On November 1st of 2022, the news was handed down that DC Films would be rebranded into its own bigger and better division named DC Studios. Peter Safran (the exec producer who directly oversaw the scrappy Conjuring megafranchise) was named as co-CEO, alongside James Gunn (who needs no introduction at this point). The subsequent 43 days produced a flurry of news and gossip and rumors about what Safran and Gunn might be discussing behind closed doors as they plot out the next ten years of DC in film.

My prediction: None of it is going to happen. Sure, films will be greenlit for development. DC Studios will make huge splashy announcements about their road map for the future and all the movies they intend to produce, but not a one of them will ever actually start shooting. At the very least, they won’t start shooting until after WarnerMedia is bought out by another conglomerate. I’ll explain why.

Consider the last time a major Hollywood studio got hit with terminal financial shortfalls: 20th Century Fox. It bears remembering that before Disney was cleared to purchase Fox, they had to compete in a bidding war with Comcast and Sky UK. After all, Fox still had holdings with Marvel and LucasFilm, which any conglomerate might use as leverage against Disney if the Mouse didn’t pay through the nose to get those holdings first. What’s more, Fox had at least one Avatar sequel in active production, which was guaranteed to print money if and when it actually got released. (At least, Avatar: The Way of Water had damn well better make a $2 billion gross worldwide or it could bring the whole damn industry into economic collapse. But I digress.)

The point is that 20th Century Fox was a highly desirable property. And so (as I’ve already discussed multiple times on this blog), 20th Century Fox spent the autumn of 2017 — in the months before the merger was made public that December — on a greenlighting spree, taking every film within reach and rushing it into production as quickly as possible. The Fox executives spent millions of dollars in production costs so they could justify raising the company’s sale price by tens of millions.

With Warner Bros. Discovery, we have the opposite case.

The closest thing that WBD currently has to a billion-dollar blockbuster on the scale of Avatar is goddamn The Flash, a film with a reported $200 million budget that’s hopelessly unpromotable because its marquee star is criminally insane. Speaking of which, DC/WB gambled so big on BvS and Justice League that the company had to get bailed out by AT&T before Justice League was even released. Those gambles didn’t pay out, and while Warner Bros. attempted to pick up the pieces, AT&T was forced to realize that they had neither the vision nor the competence to beat Comcast at their own game.

So it was that in May of 2021, AT&T handed WarnerMedia off to the freaking Discovery Channel (which they also owned), thus creating a new company called “Warner Bros. Discovery”. At the time, everyone was wondering when WBD would be sold to Disney, Amazon, Apple, or some other huge international conglomerate, and why that sale hadn’t happened in the first place.

Because no corporate executive in their right mind would take on a company that owes over $50 billion in debt, that’s why.

So it was that under the direction of Discovery CEO David Zaslav, drastic measures were taken at WBD in the ostensible interest of cutting down on that debt. Departments were shuttered, thousands of workers were laid off, and many near-completed films (most famously the Batgirl film with Leslie Grace) were not only cancelled but written off for tax breaks in such a way that the studio could no longer legally make any money from them. Most recently, HBO Max unceremoniously took many popular series offline (including “Westworld”, which cost roughly half a billion dollars across four seasons to produce) with the stated intention of sending them to third-party free ad-supported streaming services.

These are not the actions of a company that’s interested in doing right by its customers and providing quality entertainment. These are not the actions of executives who are interested in doing right by the contracted filmmakers and union workers who create the products that WBD offers. Hell, these aren’t even the actions of executives who are interested in running a company.

Ever since Zaslav took over, he and his corporate superiors have made it emphatically clear that their one and only interest with WBD is in selling it to somebody who will take it off their hands.

This brings us back to the original question: If the goal is to devalue WBD, why make all these big splashy moves with DC? Because devaluing is only half the equation.

It’s important to remember that the goal is not to devalue WBD, but to sell it. And to sell anything — let alone such a massive property — it must be A) affordable and B) desirable. Significant progress has already been made on the former, as WBD lost $20 billion in market cap this year in the process of trying to cut $3 billion in costs. (That’s “billion” with a big fat B, folks.)

I might add that earlier this month, news broke that Black Adam bombed so hard that WBD stood to lose $50-$100 million on its theatrical run — something star/exec producer Dwayne Johnson went on to publicly refute. It bears mentioning that not only is Dwayne Johnson one of the last bona fide movie stars in the industry, but he was also a significant financial partner with DC/WB by way of his Seven Bucks shingle. Thus WBD made it publicly known that Black Adam was a huge financial loss, and did it in such a way that WBD alienated themselves from a massive cash cow — that’s like a company-devaluing force multiplier.

Furthermore, by switching from Johnson (who was only ever really interested in Black Adam and the antiheroes of DC anyway) over to the team of Safran/Gunn, the WBD execs have a means of making the company affordable while also making it desirable.

Again, look at what 20th Century Fox did right before the Disney merger: They pumped up the production costs to increase their sale value. Because WBD is trying to lower their sale value, they’re going to focus on the development costs. It takes millions of dollars to hire a cast and crew so they can go shoot a movie. Keeping a film in a holding pattern of active development while making big promises about the movie they totally want to make someday costs relatively little.

And all while making those big promises, clickbait articles get generated as the fanbase gets hyped into a frenzy. All these big shiny DC properties that everybody wants to pay to go see, and you — yes, you, Mr. Media Billionaire Tycoon — could be the one to bring it to them. We haven’t even spent all that much money on it ourselves yet, so you can have it for cheap, put the savings toward your production costs, and you get total creative control with 100 percent of the profits.

You just have to buy the rest of WBD to go with it. Pretty sweet deal, huh?

As much as I hope I’m wrong about this, the past couple of years have made it emphatically clear that WBD is where hope goes to die. Yes, DC Studios’ new direction looks like a great idea on paper (so far) and James Gunn is exactly the kind of visionary/spokesperson that such an endeavor would need, especially with someone as ambitious and provably capable as Peter Safran. But no matter what Safran/Gunn says or promises, no matter how pure their intentions may be (and for the record, I believe 100 percent that Safran and Gunn are dealing with everyone in good faith), we can’t forget who they ultimately answer to.

All this stuff with DC Studios is a distraction from the unfolding garbage fire engulfing the rest of WBD. It’s a carrot on a stick that will be kept perpetually just out of reach in the hope that a sale of the company might finally see some forward movement. It is not in WBD’s best interest to put any DC Studios movie into active production because spending that kind of nonexistent money would only put them further into debt while also raising the sale price of the company. Selling a company with so many billions of debt is hard enough, and the C-suite has no reason to make it harder.

WBD will come out with a lot of DC Studios news over the next couple of months, with film journalists and fans on social media working overtime to hype up every announcement and rumor. Proceed with caution and skepticism in the extreme. Until such time as WBD is finally given a paddle, DC Studios will be right there with them up Shit Creek. And so will the rest of us, alas.