Warner Bros. is in deep waters for cooking its HBO subscriber numbers and misleading shareholders in many other ways. According to a class-action lawsuit the company had faked the number to be 10 million more than the actual number.
The lawsuit was filed by a shareholder of Warner Bros. Discovery stock named Collinsville Police Pension Board. The company accepted the stock in trade for its pre-merger Class C common Discovery shares. Warner Bros. has not responded with any comment till now and its CEO David Zaslav and CFO Gunnar Wiedenfils are named as the defendants in the lawsuit.
With several pieces of information hidden, the company hugely overestimated the subscriber base. WarnerMedia division and Discovery had announced their merging earlier in 2021 and it lapsed this year on April 8.
The alarming side of the story is that the plaintiff, Collinsville Police Pension Board says anybody that has purchased WBD in the open market post-merger is qualified to join the lawsuit. This may invite more difficulty for Warner Bros. More than 700 million subscribers of WBD were already subscribers of Discovery common and if a sufficient amount of subscribers do really join in this lawsuit, this is going to be really bad for Warner Bros.
The audiences as well as the stockholders are getting manipulated by such huge streaming giants on a regular basis. And there is no credibility or trust anymore in the business. Every platform, every production house, and every distributor looks for its own profit and does not hesitate to take on such unfair means to achieve what it wants. It is difficult to rely on statistics even officially provided by such production houses. This lawsuit is going to be an eye-opener for all the giants in the industry that plans to exploit the trust of viewers as well as for the viewers themselves so that they do not believe everything that they see.
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