Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has said some of the company's major franchises, such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and DC, have been underutilized and left dormant for too long.
As reported by The Wrap, Zaslav attended the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference on September 6 to talk about Warner Bros. Discovery and its strategies for the future. In particular, he acknowledged the potential of expanding the company's biggest and most well-known franchises.
"One of the other real strengths of Warner Bros. is we talk about the great IP that Warner Bros. owns," Zaslav said. "But, for us, the challenge is that our content, our great IP — Harry Potter, DC, Lord of the Rings — that content has been underused."
Zaslav mentioned that these properties help to set the company apart from others, though he also recognized they have "got to be careful not to overuse the content". However, over the passing of time, he has seen merit in leveraging the company's vast library of IP and creating comprehensive long-term plans around them.
"We haven't done anything with Harry Potter for more than a decade. We haven't done anything with Lord of the Rings," he said. "We think there's a lot of shareholder value in attaching a 10-year DC — a real plan around DC, bringing Harry Potter back to HBO for 10 consecutive years, doing multiple movies of Lord of the Rings.
"When you put those franchises in, it's the best-performing studio in the world," Zaslav further asserted. "We need to deploy our best capital, and we need to do it with the best creative people in the world."
Recent additions to the Wizarding World franchise include the 2022 movie Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, the third installment in the Harry Potter spinoff series, and the video game Hogwarts Legacy, which debuted earlier this year, but the company's next project will be a TV series based on the original books.
Aligning with Zaslav's vision for the company, the new Harry Potter series already has a ten-year commitment, which means its seasons will roll out on Max over a period of ten years. It will be a faithful adaptation of J.K. Rowling's novels, with early reports indicating that each season would cover one book at a time.
There are also more Lord of the Rings movies on the way, thanks to an agreement between New Line, Warner Bros. Pictures and Embracer Group. The deal apparently includes "multiple" films based on J.R.R. Tolkien's series, outside of the animated film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, due out in 2024.
Zaslav also highlighted the lack of a "long-form Superman" project at the studio in the past ten years, with 2013's Man of Steel being the last. The character's next solo outing will be in James Gunn's Superman Legacy, which will mark the true beginning of the new DCU, with David Corenswet taking over the lead role from Henry Cavill.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.
