20,000 a day, every day, for 83 years, which is the sum r/movies did within hours.
He didn't cash out alone. Deadline's tally of the filings puts the top five executives at more than $1.1 billion between them, and the payouts run further down the ladder:
- David Zaslav, CEO: $606.1 million
- JB Perrette, Gunnar Wiedenfels and Bruce Campbell (streaming, finance, distribution): $120 million to $150 million each
- Gerhard Zeiler, international chief: around $90 million
- Priya Aiyar, chief legal officer: more than $57 million, having joined in February 2025
That last one comes to roughly $2.8 million for every month Aiyar spent on the payroll. Shareholders voted against the golden parachutes at June's annual meeting. The vote was symbolic. The cheques were not.
The Batgirl bill
In August 2022, months after Zaslav took over, Warner Bros. Discovery shelved Batgirl: Leslie Grace in the title role, Michael Keaton back as Batman, filming finished, test screenings under way, budget $90 million. Rather than spend $30 million to $50 million marketing it, the studio took the tax write-down Variety's sources predicted instead. Coyote vs. Acme got the same treatment in 2023, was sold to Ketchup Entertainment and this year grossed more than $100 million worldwide.
Batgirl cost $90 million and never came out. Its old boss's payout would have covered it more than six times over.
To be fair, gross debt did fall on his watch, from $53 billion to $33.1 billion. In his farewell video Zaslav told staff: "It's been a great honor to be alongside all of you." He will be a billionaire before most of them finish their exit interviews.
Kendall Roy gets the keys
"This is what happens when Kendall Roy from Succession wins," ran one of the most upvoted replies on r/movies. David Ellison now runs the lot as chairman and CEO of the new Skydance, which carries more than $80 billion of debt. His launch statement was rather sunnier:
"Together, Paramount and Warner Bros. will form a creative-first home with the scale, imagination and technology to define entertainment for a generation."
— David Ellison, Skydance chairman and CEO
The org chart is less poetic. Warner film bosses Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca are gone, and every film label now reports to Paramount's Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein. James Gunn and Peter Safran keep DC Studios, but DC Comics itself now sits in Skydance Products & Publishing under Josh Silverman, the former Mattel chief franchise officer behind more than 165 Barbie product deals, right next to SpongeBob and the Looney Tunes. Bit of a comedown for Batman.
Netflix, which had agreed $27.75 a share for the studios before Paramount won, is reportedly preparing to cut around 5% of its own staff. It reports earnings on 20 October, and DC's Clayface opens on 23 October, with Man of Tomorrow to follow on 9 July 2027. Ellison has promised 30 cinema releases a year across both studios, in writing. Batgirl showed that, at this studio, a finished film can be worth more as a write-off. With $80 billion to pay down, Skydance's accountants will have learnt the same lesson.
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