It’s always a good week to talk with Franklin Leonard, but particularly now, as Warner Bros. goes up for sale. Still, any notion that the Black List founder and CEO would placate my deep, well-documented concerns about the loss of one of the great studios was quickly dismissed during this week’s Rushfield Lunch.
“I fear that I will not be a particularly good therapist at this moment. I also fear that I’m probably one of the people who is in the ‘this was inevitable’ camp,” Franklin told me about the news. “I tend to think that when you have a largely oligopolistic system, such shifts towards further oligopolism are inevitable.”
Franklin is the first return guest to my weekly confab with the industry’s bright lights and deep thinkers, and so it was refreshing to hear his thoughts — and how there might be hope to find.
“I’m very much a pessimist by nature and an optimist by practice, because I think that’s the only way we get through any of this stuff as human beings. And I think when I try to look for optimism in this, it really is that any hope for salvation that we were placing in the studios was probably always misplaced,” he said.
Franklin has even found some optimism in the idea that Paramount Skydance and David Ellison might swallow Warner Bros.
“I actually think the Ellison thing is really interesting because it seems very obvious to me that David Ellison didn’t buy Paramount to be the seventh biggest player,” he said, echoing comments Janice Min made this week, too. “He has, via his father, near-unlimited resources to build an empire. He can afford to not think about quarterly returns. He can afford to think, ‘Okay, well, what does a media company look like in 20 years? And how am I going to develop the talent that I’ll capitalize on?’”
Watch our great conversation above for more on Franklin’s thoughts on the Warner Bros. sale and how the industry has all but abandoned its self-proclaimed push for diversity behind the camera — and why that’s costing us millions.
