The Fall of the House of Warner
Plus: an ‘Action’ assignment!
Warner Bros. and their much-hated honcho, David Zaslav, got hit with four bad stories this week, all tied to efforts to offset some of the debt taken on in the Warner Bros.-Discovery deal.
The first, and most damning, of these stories was the news that Turner Classic Movies got hit hard by the latest round of WB layoffs. “The departed were Pola Chagnon, the general manager; Charlie Tabesh, the channel’s lead programmer; Genevieve McGillicuddy, who ran the annual TCM film festival; Anne Wilson, a production executive; and Dexter Fedor, a marketer,” Brooks Barnes reported. And while the channel will remain ad-free and Zaslav’s team insisted viewers won’t see any changes, it’s hard to see how gutting the channel’s leadership (and general staff) could really have no impact whatsoever. At the least, the channel seems likely to slide into stagnancy.
This move prompted the biggest response, as an Avengers-style squad of American auteurs assembled to yell at Zaslav on the phone: Spielberg, Scorsese, and Anderson (Paul Thomas) joined forces to demand the network be saved. Nothing seems to have come of the call. One would be surprised if anything does. Corporate machinery is hard to shut down once it’s been put in motion.
The second, and most absurd, of these stories involved news that Warners has teamed up with an AI firm to help weed out low-performing projects. Some of the outrage here was overblown—there isn’t going to be an Agent Smith pushing a greenlight button; as best as I can tell, the “AI” here better resembles a fancy Excel program that helps crunch budget numbers with projections on box office—but the optics are nevertheless bad for Warners given other cuts and also likely wouldn’t have saved the studio from spending an ungodly amount on something like The Flash.
The third, and most confusing, of these stories was news that Warners was looking to offload “half” of its “film and TV music publishing assets” for “$500 million.” I put all this in scare quotes because I don’t think anyone has concrete information on what would be included or what it might preclude WB itself from doing with the “publishing assets.” If you sell Casablanca’s theme, can you still make a new physical media release with that theme on it without clearing the rights from whoever bought it? Regardless, it’s unclear if this will go anywhere since six months ago WB was reportedly looking at unloading the entirety of the catalog for a billion dollars.
The final, and most sensible, of these stories involved HBO’s potential decision to license HBO original series Insecure to Netflix. This is precisely the sort of thing Warners should be doing with their library. HBO shows like Sex and the City and The Sopranos and Band of Brothers have been mainstays on basic cable for years, earning the network tons of money in the process. Why let something languish unwatched on Maaaaaax, where you have to pay for the rights to it, when you can lease it to a competitor, earning some cash in the process while saving some cash on your balance sheets?
The universe of walled gardens, where every network has a vast library that is only accessible to a universe of relatively stable paying customers, is unsustainable. People who subscribe to streamers watch a lot of new things once and a handful of comfort classics (e.g., Friends) over and over again. Once you’ve gotten viewers to take a bite of the new programming apple, there’s no reason to hold onto the core if someone else will pay for the right to compost it. Yes, that metaphor is tortured, but the point is simple: one streamer’s trash is another streamer’s treasure, because old trash can become new treasure when it’s exposed to a new audience. This is a huge part of Netflix’s entire business model, “resurfacing” old products for new eyeballs.
The point is, there are bad ways to balance the books, like gutting a tiny-but-beloved corner of the studio’s empire. And there are good ways to balance the books, like licensing shows that aren’t being watched by viewers to competitors and recommitting the studio to theatrical releases. How Zaslav is remembered by Hollywood’s mythmakers will depend on which path he commits to walking.
Really enjoyed talking Cormac McCarthy with Peter and Alyssa on this Friday’s Across the Movie Aisle. I hope you enjoy it as well.
Links!
Boy, I wanted to love Asteroid City just as I loved The French Dispatch and Isle of Dogs and The Grand Budapest Hotel before it. But it just doesn’t work for me. Like, at all. I tried to explain why in my review.
Really enjoyed talking to Brooks Barnes last weekend on BGTH about Universal’s development of a premium video-on-demand window. This week I’ve got Ken Harbaugh, the producer of the documentary Against All Enemies, on the show. I hope you give a listen!
As both a critic and a consumer, I am … well, unsure why I should care that much about most of the stuff animators are complaining about in this piece on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Yeah, long hours suck. But also, one of the artists is complaining about his animation being changed so he isn’t sure if he should include it in his portfolio, and I’m just kind of like … so? Lord and Miller aren’t asking for naked backrubs. This isn’t abuse. What’s the newsworthiness here?
Taylor Sheridan doesn’t take notes and he doesn’t work collaboratively and it seems to be working out just fine for him.
Assigned Viewing: Last Action Hero (Netflix)
Arnold Schwarzenegger is not only a great American (the literal human embodiment of the American success story) and a great action star, he’s also a wonderfully self-aware public figure. You can see it generally in his movie choices, how in the early 1990s he shifted away from pure action to action-comedy in a way to make him more appealing to a larger swathe of the potential audience. And you see it specifically in Last Action Hero, a flick that reteamed him with Predator’s John McTiernan and kind of laid waste to the whole idea of the big, bulky action star that so dominate the silver screen in the years prior to its release. That picture came out about ten years before its time: I’ve said this before elsewhere, but it was meta before being meta was cool, serving as both self-critique and self-celebration. As such, it holds up incredibly well today, a triumph underappreciated in its own time. Last Action Hero leaves Netflix in a week, so hop to it if you want to see Schwarzenegger at his best.
Speaking of Arnold, whom you hold in such high esteem, I guess you haven't seen the hatchet piece that your sister publication, The Bulwark, just published. It's called "Arnold Schwarzenegger Is No Hero". It's pretty ugly.
Man it is so funny what you said about Last Action Hero. That movie holds a special place for me as it was the last movie my father and I saw together.
I watched on VOD recently and I agree with your take: it was a very good movie that was simply too “meta” for its time. People did not get its satire it, and were expecting to see just another Arnold smash and bash flick. Thus the reviews at the time were pretty negative. The other movie that was similar to this was “The Cable Guy”. If you watch it now, it was so on prescient that it’s scary.