“I don’t really care what the number is,” David Zaslav said on his highly anticipated earnings call earlier this week. The now-embattled-ish Warner Bros. Discovery chief was referring to subscriber numbers for what will soon be, as has long been rumored, a unified HBO Max-Discovery+ streaming service (official name T.B.D.). A year ago, such a statement uttered from the lips of a Hollywood executive would have been blasphemous as Disney and then WarnerMedia and even Paramount+ vied to compete in the subscriber-measuring contest that Netflix routinized for Wall Street. Analysts’ obsession with Netflix, in particular, and top line subscriber growth, in general, had turned the metric into the holy grail. In fact, WBD had put forward a target—130 million by 2025—but Zaz, in a rather dispassionate and cold-hearted fashion, seemed to be disregarding it in order to get back to brass tacks: “We are not in the business of trying to pick up every sub,” he said. “We want to make sure we get paid.”