The house that Freddy built is coming down. As previously rumored, New Line Cinema co-chairmen and co-CEOs Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne will leave the studio as part of a consolidation of Time Warner's film operations unveiled Thursday afternoon. In addition, New Line will stay in tact but will now be working hand-in-hand with Warner Bros. in releasing films in the future. You can read all about it inside.
They are, however, "in discussions about possible future business relationships with the company," TW said.
As expected, the conglomerate announced the consolidation of its filmed entertainment businesses, Warner Bros. Entertainment and New Line, with the latter being operated as a unit of Warner Bros.
New Line will maintain separate development, production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operations. However, it will "closely integrate and coordinate those functions with Warner Bros. to maximize film performance and operating efficiencies, achieve significant cost savings, and improve margins," TW said.
"We are moving quickly to improve our business performance and financial returns," TW CEO Jeff Bewkes said. "Given the trend toward fewer movie releases, New Line and Warner Bros. will now have more complementary release slates, with New Line focusing on genres that have been its strength.
"New Line has been our respective life's work as well as our second family," Shaye and Lynne said. "While we're sad to be leaving, we're enormously proud to have overseen its extraordinary growth." They added that they "will now focus our efforts on exploring new entrepreneurial opportunities."
You can read the letter sent out to the company here
I agree, this is sad. I've been following the events of the New Line closure for a while now, and I'm sad that it's being scaled down and that Shaye is leaving. I hope he creates a new production company, that'd be great.
Welcome to the "future of corporate run motion picture studios" [or "corporate owned entertainment companies"] .... where consolidation into ONE MAIN UNIT means we will be seeing less independent / special interest [and more pink slips - as in many lay offs] .... it's been going on in Hollywood for almost a decade [movie, television, music] and part of the blame is a lack of knowing what the consumers want [quit 2nd guessing genre fans, give us quality over quantity, it doesn't have to be a 100 million + costing cgi fest]!!!
~(^)~
I think we all feel the same. Most of the great horror movies over the years actually didn't cost that much to make - and had good returns in revenue. They are now trying to spend more on them to try to make more money back. But when more money is on the line they get scared to be original for fear of losing money so most of them turn into PG-13 kiddie romps. Make them great, original, scary, gory, and cheap like they used to and they will make money. It might not be 100 million but it's better than losing money like I'm sure they have been with most of the shit that been put out lately. Can we all agree on this?
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They are, however, "in discussions about possible future business relationships with the company," TW said.
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