David Zaslav is the President and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery and he’s had a rough go of it recently. All of his own doing but still, rough. He took over for the company after the merger of Discovery and Warner Bros., canceled Batgirl, made it seem as if women don’t like superheroes and completely left out non-binary viewers in his breakdown of the streaming platforms he was merging, and now has decided to speak about the “franchises” he wants to focus on with Warner Bros. Discovery. And it didn’t go great!
At an earnings call, Zaslav said “We haven’t had a Superman movie in 13 years. We haven’t had a Harry Potter movie in 15 years.” Which, couple of things: That’s completely wrong. Even if you’re just focused on the title characters names, that’s still not even close to how long it has been. Man of Steel came out in 2013 and the last Harry Potter movie that wasn’t part of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them franchise came out in 2011.
Maybe he’s just bad at math but I don’t know, if I was in charge of a company and I was talking about the franchises I want to revive, I might want to know a thing or two about them but hey, that’s just me! Deadline went on to detail the rest of Zaslav’s comments, but let’s focus for a second on how he doesn’t seem to know what in the world is happening with his own mega-franchises that he’s so keen on continuing.
Harry Potter hasn’t been gone that long at all
Look, right now, the only thing we can sort of support in the world of Harry Potter are the original movies (if you own them and do not give Rowling more money) because of our sweet good boy Daniel Radcliffe. But even if we look only at the original Harry Potter franchise, the last movie to come out from that specific franchise was in 2011 with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
Since them, we’ve had three movies in the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them franchise come out, the most recent being this year. The Secrets of Dumbledore came out in 2022. So unless I missed where the last fifteen years have gone in the span of a couple of months, I’m pretty sure that someone must have said to David Zaslav, “I don’t know, the last Harry Potter movie was like 15 years ago” and he just ran with it instead of taking a look at his own company.
The Superman of it all
Okay now here is where it gets tricky for Zaslav, I guess. Superman has been … around. Granted, the last time we got a movie that was solely for Superman (and his alter ego Clark Kent) was in 2013, but he also had Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and two different cuts of the Justice League (2017 and 2021) he showed up in prior to his reappearance in the movie Black Adam.
Meaning that there hasn’t exactly been no Superman properties out there. Just not one solely dedicated to Clark Kent. And while yes, I want a Superman movie and Henry Cavill’s comments make it seem as if that is going to happen, it is still … interesting that Zaslav just openly talked about the company he is now in charge of, apparently without knowing what the actual hell is happening there.
(image: Warner Bros.)
