Hollywoods 2025 golden child Warner Bros. is back…
“One Battle After Another” is not only the title of last 12 months’s best image Oscar winner. It’s 2026’s fortune cookie message for Warner Bros., the studio that made it.
“You will fight one battle after another.”
And lose!
The studio’s downturn has been sharp and speedy. Hollywood declines often are. But it’s made a lot more noticeable by the Ellison in the room. Billionaire David Ellison’s Paramount’s acquisition of WB is caught in legal limbo. He’s threatening to depart California. It’s a mess.
“Supergirl” was a major flop for Warner Bros. ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
Trying to discover a comfortable headline for this studio is more durable than the search for a cancer remedy. They’re flailing around like a car dealership balloon man.
What a distinction a few months make. Last 12 months WB was basking in industry adulation. They had major box-office and vital hits in the sensible horror movies “Sinners” and “Weapons” and an eventual best image winner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle.”
Their IP household smash (which also smashed my cerebellum) “A Minecraft Movie” grossed $961 million. And they notched a string of other boffo successes: “Final Destination: visible injurylines” ($317 million), “The Conjuring: Last Rites” ($499 million) and the shiny new “Superman” ($618 million) all carried out.
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Studio chairs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy had been so assured in their job, they did a media victory lap.
“This was David Zaslav‘s strategy from the beginning of restoring Warner Bros. to its days of glory, being the home for the world’s best filmmakers and putting those films in movie theaters around the globe,” De Luca, brown-nosing, told Deadline.
Er, I actually hope this isn’t David’s strategy.
Because it’s been flop metropolis over in Burbank. Duds and embarrassments galore.
A “Barbie” sequel would possibly never get made. ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
One pending catastrophe hasn’t even hit the screen yet. And would possibly never will.
This week, the New York Times reported that a deal for a sequel to 2022’s “Barbie” — , Warner’s mega-hit starring Margot Robbie that grossed $1.44 billion — has yet to be reached. The stars and filmmakers need more money and better back-end offers. Duh! And if they will’t get their act together, in 4 months the rights revert back to toymaker Mattel.
Baffling. Hope these bozos don’t hardball themselves out of one of their only dependable franchises before their company merger is truly authorized.
They actually don’t need to bitter their relationship with Robbie. Their only sizable winner in 2026 so far, despite the loud discourse, was “Wuthering Heights” ($241 million) with the Aussie actress and Jacob Elordi.
Audiences left “The Bride” at the altar. ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
But exterior that and of a couple modestly profitable tasks (“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” — abysmal — and “Evil Dead Burn”), it’s been “bombs away!” at WB.
Here’s a file of the harm: The zero-star torture chamber “The Bride,” the bungled “Supergirl” and “please lobotomize me!” “Mortal Kombat II.”
“Supergirl” is an particularly big downside, because the new DC Studios just bought off the ground only to crash on its second flight.
And the best consequence for this weekend’s dino flick “The End of Oak Street” with Anne Hathaway is winding up in the “marginal success” pile.
I hear you saying, “But don’t they have a new Tom Cruise movie coming out? And a ‘Cat in the Hat’?”
“Mortal Kombat II” bought KO’d at the box workplace. ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
Why, yes, they do.
That Cruise film is called “Digger.” It’s an artsy satire from “Birdman” director Alejandro G. Iñárritu in which Tom performs a cartoony Texas oil tycoon who causes an environmental disaster.
That may go over properly at the Oscars, but it doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that Americans will flip up their noses.
The animated “Cat in the Hat” may stroll the same golden highway as “The Lorax” ($351 million) or may go hat-in-hand just like the disappointing last “Cat” flick with Mike Myers did 20 years in the past.
WB’s only sure-ish factor comes out at Christmas: “Dune: Part 3” with Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. “Part 2” grossed a first rate $715 million in 2024, but it was launched in tough March after strike-related delays.
The vacation time body will give the ultimate chapter some spice.
For a change, an wonderful WB movie hits theaters in two weeks. Only, it’s not a WB film anymore.
Timothee Chalamet will return as Paul Atreides in “Dune: Part 3.” AP
That’s “Coyote vs. Acme,” a intelligent and hilarious “Looney Tunes” flick that the studio shelved three years in the past and took as a tax write-off.
A new distributor, Ketchup Entertainment, fortunately purchased it off them. And the movie at present holds a 97% on RottenTomatoes — far eclipsing any Warner release this 12 months.
The film, which you need to see, makes an excoriating jab at its former home straight away.
In the story, Acme is depicted as the evil maker of defective merchandise that do injurious hurt.
You can see where this is going.
After the WB emblem is displayed at the start, the digital camera zooms in on the nice print: “A wholly owned subsidiary of the Acme Corporation.”
Yep. That’s all, of us!
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