Kevin Tsujihara has left his role as Warner Bros Entertainment Chairman and CEO after six years in the role.
Kevin Tsujihara has left his role as Warner Bros Entertainment Chairman and CEO after six years in the role.
This story is a very inside baseball Hollywood story, but it’s so incredibly interesting that it’s only right for The Bear Cave to cover it.
It started with The Hollywood Reporter breaking the story on March 6, revealing that old Kev was involved in some shady shit and basically text messages between the executive and an actress called Charlotte Kirk.
These texts showed that Tsuijhara would push producers and directors to give the actress auditions. It also hinted there was an apparent sexual relationship between the two and it worked but not as well as I’m sure Kirk was hoping because instead of getting cast in films like Wonder Woman, she was in films like How To Be Single in 2016 and 2018’s Ocean’s 8.
It must be stress this isn’t a Harvey Weinstein situation because by the overall thoughts of the THR story is she was using the WB CEO and Kevin can be accused of being a fucking idiot.
Since the story has come out, I seriously suggest you reading it because it’s fantastic journalism by Kim Masters and Tatiana Siegel, Tsujihara was investigated by WarnerMedia for the third time and lead to this resignation, which I wouldn’t be surprised included a very big golden handshake.
This is the big move for new WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey after telecommunications company AT&T bought Time Warner between $85 billion to $105 billion and now the eyes in Hollywood will be on who he picks to replace and today Stankey will announce an interim leadership team to control of the all the sectors Kev oversaw.
When the news broke yesterday there was seemingly a big cheer amongst filmmakers and creatives as by Eric Vespe tweet Tsujihara was the typical studio exec only caring about making money instead of the film itself as showcased by the handling of Justice League.
The question is now who replaces him and becomes chairman and CEO Warner Bros Entertainment and for the interim, I can see three names.
The first will be Toby Emmerich who is chairman of the Warner Bros. Picture Group as thank you for all the work he’s done in the role giving the WBPG their most successful year in 2018 making a global box office of $5.57 billion.
The next will come from WB’s sister studio New Line Cinema, with President and Chief Creative Officer Richard Brener as he’s been overseeing as an executive producer of some of the studios most successful films.
The third also comes from New Line, Carolyn Blackwood is also the President at the sister studio as well as being Chief Content Officer and she oversees the strategic direction for the studio. Additionally, is involved in all production, business and legal matters and as a hand in marketing, distribution and home entertainment amongst other things.
I can only see this a short term thing as WB gets stable once again and have someone come in and take full control.
The name reported by The Wrap is Stacey Snider.
Snider has plenty of experience having run Universal Pictures, Dreamworks and is currently Chairman and CEO at 20th Century Fox and will be out of a job once the Fox/Disney merger.
Industry veterans have told the US trade that Snider is the best candidate “[Stacey] makes complete sense. It’s just obvious. It’s too perfect.”
She’s an outsider and would bring the studio a new and fresh point of view and being a female executive in the #MeToo era would be a sign of progress. Plus she would be doing the same job but at the second biggest movie studio.
The other name floating around is Amy Pascal as she was Chairwoman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, but she has recently formed her own company, Pascal Pictures that oversaw films such as Spider-Man: Homecoming & Spider-Man: Far From Home as well as Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Little Women.
It’s going to be an interesting couple of weeks at Warner Bros and know The Bear Cave will be keeping an eye on it.
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