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In August, Warner Bros. announced it was taking a $9.1 billion charge, writing down the value of its traditional TV networks, which include, along with the Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network, the Food Network, TBS and TNT. Warner Bros. doesn't break out the individual financial performance of each channel, but Cartoon Network's struggles have certainly contributed to the downturn. According to estimates from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the annual advertising revenue for Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, its spinoff animation brand for grown-ups, plummeted from $668.3 million in 2014 to $133.7 million last year.
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The viability of the Cartoon Network brand in streaming doesn't look much more promising. A few years ago, network executives were touting Max as the next natural step in Cartoon Network's evolution. But since its debut five years ago, a string of programming misfires and increased competition from YouTube have meant that Max has largely failed to emerge as a go-to destination for young viewers. According to data from PreciseTV, a video advertising firm, only 13% of 10- to 12-year-old viewers have recently watched programming on Max, versus 32% for Hulu, 57% for Disney+ and 72% for Netflix. Among preschool audiences, the numbers for Max are even worse. The company recently decided that children's programming is no longer a core part of Max's strategy, further clouding Cartoon Network's prospects.
Cartoon Network’s struggles have been playing out at a time when animation at large has arguably never been more popular. From Dog Man and Inside Out 2 to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, animated features continue to rule the box office. Bluey—a cartoon series from Australia that Cartoon Network executives once unsuccessfully sought to license—has been a huge hit for Disney+. And animated shows such as Peppa Pig and CoComelon regularly attract big audiences of youngsters on Netflix. The global anime market is projected to grow from $34.2 billion in 2024 to $60.1 billion by 2030, according to research by Jefferies Financial Group Inc. Surely, many animation fans still hope, there is room for the Cartoon Network brand to flourish once again.
In the spring of 2020, when AT&T finally rolled out HBO Max (later rechristened Max), sign-ups were sluggish. “Pricing is high, the buzz is not there,” industry analyst Michael Nathanson said a few days after the app appeared, noting that his own children were totally indifferent to it. Somehow a company with three celebrated animation studios and one of the world’s largest collections of cartoons had failed to generate much interest from young viewers. “Nobody came to me yesterday and said, ‘We should get HBO Max now, Dad.’ ”
Zaslav, now dealing with his new company’s ballooning costs and vaporized cash flow, implemented a multibillion-dollar cost-cutting plan that touched every part of Warner Bros.’ business. It particularly irked creatives, including cartoonists who felt they were even more vulnerable to the scythe-swinging than their peers in live action. When cuts hit Turner Classic Movies, for example, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese jumped on a Zoom with Zaslav and ultimately won some concessions for the cherished classic-film channel. Who would ride to Cartoon Network’s rescue?
The animation industry’s stars weren’t famous actors or silver-tongued directors; they were fictional characters—by and large a bunch of anthropomorphic animals and bug-eyed misfits with nebulous executive function skills. Samurai Jack and Gumball couldn’t exactly roll up to the boss’ mansion and sweet-talk budget protections over cocktails and sign autographs for the nephews. Quite possibly, the cartoonists were screwed.
In 2023, Warner Bros. revealed that it would be shutting down Cartoon Network Studios’ home in Burbank and moving the remaining staffers into the “Iceberg,” the company’s glistening, Frank Gehry-designed offices a few miles away. What little remained of the network’s prized independence was over. Workers came in, painted over the treasured mural of graffiti on the stairwell walls and pried the Cartoon Network logo off the building’s facade. Van Partible, the creator of Johnny Bravo, went back for one final, dispiriting look around. “It was just really sad,” he says.
Last fall, Cartoon Network began airing Barney’s World, a sugary-sweet reformulation of PBS’s onetime live-action show, starring the soft purple dinosaur. In the decade and a half since the original series went off the air, the toymaker Mattel Inc. had snapped up the Barney IP and concocted a plan to revive it for the benefit of toddlers and shareholders. “It’s exactly the kind of thing that people at Cartoon Network would have once made fun of,” says Simensky, the former Cartoon Network executive.
If there remains a source of hope for Cartoon Network’s more disillusioned fans and alumni, it exists some 2,000 miles away in Atlanta, where the Adult Swim team still resides. On a Tuesday morning in February, Michael Ouweleen, president of Cartoon Network and head of Adult Swim, strolled through the hallways at the Williams Street studio. If you squinted, it almost felt like the heady days of Peak Cartoon. Ouweleen went past a gaggle of young art-school grads in training and a room with a guy animating a scene of a tree falling on a screaming character. He walked into a windowless room where, amid a smattering of tripods, cameras and papier-mâché, workers were preparing an elaborate April Fools’ stunt for the amusement of the network’s fans. (Several weeks later, on April 1, Adult Swim would broadcast a half-hour special of its hit show Rick and Morty reimagined as live-action theater sketches.)
Ouweleen, who helped to start Adult Swim more than two decades ago and has worked in almost every aspect of animation series creation, from programming to marketing, says its mission essentially remains the same: Find talented artists with a unique point of view and help them realize their vision. He points out that it still maintains a shorts program to act as a pipeline for new talent. Under the current iteration, artists can get between $6,000 and $8,000 to develop brief videos—roughly 50 of which are presented on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel every year.
Ouweleen isn’t worried about the future of animation at Warner Bros. and beyond. The entire history of cartoons, he points out, has been marked by almost nonstop technological disruption. “Animation is amazing at adapting to a different economic reality or a different consumption habit,” he says. Even so, Adult Swim will have to continue to grapple with the same downward viewership pressure that is affecting all of cable TV. According to Variety’s yearend analysis of Nielsen ratings data, in 2014 Adult Swim averaged 1.3 million total viewers in prime time. By last year that figure had dropped to 210,000.
Fortunately, Adult Swim’s shows tend to live easily these days alongside the kind of prestige HBO dramas, edgy comedies and indie A24 movies that have come to largely define Max’s core offerings. In February, Adult Swim began airing Common Side Effects, a comedy caper about an amateur scientist who discovers in the mountains of Peru magic mushrooms capable of healing just about every human ailment and is subsequently hunted down by a shadowy cabal of big pharma execs. The bloody, paranoid gonzo show seems perfectly engineered for the current “Make America Healthy Again” moment. It’s the output of an impressive creative pedigree that includes a former writer for Veep, the co-creator of Scavengers Reign and Mike Judge, from King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-Head.
Following its debut, Common Side Effects regularly appeared in the top 10 most popular series on Max, and among critics it has received the kind of effusive praise often reserved for auteur-driven serialized dramas. In March, Warner Bros. announced it was re-upping the show for a second season—a rare bit of good news amid the broader funk hanging over the industry.