During a keynote session at C21Media’s annual content event in London this week, Channing Dungey, President of Warner Bros. Television Studios, spoke about some of the new projects the company plans to undertake as part of Zaslav’s vision for its future.
Dongy is particularly enthusiastic about her department, and cites Zaslav’s openness to collaborating with outside production groups as one of the main reasons for that. And unlike the old boss who felt like staying with the company, Dongy said Zaslav was more keen on the idea of working with others and porting the studio’s content to platforms he didn’t directly own.
And while Dongy didn’t go into detail about what all of Amazon’s big deal entails, such as whether these new projects will live on both Amazon Prime and HBO Max, Zaslav made clear his desire to double down on existing works on characters like Superman. Zaslav also mentioned that he’s interested in returning to the Harry Potter universe to capitalize on the character’s still-existent popularity, and Dungy confirmed that and said the studio is currently having a number of different conversations about it.
Asked if something was imminent on the horizon, Dungey said: “Our team did a great special Coming Back to Hogwarts for HBO last year and it had such tremendous resonance, and then we did a quiz show on The Tournament of Houses, which was hosted by Helen Mirren. The fans are ready, they want more, so we’re just working to figure out the right next step.”
And in light of the recent round of layoffs and restructuring at Warner Bros. Television, it only makes sense for the studio to move to outsourcing some of that work to third parties. But the company, which relies on Amazon to produce content of a superhero nature, is also trying to figure out how to preserve its ancient legacy, which is somewhat frustrating to some, and makes it seem as if Zaslav intends to stick to his guns by returning to the company’s previously successful business. Virg.