In a rare appearance for a corporate CEO at CinemaCon, Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav took the stage Tuesday at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas — a visual show of support for an industry he’s been pumping since he took the reins of newly merged WBD last year.
“We do not believe in streaming movies,” the exec flat-out told the giant annual industry confab of theater owners before the Warner Bros. presentation. “Movies [in theaters] perform substantially better when we bring them to HBO Max than any of the direct-to-streaming movies. We said it nine months ago, and we said it six moths ago. We have never felt stronger about it.”
He added: “There’s no purer form of storytelling than the motion picture business. … [WBD is] not in the retail business, not in cable, not broadband, not phone. We are just storytellers.”
Zaslav said Warner was down to six movies a year at the merger. “We are up to 16 movies, and we want to do more than 20 [a year]. We are all in over the next couple of years with motion picture storytelling, but we do need your help,” he noted, asking for theater owners who haven’t to step up their game.
“We need to innovate the experience,” Zaslav said. “To focus on getting people into the theaters, in an environment that continues to be contemporary. A lot if what you are doing has been helping. If we can do that, this industry will be stronger than it’s ever been.”
Warner had some fences to mend after the studio, under previous owner AT&T, shocked the entertainment industry with a 2021 theatrical day-and-date pandemic plan on streamer HBO Max. Talent was aghast, never mind theaters, which were struggling to emerge from extended closures and rebuild. Zaslav has since became Hollywood’s biggest booster of theatrical windows, believing that collapsing them squeezes revenue and streaming viewership. Most studios, even big streamers like Apple and Amazon, are coming around to that.
New Line’s horror pic Evil Dead Rise opened to $25 million this weekend after originally intended for HBO Max.
Zaslav said the industry has an obligation, recalling how he fell in love with movies as a kid in Brooklyn. Main Streets around the country need all their theaters reopened, he said, with blockbusters, “romantic comedies, gangster films, Batman, Superman.”
He added that it’s not just good business but, “we’ve got to rally right now it. It’s a moment when people need to be entertained, to be inspired.”
CinemaCon, the annual convention of movie theater owners from around the world, runs through Thursday at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
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