In a Monday story for New York magazine, Michael Wolff wrote that a Warner Bros. Discovery representative relayed to him a suggestion they received from within “the Trump orbit” — if the company wants to curry favor with the administration, maybe give Donald Trump Jr. “a hunting and fishing show.” The purported Trump insider pointed to a recent (and very lucrative) Amazon deal for a documentary on First Lady Melania Trump as an “example” of how to “advantageously interact with the White House.”
“WBD confirmed that a company representative recently reached out the Trump orbit seeking advice about how the company might advantageously interact with the White House and improve its Trump-age odor,” Wolff wrote in his lengthy David Zaslav profile’s penultimate paragraph. “The reported message was to look at the example of Amazon and Jeff Bezos paying Melania Trump $40 million to participate in a documentary about herself. Don Jr. might like a hunting and fishing show on the Discovery Channel, they were told.”
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to both Warner Bros. Discovery and the White House with a request for comment on Wolff’s report, but we did not immediately receive a response from either party.
Zaslav is a Democrat, but if he wants to pull off any more mergers even remotely resembling the 2021 blockbuster combination of his Discovery, Inc. and AT&T’s WarnerMedia, he will need an OK from Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). WBD has taken steps toward spinning off its cable-channels business from its streaming platforms (mostly Max) and studios. NBCUniversal is further down the road on doing basically the same thing with SpinCo.; there has been some speculation that the unwanted NBCU cable channels and the Discovery portfolio of networks could combine.
The creation of Warner Bros. Discovery brought CNN under Zaslav’s purview, causing friction between the two businessmen. Zaslav has called CNN a “crown jewel” of the mega-company he now oversees, but the cable news network has consistently been Trump’s no. 1 nemesis (of many nemeses) in media.
Brett Ratner (the Rush Hour film series) is directing the Melania Trump doc, which started production in November 2024.
“It’s a day-to-day life, what I’m doing, what kind of responsibilities I have. People, they don’t really know and they will see it,” Melania Trump said in January. “It’s day to day, from transition team to moving to the White House, packing, establishing my team, the first lady office, moving into the White House, what it takes to make the residence your home, to hire the people that you need.”
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