In today’s Finshots, we tell you why Cartoon Network nearly shut down and how it’s now trying to stage a comeback reimagined for a modern world.

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The Story

In 2022, Cartoon Network was trending but not for the reasons you’d hope. Rumours swirled that the beloved channel was shutting down for good. The buzz got loud enough for the studio to step in and clarify things…

But skip ahead two years to 2024, and something big did happen. Cartoon Network Studio and its website was folded into the larger Warner Bros. Animation studio. And everything started redirecting to Warner Bros. Discovery’s shiny streaming platform: Max. (we’ll talk about this in a bit). The studio’s iconic Burbank headquarters was shut down and dozens of staffers were let go.

Yet, here we are, just a year later, with Cartoon Network again hinting at a major revival. 

So what on earth is going on here? Will our favourite childhood channel finally get saved, or is this just another false alarm?

Let’s take it from the top.

Cartoon Network (CN) was born decades ago on a high. In 1991, the then media mogul Ted Turner made a curious gamble. He acquired Hanna-Barbera’s massive cartoon library and turned it into a 24-hour channel. Initially, the channel played classics like Scooby-Doo and The Flintstones on loop. Nostalgia was its main attraction. But by the late 90s, the studio began creating its own magic with shows like Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Ed, Edd n Eddy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and of course, The Powerpuff Girls.

Meanwhile, the corporate world was watching. And the first to spot this was Warner Bros. In 1996, it acquired CN as part of the merger between Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner. And eventually, Time Warner became WarnerMedia, further cementing CN within a giant corporate structure.

The rejig worked. Viewers started watching in droves and merch flew off shelves. By 2015, Powerpuff Girls had exploded into a $2.5 billion brand, spinning off toys, movies, and video games. And CN had cracked the magic formula: original creativity + global intellectual property (IP) = long-term profitability. So it went on applying the same strategy to other cartoons like Ben 10. It launched Adult Swim for late-night edgy content and even Cartoonito and ACME Night for younger and family audiences. Basically, it was now a network that always had something cooking.

But then, trouble began brewing.  In 2018 the entire cable industry was going through a restructure, and that’s when telecom giant AT&T bought WarnerMedia for a massive $85 billion. The deal came with a mountain of debt plus a lot of backlash about how it would hurt competition, consumers and give too much media power to corporate giants. And all of this eventually led AT&T to sell WarnerMedia to Discovery, Inc. in 2022, to form Warner Bros. Discovery.

Now, all these corporate shake-ups had a brutal side-effect on CN. Creativity was the first casualty. As the new CEO David Zaslav took a machete to cover costs, dozens of animated shows were shelved or deleted from streaming entirely. Staffers were laid off en masse. The network's identity was blurred and its content was scattered across streaming platforms.

Financially, the picture was grim too. As per estimates, annual ad revenue for CN and Adult Swim nosedived from about $660 million in 2014 to just $130 million by 2024.

And beyond the corporate drama, there was a larger shift happening: kids were moving on. They weren’t rushing home for 5:30 PM cartoons. Instead, they were scrolling through YouTube Shorts. In fact, about 75% of Indian parents say YouTube is their kids' primary source of animation content. So yeah, the long-form story-driven cartoons, the kind CN built its name on, struggled to retain younger eyeballs against shorter dopamine hits. And every content studio saw this coming. Netflix and Disney quietly began shifting gears. Shorter episodes, quicker pacing, more binge-ability.

And as kids migrated to newer platforms, Max — CN’s new digital home — began losing its younger audience. 

So yes. Mergers, ad revenue collapse and a fundamental shift in how kids consume content all collided to knock CN off its pedestal.

Which makes us ask: what does the future hold for CN now?

Well, the animation market itself remains vibrant. Globally, animation is a $400 billion market today, projected to hit $600 billion by 2030, driven by short-form content, streaming, and mobile gaming. That’s the reason why Netflix and Disney are betting heavily on these trends.

So there’s still room for CN to flourish once again. And that’s what it is planning for.

Turns out, Warner Bros. Discovery is now positioning Cartoon Network Studios as a digital-first animation house. The comeback plan? Bet big on what’s already worked in the past. The studio is planning more adult-focused content with Adult Swim. Rick and Morty, for instance, has returned with its eighth season. They're rebooting classics like The Powerpuff Girls, relaunching The Amazing World of Gumball, introducing new shows like Iyanu, and working on a fresh Looney Tunes movie. And the network is doubling down on nostalgia because those once-cartoon-loving millennials are now parents with disposable income.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. Discovery continues licensing CN’s legacy shows to streaming houses. It has stripped away content from HBO Max to save money by removing 36 titles and shifted them to Discovery+ as well as other platforms like Hulu. This brings in steady cash.

And Warner Bros Discovery also took a $9.1 billion charge for writing down the value of its traditional TV networks, including CN. Which solves two things. It allows it to decouple CN’s falling ad revenues from the rest of its business, giving the channel more independence. And ironically, that might just be the freedom CN needs; the same freedom that let it flourish in the first place.

Even in India, the animation industry is growing rapidly and CN is going all in. The studio already uses extensive Indian talent. Now it’s going further by bringing more local IPs. In 2024, it launched CN Rewind on Prime Video as an added subscription (dubbed and tailored locally). Because the numbers are huge. India’s animation and VFX industry is set to grow, OTT platforms are demanding more animated content, and India has become the global outsourcing hub for animation production.

But zoom out and you’ll see this isn’t just a CN story. It’s about how corporate finance, technological change and evolving consumer habits are reshaping the entertainment world. Today’s algorithms reward short-term virality over long-term creativity; but iconic franchises like Ben 10 or Pokemon didn’t emerge from 15-second clips. They were the result of years of storytelling, world-building, creative investment and risk-taking.

Maybe that’s the tightrope CN is walking now. How do you keep the magic alive in a world with new screens where audiences rarely sit still for more than a few minutes.

We don’t know if it can figure it out. But we do know that imagination rarely dies that easily.

As the Vice President of CN Michael Ouweleen recently said… The entire history of cartoons has been marked by almost nonstop technological disruption. Animation is amazing at adapting to a different economic reality or a different consumption habit.

Let’s hope that holds true this time too. We have our fingers crossed. Because just knowing that CN’s still here, still fighting, feels strangely comforting. And maybe that’s why fans still cheer for it.

Because deep down, we’re all still waiting for our favorite childhood toons to make a comeback, isn’t it?

And until they do, we’d like to say… That’s all Folks!

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