Still one of the biggest entertainment stories of the past twelve months was the decision by WarnerMedia to release all of the Warner Bros. Pictures 2021 feature film slate day-and-date on HBO Max.
WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar was essentially the key person responsible for the decision, one that had a huge impact not just on the budding streaming service but on the movie industry in general with plenty of angry and upset people at first over what seemed a rushed decision.
Speaking on Tuesday at Vox Media’s Code Conference (via THR), Kilar admits he rushed the communication of his decision over the slate and should’ve taken the time to speak with the profit participants impacted by the shift:
“I will be the first one to say, and the responsibility rests on my shoulders, that, in hindsight, we should have taken the better part of a month to have over 170 conversations – which is the number of participants that are in our 2021 film slate. We tried to do that in a compressed period of time, less than a week, because of course there was going to be leaks there was going to be everybody opining on whether we should do this or not do this.”
Despite all the fallout, and Warners committing to a 45-day exclusive theatrical release window for 2022, from Kilar’s perspective it was successful:
“We said from the start that we were going to treat every single film as a blockbuster, from an economic perspective, for participants, that we were going to be fair and generous, we were going to do the right thing. The good news is we did, and we worked our tail ends off to do that. And we’re now in a very good situation.”
Kilar, when asked about the reported $18 billion Netflix is shelling out in content spend this year, says WarnerMedia will spend “north of $18 [billion] both this year and next year”.
He’s also well aware that once AT&T spins off WarnerMedia and Discovery into its new joint venture, a deal expected to close in mid-2022 should regulatory approvals go as planned, his job as WarnerMedia CEO “goes away”. Until that transaction closes though he says he will continue to work to “set up WarnerMedia for the next hundred years”.
