Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav believes DC, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings are all being “underused” by the company.
Per The Wrap, Zaslav was speaking at the Goldman Sachs conference on September 6, 2023, when he commented on how he believes the company’s intellectual property (IP) hasn’t been fully utilized.
“One of the other real strengths of Warner Bros. is we talk about the great IP that Warner Bros. owns,” he 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 specifically pointed out how the company hasn’t had a “long-form” Superman project since 2013’s Man of Steel. Warner Bros. is involved with The CW’s Superman & Lois series but is not the majority shareholder of the network.
“We haven’t done anything with Harry Potter for more than a decade,” Zaslav added. “We haven’t done anything with Lord of the Rings.”
Zaslav said the company needs to “be careful not to overuse the content” before pointing to the increased “shareholder value in attaching a 10-year DC — a real plan around DC, bringing Harry Potter back to HBO for 10 consecutive years, [and] doing multiple movies of Lord of the Rings.”
New DC, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings projects are already in the works
Following August 2023’s release of Blue Beetle, a new DC film, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, is currently scheduled to release on December 20, 2023. Following that, Warner Bros. is rebooting the DC universe under James Gunn and Peter Safran’s supervision, starting with a Creature Commandos television series in 2024 and Superman: Legacy in 2025.
Warner Bros. has returned to the Wizarding World since 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part Two with David Yates’ Fantastic Beasts film series. A new Harry Potter series is also currently in the works for Max.
Fans were brought back to Middle Earth, meanwhile, with Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, which concluded in 2014. The company isn’t involved in Amazon Studios’ The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power television series; however, an animated The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim movie is scheduled to release from Warner Bros. Pictures on December 13, 2024.
