Just to recap, ever since David Zaslav came is as the new Warners CEO, he’s been cleaning house; he’s reduced HBO Max’s original content, forever shelved “Batgirl,” and criticized the studio’s six-decade friendship with Clint Eastwood.
A recent Above the Line piece tackling the Clint Eastwood “mystery” over at Warner Bros isn’t anything new to our readers.
I still stand by an August piece I wrote titled, “Warner Bros. May Have Ended Their 50-Year Partnership With Clint Eastwood.” The gist of it was that, according to a source of mine, Eastwood had pitched a new movie to the Zaslav-headed Warner and ensuingly got rejected.
A few months before that, a major point of contention for Zaslav was Eastwood’s recent box-office flop “Cry Macho.” Zaslav was none-too-happy about it bombing in a now leaked conference call by implying that, despite their five-decade allegiance to him, Warners didn’t owe Clint any favors.
Eastwood is 92-years-old. The odds are that he has only a couple more films left in him — at most. He’s also released nine films in the last eleven years. He works very fast, hopping from one project to the next at lightning speed.
Eastwood has been making movies with Warners for over 50 years now. It’s been one of the most trust-worthy and long-lasting director/studio friendships in the industry. Zaslav would be a fool to end it, especially since a) Eastwood’s films are fairly cheap to make and b) well, it’s Clint Eastwood.