WB’s Value Lies in More than Just Capes, Harry Potter, and IP

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In 1969, director Stanley Kubrick was on top of the world. He had, as the director once mused to his later-friend Steven Spielberg, made a dint on cinema thanks to the extraordinary vision of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film was also produced by MGM, the once reigning studio in Hollywood that by 1968 was bleeding—which might have been why restless and unimpressed executives walked out of the New York City premiere early, demanding cuts from Kubrick after being baffled by his largely nonverbal, psychedelic experience.

It was a golden opportunity for the likes of John Calley, who was then the production chief at Warner Bros. On the other side of 2001’s shocking success (at least to MGM and other grayhaired execs), Calley made overtures for what would become a career-defining move. At Warners, Kubrick was promised final cut on his next picture, an adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, assuming of course Kubrick could agree to a budget. Once that was settled (with Kubrick winning the give-and-take), WB became his home for the next nearly 30 years and five movies. Only Terry Semel, one-half of the two co-chairs running the studio between 1980 and 1999, was allowed to read Kubrick’s scripts. Otherwise, WB gave him money and trusted his vision. That yielded The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, in addition to Clockwork and Barry Lyndon.

That was among the earliest and most extreme of the relationships that built WB’s reputation as a filmmaker-first studio, but it set a template that has fitfully remained part of the company’s culture for more than half a century. It’s why with a single exception, after Clint Eastwood made the jump from Universal to WB in 1975 for The Outlaw Josey Wales, he never directed a movie at another studio in the following 50 years. It’s how Christopher Nolan was groomed and nurtured by the likes of production head Jeff Robinov, which saw the once promising Memento helmer graduate from studio priorities like Insomnia and Batman Begins to earning near total freedom on The Prestige and Inception, not to mention even getting a lot more latitude on valuable studio intellectual property like The Dark Knight.

This is also a legacy that current WB co-chairs and CEOs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy have fought to preserve in spite of the industry’s general state of consolidating upheaval, and WB’s own near-perpetual state of being in the midst of some kind of acquisition, merger, or crisis. A filmmaker himself, De Luca was the writer of the underrated John Carpenter cult classic, In the Mouth of Madness, as well as president of New Line Cinema during the glory days of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Austin Powers, and when Peter Jackson began work on Lord of the Rings.

De Luca and Abdy were brought into WB following what would prove to be its first of three contentious mergers (or near mergers in the Netflix boondoggle’s case) inside of five years. Tapped by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, De Luca and Abdy spent the last four years attempting to quell the disastrous decisions of Jason Kilar, the CEO of the defunct WarnerMedia, who in 2021 burned bridges with the entire filmmaking community with the shockingly misguided “Project Popcorn” fiasco (where the studio released their entire 2021 film slate day-and-date on HBO Max without even consulting the talent they were screwing over). It cost the studio its relationship with Nolan.

To be clear, Hollywood has always been cutthroat, at WB or anywhere else. The same head of production who Nolan cites as a mentor for navigating the studio system, Jeff Robinov, is also the guy who tried to shut George Miller down on Mad Max: Fury Road in the early 2010s after the movie went over budget and schedule in the deserts of Namibia. De Luca and Abdy also had to carry out Zaslav’s dirty work when what is likely Clint Eastwood’s final film, Juror #2, got dumped to HBO Max beyond a cursory, miniscule theatrical release. This followed Zaslav infamously uttering, “We don’t owe any favors” to directors.

That kind of shortsighted mindset is probably why Zaslav seemed to publicly shop for replacements of De Luca and Abdy last year before their banner year netted WB $4.4 billion thanks in part to IP plays like A Minecraft Movie and Superman, but just as importantly filmmaker-led projects that helped eventize directors as the star, a la Ryan Coogler via Sinners ($370 million), Paul Thomas Anderson with One Battle After Another ($213 million), and Zach Cregger and Weapons ($270 million).

All of those were original stories, two horror movies and one an action-drama hybrid, and they each made respectable box office, won Oscars (including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, and both screenplay awards between them) and, best of all, were great audience-building movies. Cregger became as much or more the selling point for this year’s Resident Evil reboot as the video game IP. And now, Cregger’s next original movie, The Flood, is set up at Warners with Jennifer Lawrence attached. Abdy and De Luca’s gamble paved the way for a partnership that could yield creative and commercial dividends for years.

Unfortunately, not every gamble pays off. And De Luca and Abdy’s bet on the combined talents of Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise making a high-wire act like Digger work didn’t pan out. Still, I’m happy a studio could take a risk like that, because last year a similar roll of the dice on PTA and Leonardo DiCaprio produced a new 21st century classic.

It’s keeping this all in mind that fills one with trepidation when it was confirmed Friday morning that De Luca and Abdy are out at WB. Once the merger is complete, and WB and Paramount are both ancillaries of “Skydance,” new overlord CEO David Ellison wants the studio heads who maintained relationships with Coogler, Anderson, Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, and so many others to be shown the door. Given Ellison’s admittedly brief track record of overseeing Paramount Pictures during the last year—and its fixation on pumping and dumping IP movies—this is a grim sign.

The corporate trajectory of WB from Kilar, the man who drove a generational talent like Nolan into the arms of Universal, to Zaslav, the guy who attempted to shelve Coyote vs. Acme for a tax write-off and treated Clint Eastwood like a doddering burden, to now the Ellisons, is a dispiriting journey for the studio that was once home to Stanley Kubrick. It also illustrates the larger shortsighted IP corporate mindset of so much of the entertainment industry’s most powerful movers and shakers these days.

Yes, WB has a goldmine of valuable IP. DC Comics’ superheroes, Harry Potter’s wizards, Lord of the Rings’ orcs, and hell the Looney Tunes too, if anyone at the top would care to remember them, all live on the lot. But Warners’ legacy and value transcends brands and sequels. Batman was a dead horse before Christopher Nolan came around; Lord of the Rings was once a gamble proposed by a young, scrappy horror filmmaker from New Zealand; and the next generation of audiences are more excited by certain directors than they are certain capes. WB’s new owners would do well to remember that.