Warner Bros Discovery’s film studio has been through a series of shake ups this year, most recently with the exit of Courtenay Valenti, the ascendance of Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy and the unsuccessful negotiations with Dan Lin to run DC. Despite the tumult, the studio has one very powerful ally as it tries to find its cadence.
“It’s a unique time in the superhero genre, where there’s the introduction of fresh blood and new characters on both sides of the aisle — at Marvel and certainly at DC,” Dwayne Johnson, who will catapult DC’s Black Adam into the universe this weekend, told the New York Times this week. “And the launching of Black Adam is converging with a time where they are also bringing in new leadership at Warner Bros. and new leadership on the DC side is soon to be coming in. I feel very confident about the direction of the DC universe. It is going to require real strategy and real leadership. And that requires us not to look at Marvel’s success and say, let’s follow that blueprint. That’s Marvel. I’m very happy for them. We don’t want to be Marvel, in my opinion. We want to be DC and we want to do it our way.”
That “we” is important, since it indicates buy in and a sense of partnership from Johnson, who hopes his passion project, Black Adam, is just the beginning of the collaboration.
“I have been saying for some time, there’s a new era in the DC Universe that’s about to begin,” Johnson said. “What I really meant by, ‘This is a new era in the DC Universe,’ is listening to the fans. And doing our best to give the fans what they want.”
That may include a clash with a certain caped Kryptonian.
Johnson has said he wants to see Black Adam fight his closest superequal, Superman. “Absolutely,” he recently told Deadline’s sister publication, Indiewire. “That is the whole point of this, man.”
Warner Bros Discovery boss David Zazlav is on board.
“We have done a reset. We’ve structured the business,” Zaslav announced during the company’s August earning call. “There will be a team with a 10-year plan focusing just on DC. It’s very similar to the structure that Alan Horn and Bob Iger put together very effectively with Kevin Feige at Disney. We think we could build a long-term, much more sustainable growth business out of DC, and as part of that, we’re going to focus on quality. We’re not going to release any film before it’s ready.”