Contrary to what you might think, I’m not totally against what David Zaslav is doing over at Warner Bros. Sure, it’s wrong to not release already-completed films (“Coyote vs Acme”), but on the bright side, Zaslav is one of the very few, if not the only, studio exec willing to dish out hundreds of millions of dollars on auteur-driven passion projects. Who else is doing that? That’s right, absolutely nobody. Zaslav’s losses are our gains.
Bloomberg now has a report describing Zaslav’s love for auteur-driven cinema, and how this infatuation for the medium might sadly, and quite epically, backfire on him in 2025.
It’s not just “Joker: Folie a Deux, which cost $200M and bombed in 2024. Warner Bros has a bunch of other pricey auteur-driven films coming out, including Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride” ($100M), Bong Joon-ho’s “Mickey 17” ($150M), Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” ($100M) David Robert Mitchells’ “Flowervale Street” ($90M), and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” ($140M).
With that said, Zaslav is starting to panic. Do you blame him? The Bloomberg report has him condemning Warner Bros film heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy in a meeting after ‘Folie a Deux’ flopped on opening weekend. It doesn’t that almost all of the titles I just mentioned had their original budgets balloon during production.
The report goes on to state that, despite the Zaslav lashing, De Luca and Abdy are optimistic about their 2025 slate. In fact, internally, and with the “star power” of Leonardo DiCaprio at the helm, they are forecasting that Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” will earn $180M domestically.
PTA’s most successful film (“There Will Be Blood”) only managed to make $76M worldwide. Sure, this latest one has DiCaprio — who is said to have earned $20M to star — and is banking on a splashy rollout, in IMAX, no less, but it’s turned into the definition of a RISK. There’s also zero chance it keeps that August release date.
Regardless, what an enormous gamble this was for Warners, especially given that the most successful film of PTA’s career (“There Will Be Blood”) only managed to earn $76M worldwide. Sure, this latest one has DiCaprio — who is said to have earned $20M to star, but $180M might be stretching it. I hope I’m wrong. More recently, Warner executives were telling The Wall Street Journal that “DiCaprio’s box-office track record justifies the budget for Anderson’s latest”.
Regardless, the real winner here is PTA who somehow managed to convince Warner Bros to shell out this much money for his new film. No matter how much this film makes, it’s damn-near miraculous he got the greenlight on a $140M+ Thomas Pynchon adaptation.