Warner Bros. Cuts Its Online Division
Warner Bros. is shuttering an online division that was among the first studio-backed ventures to create original entertainment content exclusively for the Web.
The closing of Warner Bros. Online, confirmed Wednesday, is part of a series of cost-saving cuts at the Burbank studio that began in earnest last fall.
As a result, Warner is laying off 19 employees from the online unit. Forty people will be redeployed into the 1-year-old Warner Bros. Digital Distribution unit, or into another group responsible for cutting-edge technologies. And an additional 22 open positions will be reallocated throughout the company.
“It’s not really an elimination of what online has done or did do,” said Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group. “It’s really more of a realignment of and redeployment of people.”
A Warner Bros. spokesman declined to comment on the financial savings the studio will realize. The realignment comes at a time when the studio has been under pressure to slash costs and shore up profit.
Warner Bros. in November cut 400 employees in Burbank and in the studio’s overseas operations.
Warner Bros. Online -- whose ambitions and resources have diminished in the years since AOL acquired Time Warner Inc. in 2001 -- was a vestige of the former dot-com boom.
Created to promote Warner Bros. movies and TV shows, it expanded in the late 1990s into a full-blown entertainment destination called Entertaindom.
In its heyday, Entertaindom featured original content such as “God and the Devil Show,” an irreverent celebrity talk show featuring the Almighty and Satan. It leveraged other studio assets, such as “Superman” and such classic Looney Tunes characters as Marvin the Martian, to create original short-form entertainment. It even enticed some top-name Hollywood stars such as Adam Sandler to do Web-based skits including “Peeper.”
But former insiders said AOL’s acquisition of Time Warner forever changed the fortunes of the online division. The studio didn’t offer the same support for Entertaindom, and budgets were cut.
Such key executives as Jeff Weiner and Jim Moloshok left to join former Warner Bros. Co-Chairman Terry Semel after he was hired in 2001 to turn around Internet giant Yahoo Inc.
Since then, Warner Bros. Online returned to its roots, promoting the studio’s TV shows and movies on the Web and creating content for mobile phones.
After the division’s closure, original digital content for the Web will be produced under the studio’s TV and movie units.
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claudia.eller@latimes.com
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