Warner Bros. Doesn’t Understand Where Games Or Movies Are At In 2024

If you keep your lens focused enough, Warner Bros. seems to be doing a great job. The studio currently has the number one movie in the world with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dune: Part Two, which has al﷽ready grossed over $200 million worldwide since opening last week. Given the dearth of would-be blockbusters slated for 2024, it could very well go on to be the biggest movie of the year.

That would put WB on top for two years in a row, following Barbie’s billion-and-a-half buck breakout last summer. ဣThat unstoppable pink freight train became the highest grossing movie in Warner Bros. history (unadj🌜usted for inflation).

Dune: Part Two Is An Old-Fashioned K꧃ind Of Team-Up Movie

Unlike The💫 Avengers, Dune: Part Two is exciting because it brings huge actors together, not iconic🍒 characters.

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: ꦅ

On the games side of things, Warner Bros. Interactive also has reason to celebrate. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hogwarts Legacy, the Wizarding World-themed open-world RPG, did gangbusters on PC and consoles, beating out perennial juggernaut 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty as the top-selling game of 2023.

Those successes, on their own, might suggest a company that knows what it’s doing. But you can’t underestima🌟te Warner Bros. Discoveryꦐ CEO David Zaslav’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The biggest bomb in the studio’s history, The Flash, came out a month before Barbie, its greatest success. But that failure has many fathers, including the crash of the superhero boom, the , and the movie’s position as one of the last DCEU movies before James Gunn’s continuity reset.

Main characters from Wonka, Barbie, and The Flash on a yellow background

If you set that film’s dismal box office aside, though, Warner Bros. recent handling of its films has been erratic at best, and downright anti-art at worst. First, the erratic: WB released three movies that each had blockbuster potential in their own right all within 12 days of each other — Wonka on Dec. 15, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Aquaman 2 on Dec. 22, and The Color Purple on Dec. 27 — all but ensuring that they would cannibalize each other. Only Wonka was truly successful, with a $624.9 million gross on a $125 million budget. But Aquaman 2 did okay by the ༒standard of 2023 superhero movies (which would make it a resounding failure in another year), and The Color Purple flopped. 🐻Releasing all three movies in the same window was a bizarre choice that oversaturated the market with product that was basically only competing against other Warner Bros. product.

And yes, calling movies ‘product’ does make my sk🍎in crawl a little bit, but Warner Bros. has made it clear that this is how it views the films and games it releases. Or, in a few cases, doesn’t. Warner Bros. is leading Hollywood in a race to the bottom in its pioneering use of the delete key, Ctrl+X-ing entire movies for the tax write-off. It’s done it multiple times now, permanently shelving or completely deleting the near-finished movies Coyote vs. ACME, Batgirl, and Scoob!: Holiday Haunt.

In games, Warner Bros. Discovery has proven similarly inept at reading the tea leaves. Its response to 168澳洲幸运5ღ开奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League bombing was to double down on the aspects of that decade-in-the-making game-as-a-service that players most rejected, annou🌜ncing plans to pivot away from single-player experiences in favor of forever games. That's despite the fact that both Suicide Squad and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Gotham Knights, another GaaS, both underperformed, while Marvel's single-player 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man games all sell like gangbusters and WB's own single-player Arkham games were huge hits that remain beloved to this day. Or, you know, that WB's own single-player Harry Potter game was huge enough to topple Call of Duty, the ultimate live game.

This pivot is just the latest in a long line of dispiriting decisions that have me exhausted with the current leadership of the 101-year-old company. It points to the deep need for people in charge who value art at least as much as they value money.