Time Is Up!

You'll see tickers fly as we kick off another week that is rich in companies you know announcing their quarterly earnings. From consumer brand staples such as Gillette (NYSE: G  ) and Wrigley (NYSE: WWY  ) to defense titans Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT  ) and Boeing (NYSE: BA  ) , the heavies will be busy this week.

However, the one report that I can't wait to hear will come from Time Warner (NYSE: TWX  ) . The market seems to have glossed over this entertainment giant in recent years. Its shares have been toiling away in the teens longer than Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. OK, so technically it's been just a little more than two years since the stock traded beyond the teens, but that's pretty surprising when you begin to consider everything that has happened with the company since then.

On the celluloid front, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter series couldn't have fared much better. Its America Online service has gone through some painful growing pains, but with companies such as Google and Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO  ) mastering contextual text-ad marketing to the point where content is once again regal, it might not be fair to consider AOL to be simply a subscriber services specialist.

When America Online announced that it would be acquiring Time Warner, it was seen as a bold step in marrying new media with the old. Yet, these days, watching the company's market cap fetch far less than either of those two pieces were trading for while they were still courting is a painful reminder that synergy is a buzzword that is much easier said than done.

Time Warner has ditched the AOL ticker symbol and wiped the America Online name off the corporate moniker, but it still hasn't chased all of the demons away. That has been a gradual process. Perhaps that's why it's OK to wait every three months for the company to produce its fiscal report card. There is too much potential in the company, given all of its parts, to not make the grade eventually.

What will it take for Time Warner to come of age -- as in trade higher than the teens? What should it do with America Online? All this and more -- in the Time Warner Discussion Board. Only on Fool.com.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz has been a satisfied America Online user for more than a decade. However, he does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story.