It’s a little maddening existing. Specifically, it’s enraging watching so many powerful people ignore the past just to stuff a few extra dollars into their pockets. We know what happens when you cut down environmental protection and measures to curb pollution in people’s drinking water. Let’s slash those anyway! History has shown America diving into wars in the Middle East for oil does nothing but inspire bloodshed and carnage. Let’s do it anyway! Hopping onto tech trends only Wall Street bros and Silicon Valley losers deem “the future” merely produces entities like Quibi and the Metaverse. Let’s put everyone’s money into generative AI bullshit anyway!
For Hollywood right now, the same thing is happening regarding Skydance’s proposed purchase of Warner Bros. Skydance would own two major studios in this regard, following its absorption of Paramount Pictures last year. It’s clear this is a terrible idea. Having two massive studios owned by one company, nope, warning signs going off. However, so many prolific figures in the entertainment industry are greeting the news with either a shrug or attempts to curry the favor of Skydance head David Ellison should he gain control of Warner Bros.
Deadline Hollywood described recent questions lobbed at Ellison about the proposed mega-merger as “softball” queries. Former Warner Bros. Pictures head Toby Emmerich said he feels the merger is a good thing and expressed hopes that the combined company would distribute films from his new production label. Openly conservative producer Jerry Bruckheimer, meanwhile, has openly supported the Skydance merger. Of course, he would. He’s rich and sheltered enough to withstand any negative consequences from two movie studios becoming basically one. Meanwhile, working-class organizations like Hollywood teamsters or the theater owners’ representative group Cinema United have openly opposed this proposed merger on many grounds.
These opponents have wisely pointed out how 20th Century Fox’s output decreased dramatically once the studio was bought by Disney. Movie theaters and the general box office have since suffered. If they want another example of what horrors happen when movie studios consolidate, though, may I suggest referencing the poor struggles of New Line Cinema? Once a prosperous standalone studio, it was shuttered into a Warner Bros. division in the late 2000s. Cinema has suffered for that ever since.
New Line Cinema As An Independent Studio
1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, though, launched New Line Cinema into the stratosphere and new levels of notoriety. The studio expanded its operations, but didn’t stop handling motion pictures many other studios and distributors wouldn’t touch. For instance, in September 1984, New Line released Buddies, a terrific movie that served as one of American cinema’s first explorations of the AIDS crisis. New Line also released fellow queer cinema staple Torch Song Trilogy in the final weeks of 1988 and, at the dawn of the 90s, this label put House Party into theaters. Similarly, when nobody else wanted to take on distribution rights to the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, New Line Cinema stepped up to the plate and made a fortune in the process.
Between New Line Cinema and Fine Line, 16 New Line-owned movies got theatrical releases in 1999. New Line put out the same number of titles across its two divisions in 2002. Warner Bros. put out 23(!!!) separate new theatrical releases the same year. Unfortunately, New Line would cease to function as a standalone entity by the start of 2008. New Line’s attempts to recreate that Lord of the Rings box office success with misguided, costly misfires like The Golden Compass had sunk the studio’s fortunes. TimeWarner announced in late Feburary 2008 that Warner Bros. would be the company’s only theatrical film studio going forward. Picturehouse (an arthouse label successor to Fine Line Features) was dead. New Line was now a Warner Bros. division.
“New Line Cinema Is Dead. Bury It.”
For the next two years, Warner Bros. released a deluge of new releases (like The Final Destination, Sex and the City: The Movie, He’s Just Not That Into You, Four Christmases, and more) that were already green-lit and/or filmed before New Line’s demise. By 2010, though, it was clear New Line was in a new era. Only four new movies featured the New Line logo that year. Compare that to the 11 features New Line Cinema released three years earlier in 2007, or its 10 features in 2006 and 2005. In 2012, the nadir of New Line’s existence, Warner Bros. only put out three films under this label. Just looking at the raw numbers here makes it apparent: corporate consolidation cost the film industry dearly. Fewer jobs, fewer titles for movie theaters to play, and fewer artistic endeavors were created after TimeWarner merged New Line into Warner Bros.
Initially, New Line Cinema’s fate under Warner Bros. appeared to be similar to 20th Century Fox’s fate under Disney leadership: a label for sequels to old movies, but nothing new. WB was happy to use the New Line Cinema logo for Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, and Final Destination 5. From 2010 to 2012, though, it looked like the age of fresh New Line Cinema films was over. Thankfully, 2013’s The Conjuring breathed new life into New Line and allowed the label to slightly expand its annual output.
Still, New Line, even with Conjuring and the It movies under its belt, was a shell of its former self. Excluding MGM co-productions, MGM only put out five films in 2016. The previous year, it only put out four titles (again, exempting MGM movies like Hot Pursuit and Creed). The closest the 2010s had to an “old school” year for New Line Cinema was 2019, when the label was attached to nine different movies. That included British indie Blinded by the Light, a Sundance 2019 sensation New Line acquired. A smaller scale independent title like that harkened back to the earliest days of New Line and the kind of output that used to be its bread and butter.
Aside from 2019, though, New Line’s annual output has been significantly limited and often comprises franchise titles rather than the originals/non-sequels it used to take risks on. Recent features like Companion and Weapons are exceptions to the default releases Warner Bros. shuffles under the New Line banner. The days of New Line and Fine Line Features offering havens for John Waters movies, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, My Own Private Idaho, Buddies, and more have been replaced by endless Conjuring sequels and spin-offs. New Line’s annual theatrical output is often 75% less than its typical slate when it was a standalone entity.
What We Lose When Studios Consolidate
Studio consolidation is not sad because we’ll see a certain movie studio logo less or because change is inherently bad. It’s because it only benefits the most powerful people. Reducing competition and how many studios to operate provides more dollars for the top executives of whoever owns Warner Bros. this week. It sure doesn’t offer more choices or variety for the consumer, though. It also doesn’t help ensure there are options in the marketplace for filmmakers and artists needing distributors.
To boot, New Line Cinema and Fine Line Features, as part of their “let’s take some risks” practice, helped get films from marginalized artists off the ground. In addition to the LGBTQIA+ movies I’ve already mentioned, there was a slew of features from Black filmmakers that got made at New Line Cinema. Love & Basketball, for instance, was a New Line Cinema release. Ditto other titles from Black artists like Bamboozled, Set It Off, and B*A*P*S, among many other titles, were also New Line/Fine Line titles. Since 2013, Blinded by the Light (an outside acquisition) is the only film helmed by a woman of color to get released by New Line Cinema. Reducing this studio to being a Warner Bros. label, whether intentional or not, deprived the world of more art from non-white voices.
New Line Cinema is one of the most tragic examples of this phenomenon (and, ironically, a cautionary tale its larger sister company, Warner Bros., seems doomed to mimic). New Line once was the place that steadily supplied all kinds of movies to theaters and birthed the careers of John Waters, Gina Prince-bythewood, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, John Cameron Mitchell, and more. Heck, we have the Lord of the Rings trilogy because of this studio. In the 2020s, though, it’s the home of Black Adam and a series of reboots/remakes (like new Mortal Kombat, Final Destination, and Conjuring outings) exploiting its legacy.
Both its volume of new theatrical releases and risk-taking (each of which theaters need to survive) are gone. Do not listen to the press release-ready jargon of David Ellison. Gaze upon the dwindled modern incarnation of New Line Cinema to witness what happens when movie studio consolidation goes unchecked. Mergers obliterate jobs. They do not create them.