ROB LONG: Coyote Vs. Studio.

A successful studio walks a tightrope. It needs to be big enough to take the Coyote vs. Acme swing—big enough to green-light the oddball, release it widely, and eat the loss if it comes—but not so big and debt-saddled and answerable to a fractious quarterly-earnings call that the verdict on a promising movie gets made in the tax department instead of the theater.

Warner Bros., under David Zaslav, didn’t make it across the tightrope. It was big enough to pay for Coyote vs. Acme, but too big to release it. The studio is now in the process of being swallowed by Paramount Skydance, in a deal worth something north of $110 billion. The proposed combination is making its treacherous path through regulators and hostile state attorneys general. And to sweeten the prospect, David Ellison, the man trying to do the swallowing, has made a very specific California-friendly promise: The combined company will release 30 theatrical films a year, 15 from each studio, each with a real 45-day theatrical window. Last year, for comparison, Paramount released eight movies. So, big talk from Ellison. It’s worth remembering that in 2022, Zaslav promised that Warner Bros. would release 16 films in 2023 and 20 in 2024. He ended up delivering 11 and nine. Quarterly debt payments don’t care about your promises.

If Ellison keeps his promise, there will soon be a shelf of weird, specific comedies that got to exist because the combined company was large enough to absorb the risk but not too large to take the risk in the first place. But Ellison might simply end up owning the latest studio to fall off the tightrope, and the guys at Ketchup [Entertainment] will have another shot at picking up dead projects and making some real money.

Speaking of Warner Brothers: Warner Bros. Is Having Its Worst Box Office Stretch in Nearly Three Decades.

As September arrives, Warner Bros. still hasn’t produced a single $100 million domestic grosser this year. The Bride!, Mortal Kombat II, They Will Kill You and The Mummy have all failed to provide the sort of mainstream theatrical breakthrough the studio desperately needs. Practical Magic 2, arriving this week, was supposed to be one of the obvious candidates to change that. Current tracking, however, has been nowhere near the level required for a $100 million domestic run.

And that makes the historical comparison particularly fascinating.

Warner’s last comparable drought came in the late 1990s. Contact, released in July 1997, became a $100 million domestic film, finishing just above the century mark. Then Warner went roughly a year without another one until Lethal Weapon 4 arrived on July 10, 1998. Lethal Weapon 4 ultimately reached $130.4 million domestically.

There is a delicious bit of irony in that comparison. Contact was a prestige-minded science-fiction movie starring Jodie Foster, directed by Robert Zemeckis and based on Carl Sagan. Lethal Weapon 4 was the fourth entry in a wildly successful action franchise starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Warner’s solution to the drought was not some carefully engineered brand strategy. It was simply a giant movie arriving at exactly the right moment.

The same problem feels different today because the theatrical marketplace itself has changed.

Assuming Warner Brothers is swallowed up by David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, they’ll be yet another Covid-related death: Christopher Nolan’s Warner Bros. Partnership Betrayal Was a Big Mistake.

Like with all things regarding the current state of media, from the fading popularity of the MCU to the rise of video game movies, Nolan’s breakup with Warner Bros. can be traced back to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Mar. 15, 2020, all theaters in the United States shut down following the pandemic as many states went into lockdown. There was concern about whether theaters would ever open again. Christopher Nolan’s then-current film, Tenet, was given the director’s favored third-weekend-of-July release date and was set to be one of the year’s biggest films.

Nolan was never going to let Tenet be sent straight to streaming as Warner Bros. had done with Scoob!, and the studio wanted to keep the filmmaker happy after many years of creative partnership. Nolan wanted the movie delayed until September 2020 and hoped it could be positioned as the first major Hollywood film to welcome audiences back to theaters. Tenet had a limited release at first and was rolled out in the United States and a few select countries over the coming weeks. However, this was before a vaccine became available, leaving many moviegoers uneasy about returning to theaters.

Four months after Tenet’s limited release, Warner Bros. made the controversial decision to release its entire 2021 slate of films, along with Wonder Woman 1984 at the end of 2020, in theaters and streaming on HBO Max day-and-date. This initiative was known as Project Popcorn. Nolan, a big proponent of the theatrical experience, famously balked at the decision. On Dec. 7, 2020, Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter:

“Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service. Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.”

Related: The Inexplicable Suicide of Hollywood.