Hollywood quietly achieved a record this year when it comes to the lucrative compensation packages awarded to CEOs running all the nation’s major television, movie, and streaming businesses — but it’s becoming clear that come next year, shareholders will take CEOs to task where it really hurts: their paychecks.
Hardly an eyebrow was raised when Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav took home $246 million in compensation for 2021, more than six times his 2020 pay (and well above his all-time high of $156.1 million in 2014). It was the most money paid to a studio CEO for one year’s work — and higher than the combined paychecks for the CEOs of Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Comcast, Lionsgate and Fox.