Donna Langley, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment & Studios, is not a fan of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combining. “I think it is bad. I think it’s bad for everything,” she said bluntly, addressing the feature film market in particular.
“What this year has proven is, if you build it, they will come. Right? If you have the right mix of films in a steady diet for the audience, they’re going to show up. And we’re also cultivating this great habit with young people, who are coming to the cinema and we need to keep them there. So volume matters, and if we if we essentially lose a studio — which is I know not the stated plan and goal — but if we lose a studio, it’s bad … Look back at Fox-Disney. It wasn’t great, she said during a Q&A at the Bloomberg Screentime conference.
Paramount has committed to a legal settlement calling for the combined studios to release 30 theatrical films a year for the first two years post-merger, and 32 films for the following three years. The deal is expected to close next Tuesday.
Last fall, Universal detached the prolific Tyler Sheridan from his longtime studio home at Par for a new five-year film and television deal starting in early 2029. Asked how, Langley said, “Look, I think I saw an opportunity, with disruption and instability at moments where companies are going through something. And you know they are just moments to kind of look around the marketplace and see if there’s a competitive advantage. But really, where I started talking to Taylor was about film, because I knew that he had a film deal at Paramount but it was a first look deal, didn’t have as many teeth to it as his television deal. That’s how it started, and then we just got to talking, and one thing led to another.”
NBCU itself is in the midst of big corporate wrangling as parent Comcast plans to spin it off with Sky into a standalone, publicly traded company. “I’m mostly excited and optimistic about it. I’m not fearful of it at all, actually. I think it’s going to be good … Not to be tethered to a legacy business, Comcast, where the stock has struggled for a while, is a good thing.
“Now we are going to be the masters of our own destiny. It is more pressure. But in our neck of the woods, when you have to open movies, you know, however many times a year, there’s no more pressure than that.” She acknowledged “the scale question, of course,” but said it will be interesting for the slimmed down company to explore “at a moment of this real historical transformational change, what else can we be doing, and where else should we be playing in terms of growth.”
The head of the number one movie studio in the world this year in the best overall box office since the pandemic, is more cautions about next year. “I think 2027 has a different complexion to it. I don’t think it has as much potential for the kind of big billion-dollar hits like this year, if you think about the breakouts, the ones that were surprises … But I think ‘28 will be kind of back again.”
“But you know, you really never know. I mean, I think if this year taught us anything, it was so exciting because it sort of reminds you that one of the fun things about this business is that surprises can always happen, good or bad. Luckily, it was good.”
Universal’s Christopher Nolan’s epicThe Odyssey is a juggernaut led and Obsession from Focus Features one of the year’s unexpected hits.
“They were both surprises for different reasons. I felt very confident that The Odyssey was going to cross a billion and then some. But the play-out pattern was so extraordinary. I mean, the fact that in week three we actually outgrossed the second week. It was just filled with surprises all the way along.”
Obsession “was just a good old-fashioned over-performing surprise. We knew we had something that could hit the cultural zeitgeist when we apparently, according to reports, overpaid for it in Toronto … We caught lightning in a bottle.”
The studio acquired the film for $15 million and it went on to gross over $500 million worldwide.
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