You Had One Job, David.

There’s something darkly funny to me, in an “inside baseball” office politics way, that Oppenheimer was the vehicle to Christopher Nolan’s Oscar glory that we all witnessed last night. Not only was this movie the first feature-length film he’s directed with the financial and institutional backing of Universal Pictures, it’s his first movie since Memento not distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. He had been putting out films under their umbrella for over twenty years! They entrusted him to resurrect one of their most valuable intellectual properties! That studio has devoted serious amounts of money and time on awards campaigns for pretty much everything he’s directed since The Dark Knight, the smash hit cultural phenomenon whose infamous omission from the Best Picture lineup changed that category forever. They were two peas in a pod since before I even attended high school as a freshman.

But only now, after their relationship soured over Tenet’s distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic and he jumped ship to Universal, has he finally convinced Hollywood to bestow upon him, his longtime producing partner Charles Roven, and his producer/wife Emma Thomas, the title of “Academy Award Winner.” On the night of March 10^th, 2024, they had to watch their man accept the industry’s highest honor wearing a different team’s colors:

Not that he owes Warner Bros. any loyalty. No one owes any for-profit corporation their unconditional loyalty. In this day and age, when it’s getting harder to find backing for any project with a price tag in-between a microbudget indie and a summer tentpole behemoth, any filmmaker can and should take whatever golden opportunity presents itself even if that means ruffling a few feathers among your old business pals over at the other end of the studio lot. But… it’s still pretty funny, right? Especially since he (along with Kevin Feige and Jon Favreau over at Marvel) midwifed into being what became a fifteen-year trend of superhero blockbusters dominating the box office and squeezing out mainstream adult dramas like Oppenheimer from financial viability. In hindsight, Universal was a little insane to agree to the deal Nolan demanded: $100 million production budget that they had to match dollar-for-dollar in their marketing budget, an exclusive theatrical window of at least three months plus another three weeks before and after its release when Universal couldn’t theatrically premiere any new films, oh and also he had to get paid 20% of its first-dollar gross. This three hour-long, dialogue-driven project about a World War II-era scientist would have had to take in at least half-a-billion just to turn a profit. This was shortly after Tenet had been declared an underperformer, by the way.

And still, it might have failed had his former partners at Warner Bros. not engaged in a release date pissing match with him via Barbie that accidentally turned into a meme-driven double-feature cultural juggernaut! And yes, Barbie also made a ton of money and even ended up breaking The Dark Knight’s box office record as the most lucrative movie ever from the studio. Rising tide, boats, etc. But man, there’s got to be at least some grumbling from the higher-ups that they weren’t riding Oppenheimer’s awards wave immediately after ending a partnership with him that was older than the lifetime of actress Jenna Ortega.

But… they made off well with Barbie. Thank goodness for their shareholders that they even had Barbie last year. Because, if you set aside Joey’s favorite film of 2023, their earnings have been… not so hot, lately.

Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement; set aside Greta Gerwig’s pop feminist meta-comedy, and that studio has been throwing gutterballs repeatedly over the last several fiscal quarters. All four installments of their now-dead-and-buried D.C. Extended Universe franchise from last year bombed, with The Flash going down as one of the most catastrophic box office failures in Hollywood history. The Color Purple also bombed, with only a single Best Supporting Actress nomination (which it lost) to show for its aggressive and expensive awards marketing campaign. Magic Mike’s Last Dance barely broke even. It sure seems like everyone who has a financial stake in that company owes her and producer/star Margot Robbie flowers, an expensive bottle of wine, and a handwritten “Thank You” note (and the same to the people behind The Nun II and The Meg 2, I guess) for keeping their company alive through 2023. Or, at least, they deserved something a little kinder than the huffy defensiveness of pundits and has-beens who insisted they positively definitely didn’t deserve Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Lead Actress, respectively.

Heck, if the Oscars really are just a glorified industry validation/marketing scheme that it’s sometimes dismissed as, I am hard-pressed to think of more than a tiny handful of Hollywood figures from last year who could be more deserving of a big “You Won Capitalism” trophy than them. If not from the Academy, then certainly from Warner Bros. Instead, they’ve decided the most deserving of reward is apparently their CEO, David Zaslav. Only he is not getting an Oscar, but rather, enough money for him and his children and his grandchildren to effortlessly live in fabulous luxury for the rest of their lives. He made off with $498,915,318 by the time the strikes that gripped the industry last summer kicked off, and he continues to rake in money that would be literally life-changing for the rest of us. If you were paid one dollar per second, starting right now, you’ll be speculating on the major contenders at the upcoming 112^th Academy Awards in December 2039 before you made that amount of money.

And he’s netting that obscene paycheck to do one thing: ruthlessly pursue growth to make the line go up on those quarterly earnings reports to make the shareholders happy. That’s it. That’s the only thing he has to achieve in exchange for a compensation package exceeding the nominal GDP of Micronesia. I personally think the existence of that kind of job, one apparently so important that it’s entrusted to the top c-suite executive, is a reflection of a sick and broken economic system, but at the very least, you would think guys like Zaslav would be able to meet the one metric by which their performance would be considered successful, and he couldn’t even manage that.

From Cynthia Littleton at Variety:

Warner Bros. Discovery shares were down 9% in pre-market by the end of the company’s hourlong conference call with Wall Street analysts. Shares closed Thursday at $9.56 and were down to around $8.75 shortly after 9 a.m. ET. The stock was down 10% after just two minutes of formal trading as markets opened at 9:30 a.m. ET. By day’s end, the stock was down 10% to $8.61, near an all-time low since WB Discovery was birthed in April 2022 by the merger of AT&T’s WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc.

WB Discovery shares are down 26% for the year to date and down 45% for the past 12 months.

I would love to talk to a member of Warner Bros. Discovery’s board of directors about this. I really would. I would love for one of them to look me in the eye and try to tell me their CEO is a truly one-of-a-kind visionary who delivered results that couldn’t have been replicated or even improved on by any random undergrad fresh out of Boston University. Or the head of a mid-sized film distributor who would have commanded a fraction of what Zaslav is taking in. Do you think those less “seasoned” candidates would have burned the bridges that Zaslav has? Delisted all video games published through Adult Swim? Eliminated the existence of a $90 million-budgeted Batgirl movie entirely? Refused to screen or sell Coyote vs. Acme for a relatively minor tax write-off? Killed off one of the last profitable internet comedy websites after buying up and deleting their independent film project out of… presumably spite? Solidified a reputation among creative professionals as a cynical hack in a fancy suit who’ll ice their projects without so much as a warning or even an explanation? Oh, but don’t worry! He is responding to these embarrassing setbacks by… blaming other people and making vague promises about his “strong attack plan” for next year. Which is, from what I can tell, just trying to replicate the Marvel Cinematic Universe with their D.C. library again and hope for the best because now James Gunn is calling the creative shots instead of Zack Snyder. Wowee. David O. Selznick bows at the feet of such an innovative entrepreneurial mind.

You had one job, David. One. And amazingly, you still have it, despite continuing your abysmal performance that had already netted you the title of “Most Overpaid CEO” a full year ago:

If we’re going to continue centering our entire economic system on this late-stage hypercapitalist dystopia, if we’re going to pretend clawing at unsustainable revenue increases like we’re expecting to find an infinite money glitch in the real world, if we want to continue to delude ourselves into believing this kind of ravenous appetite for year-after-year profit margin increases at the expense of sustainability, occupational safety, a living wage for workers, or even customer satisfaction is, in any way, in our best interests as a society, it’s not too much to demand the business demagogues currently pulling the levers of this odious economic engine be competent at following through on their heartless, destructive corporate mandates. If we’re going to continue to tolerate grotesque income inequality and the ravages of austerity politics, can we at least have some semblance of a reliable return on investment to shareholders? Surely, everyone of every political persuasion can all agree that a CEO who presides over a net loss of more than four times his exorbitant salary during his tenure either shouldn’t be paid that much, or shouldn’t be in that position at all?

What is it going to take? How much more of this incompetence-bordering-on-malfeasance will be tolerated until someone asks these tough questions so we can stop treating these people as if they’re critical job-creating paragons of hard work and bootstraps? Most of them can’t even do the one job they actually have, let alone comprehend the true value of everyone else’s.