Franchise fare will always be king in Hollywood, but Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav might want to read through his nearest dictionary and double check the meaning of “underused.”
At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference, the CEO of the multimedia giant outlined his intentions to keep mining the studio’s biggest IP for all that it’s worth, and he named three properties in particular as cash cows that he doesn’t believe have been milked anywhere near enough.
“One of the other real strengths of Warner Bros. is we talk about the great IP that Warner Bros. owns. But, for us, the challenge is that our content, our great IP — Harry Potter, DC, Lord of the Rings — that content has been underused. We think there’s a lot of shareholder value in attaching a 10-year DC — a real plan around DC, bringing Harry Potter back to HBO for 10 consecutive years, doing multiple movies of Lord of the Rings.”
Far be it from us to tell the man how to do his job, but surely somebody must have pointed out that we’ve already seen an entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was then followed by The Hobbit, never mind the fact Harry Potter ran for eight movies and was then spun off into a Fantastic Beasts trio. That’s 17 features from those two alone, and we haven’t even started on DC yet.
Since the turn of the century, Warner Bros. has theatrically released no less than 27 films in live-action or animation derived from DC Comics titles, which includes various splinter universes and sagas like Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, Joker, and even the likes of Jonah Hex and The Losers.
Of course, there are countless more projects in development based on all three of the aforementioned brands, but 44 movies in 23 years is almost the complete opposite of “underused” in this context.
