Since taking over Warner Bros. Discovery two years back, David Zaslav has gone from obscure media honcho to cartoon villain. And for good reason: Among his controversial antics is the fact that he keeps cancelling completed (or near-completed) movies. Batgirl? The Scoob! sequel. Coyote vs. Acme? All will unlikely ever see the light of day, all for tax purposes. But he’s apparently not the only tycoon doing that.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, on Tuesday Disney CEO Bob Iger spoke at a conference hosted by Morgan Stanley in San Francisco. At one point he addressed the very bad run Disney had at the movies last year, when they had one high-profile underperformer or bomb: Indiana Jones 5, Ant-Man 3, Wish, and, most notoriously, The Marvels. What was he doing to get their film wing back on track?
“You have to kill things you no longer believe in,” he said, “and that’s not easy in this business, because either you’ve gotten started, you have some sunk costs, or it’s a relationship with either your employees or with the creative community.”
He then admitted that among the “tough calls” he’s made has been ending films. “We’ve not been that public about it, but we’ve killed a few projects already that we just didn’t feel were strong enough.”
Granted, Iger didn’t explain if he was referring to films that were already in production, much less nearly completed, as the three Zaslav iced were. It’s probably fine to axe a film that was still in pre-production. If Iger has done the same to one that’s basically done, that’s been tested, that’s taken months, years of people’s lives to make, then he’s as hissable as David Zaslav.
Iger also pushed back at that whole “superhero fatigue” thing that’s resulted in even Marvel movies tanking.
“A lot of people think it’s audience fatigue, it’s not audience fatigue. They want great films,” he said. “And if you build it great, they will come and there are countless examples of that. Some are ours and some are others’. Oppenheimer is a perfect example of that. Just a fantastic film.
It’s worth noting that Oppenheimer is not a Disney film. It’s from Universal. It might have happened over at Warner Bros, but Warner Bros. alienated filmmaker Christopher Nolan with that whole “let’s release all our new movies on our new streamer the same day as they hit theaters” ploy they did throughout 2021. But then, had Nolan stayed during the Zaslav regime, there’s a chance Zaslav may have just deleted it to save a couple bucks.
(Via THR)