(L-R) Bobby Voltaggio and Ryan Gould speak onstage during the Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront 2026 at The Theater at Madison Square Garden on May 13, 2026 in New York City. Mike Coppola/Getty Images The 2026 Warner Bros. Discovery upfront lacked any spark, and not just because it took place at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.
Today’s event, ostensibly to sell television-commercial slots to the advertisers in attendance, felt more like a wake for WBD. That’s probably because, in some ways, it was.
Barring any unforeseen bumps in the regulatory process, Warner Bros. Discovery, formed in April 2022 through the merging of Discovery, Inc. and WarnerMedia (owned at the time by AT&T), will become part of Paramount Skydance sometime this fall. So what happens when a major media company has no fall slate to sell at a trade show almost entirely about buying fall slates? You get a quick — and very forgettable — upfront.
WBD’s heaviest hitters sat this one out. CEO David Zaslav was not seen on-site (let alone on stage). HBO chief Casey Bloys was also neither seen nor heard. However, Bruce Campbell, the company’s chief revenue and strategy officer, and Gunnar Wiedenfels, CFO, came to the press lunch immediately following the event. Look, you might as well eat on the company’s dime while you can.
That left Warner Bros. Discovery advertising presidents Ryan Gould and Bobby Voltaggio to open the show, to, in a press release’s words, “reaffirm the company’s commitment top partnership, performance and storytelling across every screen.” For, like, the next four or five months they mean, I imagine.
On that promise of “partnership,” Voltaggio opened with a joke about the unusual circumstances.
“Good partnership is what drives us here at Warner Bros. Discovery. So before we go on, we do want to address the Ellison — I mean the elephant — in the room,” Voltaggio said.
OK, so he’s no Jimmy Kimmel, but it was better than pretending we aren’t all thinking the same thing.
“Listen, we don’t deflect, that’s not who we are,” Gould added. “Everyone here knows that there’s change ahead and that there’s change at our company. But there’s change across the entire media industry. And we’re well aware that your business is changing, too. But we believe that success is a team effort, so our best-in-class organization, the team and people you know and trust so well, are here to help guide you through this transition.”
The others there to help guide the clients in the room included household names like Karen Bronzo, chief global marketing officer for U.S. Networks & News, Dana Nussbaum, EVP of Worldwide Marketing for Warner Bros. Pictures, and Shauna Spenley, global chief marketing officer of Direct-to-Consumer (streaming and linear HBO). They each commenced to interview for their jobs share the latest measurement gibberish, which is not at all unique to WBD’s upfront, and present whatever crumbs of content there were left to announce, respectively.
No shade on any of the executives who went through the motions this morning. They did what they had to do in a difficult situation. But the total lack of star power carried over to the near-total lack of stars*. The Warner Bros. Discovery lineup came down to Abby Phillip, Adam Lefkoe, Anderson Cooper, Brian Posehn, Craig Ferguson (he was funny), Dan Schachner, Francois Arnaud, John Ross Bowie, Kaitlan Collins, Katherine LaNasa, Kevin Sussman, Lauren Lapkus, Leslie Jones, M. Night Shyamalan, Morgan Spector, *Noah Wyle, Robbie Graham-Kuntz, Shaquille O’Neal and Terry Crews.
The morning’s red carpet probably could have just remained rolled up.
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