Walter Hamada Signs Two-Year Deal To Stay As DC Films President

Having proven himself in the role and planning out the future, Warner Bros have tied down Walter Hamada as President of DC Films for a further two years.

Variety is reporting that studio will be making the announcement on the deal shortly (so probably by the end of this week) with the extension will take Hamada to 2023 and he’ll continue to work under Chairman of Warner Bros Picture Group, Toby Emmerich.

As you can tell, the label looks after all big-screen DC superhero projects like this year’s Wonder Woman 1984, billion-dollar makers Joker and Aquaman and the upcoming The Batman.

Hamada has been chief of DC Films since 2018 moving across from Warner’s sister studio New Line Cinema handling many of their successful horror slate. A lot of the success was down to his handling of budget transferring into major profit.

This is something he’s brought into DC Films with the main Justice League members Aquaman and Wonder Woman 1984 having a production budget of roughly $200 million. In the case of the King of Atlantis nearly making a profit of five times their budget.

The numbers could’ve been roughly the same of WW84 had it released worldwide in cinemas just a shame the world was on fire for 2020.

Then you have his first DC project while at New Line with Shazam! ($100 million budget) that while it made a cracking $365.9 million, the film was so fantastic it should’ve made more having just scraped a profit.

Meanwhile, Birds of Prey had an $85 million production budget but didn’t make the profit just hitting over $200 million. The nicest thing that could be said is it possibly scraped breaking even, but it’s unlikely.

What helped ease the studio’s pain was a couple of months before was Joker making over a billion on a $55 million budget.

Reportedly Matt Reeves was given a surprisingly moderate budget of $150 million for The Batman.

Hamada’s focus is to bring DC projects to WarnerMedia’s streaming service HBO Max with spinoffs from their films, like Peacemaker spinning off James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and exclusive movies of fan favourites like Batgirl and Static Shock.

It seems those within the studios have enjoyed working with the chief with Ann Sarnoff, Chair and CEO WarnerMedia Studios and Network Group, states Hamada is “an incredibly talented, well-respected executive, known by his colleagues and our filmmakers as a great collaborated.

“I’m excited about where he’s taking DC Films and look forward to working with him and the rest of the team to build out the DC Multiverse” she added.

Throughout the past six months, DC Films has been under the spotlight with an investigation on the Justice League reshoots following star Ray Fisher accusing director Joss Whedon of unspecified misconduct. The investigation concluded last month with “remedial action” taken.