As for movies?
Mr. Zaslav acknowledged that film is “a tough business” at a Morgan Stanley conference this month, and seemed to ask for a bit more patience. “It’s a long-cycle business, and we’ve been winding out of what wasn’t ours,” he said, a reference to flops like “War of the Rohirrim” and “Mickey 17,” which were given a greenlight before he arrived. “Over the next few years you’re going to see what is ours, and I’m optimistic about it.”
The next Warner Bros. release, “A Minecraft Movie,” could break out when it arrives next week, box office analysts say. “Minecraft,” which cost $150 million to make, is based on the popular game and aimed at families. (Legendary Entertainment contributed 25 percent of the budget and helped produce it.) A couple weeks later, Warner Bros. will release the R-rated “Sinners,” a $90 million original horror thriller set in the 1930s and starring Michael B. Jordan. “Sinners” was directed by Ryan Coogler (“Black Panther”). Both movies were overseen by Mr. De Luca and Ms. Abdy.
At the Morgan Stanley event, Mr. Zaslav praised the pair for getting into business with Mr. Coogler and other marquee filmmakers on expensive original projects. “In some cases, we may have overspent,” Mr. Zaslav said, an apparent reference to a Bloomberg article on Feb. 26 that questioned the strategy. “I don’t think we did. Because we wanted to bring the best and the brightest people back to Warner Bros.”
The most important movie on Warner Bros. Discovery’s immediate schedule is “Superman” from DC Studios, which is managed by James Gunn and Peter Safran. It arrives on July 11 and represents an effort to reboot the company’s superheroes for a new generation of moviegoers. Mr. Zaslav, noting at the Morgan Stanley conference that he had just spent an hour and a half with the DC Studios team, called the movie “a huge moment for us.”
The budget for “Superman” isn’t known, but superhero movies typically cost about $200 million to make, not including marketing.
If it becomes a hit, the result would represent a turnaround for the studio from last summer, when Warner Bros. released duds like “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and managed only a 4.7 percent share of domestic movie-ticket sales. By that measure, it was Warner’s worst performance since analysts started to compile seasonal box office data in 1982.
