Forum - View topicNEWS: Warner Bros. Japan to Produce Over 10 Anime Titles Per Year
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Meowtain Duwu
 Posts: 149 Location: United States |
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I literally forgot about the Cartoon Cartoons revival until I read this *insert skull emoji here* It’s a shame because an animator and artist I follow on Instagram got one of her concepts picked up by the initiative and now I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to see it… 
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Wack Sage
 Posts: 33 |
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Didn't Disney do something like this a few years back? Weren't they they ones who invested in Tokyo Revengers season 2 and Summer Time Rendering or did they just get the streaming license for those shows. I'm curious what this means overall and how involved they will be. More funding for anime based on manga and stuff would be nice so long as Japanese mangaka and directors get creative control.
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rano
Posts: 3 |
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Oh good grief. Still more evidence that if enough people repeat the same stuff on the Internet enough times it will be considered true. Here is some context to what Zaslav did. AT&T bought Warner Bros allegedly because of the need to compete with rival ISP Comcast, who owns Universal, but the real reason was because their CEO at the time wanted to socialize with stars and become mainstream famous. Seriously. Of course, AT&T had absolutely no idea how to run an entertainment company. But because the CEO was desperate to curry favor with Hollywood to get good press, he followed the strategies that the entertainment media was hyping. The problem? We haven't had a real entertainment media for a good 25 years. Those folks now push - to be kind - wishful thinking, fairy tales, pixie dust and pie in the sky. Result? AT&T's operating losses for Warner Bros were so massive that their shareholders forced them to unload WB at a $45 billion loss after 3 years. So should Warner Bros new owners continue the decisions made by an ISP whose starstruck CEO "strategy" was to do whatever would get him good press by the entertainment media? OF COURSE NOT. Instead, the right thing to do is to cancel a bunch of projects that had absolutely no potential to succeed financially and cut their losses. By the way, this is something that routinely occurs when ownership or management changes at a studio. Projects get cancelled and never see the light of day. But the media pretended that Zaslav was doing something unusual and exceptional and ginned up all this controversy. Why? Because Zaslav was pulling the plug on the strategies that the entertainment media advocated for the previous owners to take in the first place! Note that the only people angry at Zaslav over this are the media. The media has been trying to goad the talent into boycotting WB in outrage over their routine behavior. Hasn't happened ... because the actors, producers and directors all know that it is routine behavior. Take a look at some of these projects that got cancelled. Batgirl. A $90 million movie starring a C-list comic book character that wasn't even going to be a traditional take on the character or made in a way designed to appeal to the main demographic. How on earth were they going to make that money back? It wasn't going to be shown in theaters. Though even if it had ... well Birds of Prey, made by the same production team and the same screenwriter, was a huge flop. It was supposed to be the first project in a "Gotham City Sirens" shared universe of female characters from the Batman comics. It was going to encompass theatrical and HBO Max projects. After Birds of Prey failed, WB pulled the plug and Margot Robbie moved on to Barbie. Batgirl only got made in the first place because it was already in production before the whole "Gotham City Sirens" project was mothballed and Robbie moved on. Coyote vs Acme? Well considering the $70 million production budget, a marketing budget of $50 million and the fact that movie theaters get 50% of the take, it needed to make $225 million at the box office to break even. Was it going to do this? Of course not. Hollywood has been trying to tell us for over 10 years that John Cena is an A-list star. He isn't. DC Super Pets, which actually did have real stars in Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, only made $210 million, meaning that with its $90 million budget and proportional marketing expenses, lost WB at least $40 million. Ferdinand, Cena's last big similar project, made $295 million on a $110 million budget - meaning that it also lost tens of millions - and that was in the much better market for family films that existed before the pandemic AND had the Blue Sky name brand going for it. The only film that Zaslav cancelled that had any chance was Scoob because it only had a $40 million budget, and even then it would have only been eventually profitable thanks to DVD, digital plus the longtime Hollywood racket of the movie part of the studio "selling the rights" to the TV/cable/streaming part that is owned by the same studio. Note that Disney fired their former CEO Bob Chapek (in part) for using that shell game to write down/mask losses by shifting them to Disney+ because he thought that there wasn't any pressure for Disney+ to be profitable for 5 years anyway. Granted, Disney had been doing the same for decades, their cable and broadcast networks "buying the rights" to Disney theatrical flops, but those linear networks receive ad revenue to cover the shell game that Disney+ didn't have. And even at WB, that shell game was impossible because WB doesn't own a broadcast network like ABC (unless you count The CW, which WB ditched their stake in after that network never turned a profit in its 15 year existence) and WB's cable networks have been bleeding money. Now of course, not ALL of Warner Bros. bad decisions were set in motion by AT&T. Lots of them were due to the prior owners. Who also failed, which was why they themselves sold WB to AT&T after years of losing billions. But here is the deal: the entertainment media types driving this hate campaign against WB could care less about that company's longterm financial troubles. Instead they are trying to force Comcast to buy WB. Yeah, like Comcast taking on WB's $40+ billion in debt is a good idea. Or Comcast adding WB's money losing cable networks to the ones that Universal owns ON TOP of how Comcast's own cable business is in a long term decline due to cord cutting. Right now at least WB is able to made Max appear profitable with creative accounting, but having to deal with both a struggling Max and an outright disaster area like Peacock will mean that is no longer possible. Of course, the "entertainment media" doesn't care about boring stuff like financials. They just want WB to get a new CEO that they can bully into not cancelling projects that they like regardless of whether those projects have any chance of financial success. Warner Bros is increasing their investment in anime for the same reason that Sony, Disney, AMC and Netflix are: it is making money. Which the projects that Zaslav cancelled were never going to do. |
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MFrontier
Posts: 11370 |
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I wonder if this means the Suicide Squad Isekai director will get to do that Flash anime they wanted?
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Twage
Posts: 358 Location: North Bergen, NJ |
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It's routine to cancel projects in preproduction or that experienced irrecoverable problems during production. Declining to release films that are completely finished is quite unusual.
This is silly. "The media" is not a big conspiracy, and even if it were, no executive is going to listen to "the media" when making decisions.
This is just untrue. Director (https://www.cbr.com/james-gunn-coyote-vs-acme-response/):
Editor:
Star (https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/will-forte-hate-coyote-vs-acme-scrapped-by-wbd-1234958854/):
More cast frustration from Batgirl: https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/batgirl-cancellation-brendan-fraser-michael-keaton You're just saying stuff that's incorrect. |
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yeehaw
 Posts: 426 |
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They're obviously joking |
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MysticGon
Posts: 43 |
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That's what you want to see. Motivated by quotas, who needs passion and vision. I hope the animators, actors and writers they rope into this don't lose hope. And shame on the studio heads that rush to ink a deal with WB. This quick payday will not be the win you think it is.
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jdnation
Posts: 2004 |
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It is unusual, but with good reason. 1. They'd be spending more money to release and market a certified bomb. Mat as well throw that money away. 2. If it was that bad, even throwing it on streaming would risk damaging the brand. Better foresight to do another Batgirl in the future than poison it as they did to Catwoman.
You'd be surprised to what level, executives, shareholders, politicians etc. can fall prey to what "the media" says, as the same for the general public. Disney is another company committed to financial suicide as a result of Bob Iger's obsession with narratives, and even in video game, products are be ruined due to decision making that takes its cues from the media echo chamber rather than from the actual market. The electric vehicle boondoggle will be another example for the history books. |
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King Chicken
 Posts: 91 |
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Warner Bros. Japan has already produced like a hundred series so far so this isn't exactly new, but it does feel like another nail in the coffin for a lot of American animation when more and more companies would rather invest into anime than build up their own studios and projects.
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smurky turkey
Posts: 1969 |
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Like others have said there is already a ton of anime every season, so much so that being picky still means having a lot to watch. There is such a thing as oversaturation and there not being enough viewers to keep up with the ever increasing supply.
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Avec ou Nous
Posts: 106 |
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Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. I've genuinely see people say there's no good anime being made despite having near 100 options at any given time from new and continuing shows. |
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Nigel Planter
Posts: 69 Location: London, UK |
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To be fair all the stuff people complain about being shelved did not sound good at all. Pretty sure people were trashing that Batgirl movie from all the info we had pre-release from the get-go. They probably just saw that and figured it wouldn't make enough money to justify further expenses. And did we really need yet another live-action hybrid Looney Tunes film? Like, okay, the original Space Jam was charming, but the sequel wasn't good and didn't do amazing, and the previous one from ages ago Back in Action was even worse. Investing that money into anime seems like a smarter decision. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5951 |
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Oh for fudge’s sake.
And unsurprisingly they’re doing the same thing they complained about in their opening statement of telling a lie enough times to make it true. Zaslev. f’ed. Up These people can ague against this fact however they want as much as they want. But doing this when few people around have bought into this and for good reason. Is just the height of pointlessness.
And yet Flash was a certified bomb one that was in production before the new regime took over and one that Zaslev himself thought was good but that didn’t get thrown out or locked away and they lost their asses on that one.
This idea would make sense if Warner Bros hadn’t throughout its history made multiple underperforming and terrible Batman & Superman films and kept doing more after awhile. Not to mention there is no guarantee there will be another attempt at a Batgirl film whether Gunn-Safran’s new DC Cinematic Universe succeeds or not.
Sure hope you remember that Iger’s predecessor himself had overseen a number of questionable decisions in his tenure that was a big reason for why Iger who originally stepped down coming back to the company. I also hope you’re not implying that Disney’s present problems have to do with pissing off a bunch of people who think having strong and competently written ethnic or female characters or openly gay/trans/non binary people on screen is somehow a bad thing. I also hope those history books detailing the electric car will spare no detail in explaining the role of the fossil fuel & automotive industry in sabotaging the electric car’s ability to make headway into the market. Granted the industry and some of its major players have made some **cough** questionable decisions and statements but that last part is key.
Okay and what happens when this bubble bursts? As they almost always do? This already happened once before in the anime industry. |
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L'Imperatore
 Posts: 829 |
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If I'm reading the article correctly, this is about WB Japan, which has been in anime industry since 2011, increasing its annual output.
Why is (almost) everyone debating about the deeds of (heh) evil father on the other side of the Pacific? |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5951 |
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Only two reasons I can guess
1. Is because Warner Bros has a spotty track record in their own wheelhouse and also outside of it. 2. Western companies investing/jumping into anime is a bit divisive among anime fans |
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