How Much Trouble Is Warner Brothers In?
It’s a bunch of little things that are adding up to bad news for Warner.
The first thing was the cancelation of Batgirl, even the filmmakers admitted it needed some work, but they were pretty sure they could fix it. But then Batgirl was canceled along with $850 million worth of other things that got shitcanned. Now I understood part of that. When Warner and Discovery merged a new entity was created and the “new” company Warner Brothers Discovery had a limited time window to make a one-time claim on losses. I assumed that David Zaslav wanted to ditch the DC Sarnoffverse and make things less Woke. Sadly, Keaton-Batman would have to go, but I could live with that if the race-swapped superheroines vanished too. However,…
Aquaman 2 and the Shazam sequels have been delayed now. Okay, Aquaman 2 is understandable, it also needs some reshoots. But Shazam 2 and Black Adam are (from what I’ve heard) fine. A little polish and then launch them.
The problem is that a theatrical release costs major bucks. If you are doing it right, it’s at least $100 million to launch a movie. Maybe more.
Next, some of the more expensive talent at CNN has been kicked to the curb. Again, I was mostly looking at explanations I really liked because I can’t stand the people who got flushed.
But then there is DC Comics. DC Comics has for decades been able to survive as an IP farm. Yeah, it’s a loss leader and has been that way since forever ago but that red ink is barely a rounding error for Warner Brothers. And now they are seriously under the microscope. DC has never been audited by Warner Brothers before because it wasn’t worth doing it. It was actually a waste of money to find out if it was a waste of money. Because it obviously was. Now, DC Comics is having to explain its terrible decisions and why they are pursuing storylines that killed sales. The answer is, we wanted to be popular with the cool kids and you never cared about the money we burned doing it before now, so why not?
DC Comics didn’t send out their royalty checks to writers and artists. DC has never missed a royalty payment since they got bought up by Warner Brothers. The only reason they wouldn’t be sending out money is if there was no money to send.
Finally, there is the saga of Ezra Miller. The Flash movie is testing very well. Enough so that it’s worth the $100 million or so needed to clip out Ezra Miller and replace him with a not insane actor. But David Zaslav has been determined to launch the flick as is, despite the fact that he can’t possibly put Miller on a publicity tour. And no matter how deep a hole Ezra Miller dug for himself Zaslav wouldn’t part with him. Somebody finally tackled Miller and explained to him that he was never going to be able to go back to his goat farm in Vermont given that the size of the lawsuit Warner Brothers was going to hit him with would leave him in debt for his next five reincarnations. They’ve got him locked up now and he’ll stay that way until the Flash launches, but it would have made more sense to dump him. Unless Zaslav had no choice.
The question has to be asked at this point. Is Warner Brothers out of money?
