As Adult Swim Gets Set To Add An Hour Of Daily Programming, President Michael Ouweleen Sees Warner Bros Discovery In A More Settled Post-Merger State: “We’re All Feeling More Possibility”

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: After months of upheaval following the close last April of WarnerMedia and Discovery’s $43 billion merger, Michael Ouweleen sees a much more settled operating environment taking shape in 2023. “We’re all feeling more possibility this year,” the president of Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Boomerang and Discovery Kids told Deadline in an interview. “Last year was hard” for the entire media sector.

Ouweleen took on his current role in June 2022 after having previously overseen kids and family networks during a 27-year run at Warner Bros Discovery, WarnerMedia and Time Warner.

He is now spearheading an expansion of Adult Swim programming by one hour a day, starting nightly at 7 p.m. as of May 1. The step-up for the Cartoon Network block is headlined by Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, a new show from Genndy Tartakovsky, who directed the first three Hotel Transylvania films and created previous Cartoon/Adult Swim shows Primal, Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack. (Watch a trailer for the new series above.) The first two Unicorn episodes premiere May 4 on linear and will stream on HBO Max the next day.

Throughout his three decades at the company, Ouweleen said, animation has always occupied a unique place in the corporate portfolio. “We’ve always, in every iteration of this company, been this little animation operation in Atlanta, Georgia,” he said. “We sort of invented our own set of rules because we weren’t in New York and we weren’t in LA.” The arrival of WBD CEO David Zaslav and his largely Discovery-based management team has generated headlines for decisions to jettison a number of film and TV projects, even some fully produced titles, in the name of attaining $4 billion in overall cost savings.