Warner Bros Discovery boss David Zaslav aims to head off Batgirl cancellation by announcing a plan to come up with a plan.
It’s fair to say that Warner Bros isn’t exactly covering itself in glory since its merger with Discovery, with the news of the studio’s cancellation of the almost-complete Batgirl upsetting fans, all involved with the project’s production and earning the company a landslide of negative PR. You can check out our thoughts about that decision right here. Even in the world of fancy graphs and balance books, things aren’t too great either, with a crucial earnings call yesterday revealing what Deadline has described as a ‘big net loss, disappointing revenue, high debt and slower streaming growth.’
As is often the case in these earnings calls, the company CEO, David Zaslav chose to adopt a bullish tone, especially when talking about the future of the DC Extended Universe, one of the chief jewels in Warner Bros’ IP crown. Zaslav announced a change in direction for the studio’s approach to its DC properties, revealing that the titles would be released in a ten year plan inspired directly by the success of the MCU.
“There will be a team with a 10-year plan focusing just on DC,” announced Zaslav. “It’s very similar to the structure that Alan Horn and Bob Iger put together, very effectively, with Kevin Feige at Disney. We think that we could build a long-term much stronger, sustainable growth business out of DC. And as part of that, we’re going to focus on quality. We’re not going to release any film before it’s ready. We’re not going to release a film to make a quarter. We’re not going to release a film unless the focus is going to be ‘how do we make each of these films in general as good as possible?’ But DC is something that we think we could make better and we’re focused on it now. We have some great DC films coming up — Black Adam, Shazam, and Flash – and we’re working on all of those. We’re very excited about them”.
Whether Zaslav and those he entrusts to oversee such an enterprise can enjoy the same success as Marvel remains very much in doubt. The studio’s current release landscape is something of a mess, with seemingly-little creative oversight and the aforementioned Flash looking increasingly like a doomed venture due to Ezra Miller’s ongoing legal issues. Considering that San Diego Comic Con just happened, the opportunity to wow fans and investors with a coherent plan and draw in the world’s eyeballs has just gone begging, which suggests the ten year plan is is actually more of a plan to come up with a plan, which we doubt will be filling anybody with confidence.
We’ll bring you more on this story as it happens.
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