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    Warner Bros. Suspends Deals With Top Show Creators

    The move, which affected star writers like Mindy Kaling and J.J. Abrams, is an escalation of the standoff between Hollywood studios and the Writers Guild of America.When television and movie writers went on strike in May, studios quickly suspended certain first-look deals — mostly those for lesser-established writers. Star show creators like Mindy Kaling and J.J. Abrams were kept on the payroll. Worried about keeping them happy, even during a walkout, studios left their multimillion-dollar deals alone, shielding them from the pain of the strike.No more.In an escalation of the standoff between studios and the Writers Guild of America — it has entered its fifth month, with no end in sight — Warner Bros. moved late Wednesday to suspend deals with the 1 percent of television writers. That includes Ms. Kaling, a creator of the Max series “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” and Mr. Abrams, whose recent television efforts include “Duster,” a coming thriller set in the 1970s, according to two people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private suspension notices.Warner Bros. also suspended deals with Greg Berlanti (“Superman & Lois”) and Bill Lawrence (“Ted Lasso”), among others, the people said.A spokeswoman for Warner Bros. declined to comment. Representatives for the writers either declined to comment or did not return calls. A spokesman for the Writers Guild of America had no immediate response.Top writers have contractual protections that will ultimately enable them to receive all the compensation promised in their original deals. Warner Bros. is doing what is known as “suspend and extend,” according to the people briefed on the matter, meaning that the studio will halt payments for the duration of the strike — and then, when work resumes, extend the contracts by the amount of time they were suspended.The suspension of the A-lister deals suggests that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, expects the strike to continue into the fall. (A representative for the studio alliance declined to comment.) Studio executives had signaled that Labor Day was an inflection point; the industry’s sitting idle beyond that date would have a severe impact on the 2024 release calendar, particularly for movies.J.J. Abrams’s deal was also suspended. The move can exert more pressure on the striking writers guild.Jerod Harris/Getty ImagesWarner Bros. Discovery said in a securities filing on Tuesday that the Hollywood strikes — tens of thousands of actors joined writers on picket lines in mid-July, the first time both unions have been on strike at the same time since 1960 — would negatively affect its 2023 earnings by up to $500 million.“We are trying to get this resolved in a way that’s really fair and everyone feels fairly treated,” David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, said at a Goldman Sachs event on Wednesday. “Having said that, in our guidance, we said that this would be resolved by September. And here we are in September. This is really a very unusual event — the last time it happened was 1960.”Suspending the deals of prominent writers is one way for the studios to try to put pressure on the Writers Guild. During the last writers’ strike, in 2007, a small group of showrunners agitated for union leadership to settle with the studios as the stalemate wore on. That strike lasted 100 days; the current strike is now at the 128-day mark.Studio officials and Writers Guild negotiators have not met formally since Aug. 23, when talks broke off for the second time and the companies publicly released their latest offer in an appeal to rank-and-file members. Studios were hoping the offer would look good enough for members to pressure their leaders to make a deal.But the move seemed to have the opposite effect, instilling the 11,500-member Writers Guild with renewed resolve to keep fighting. “The companies’ counteroffer is neither nothing, nor nearly enough,” guild leaders said in a note to members on Aug. 24. “We will continue to advocate for proposals that fully address our issues rather than accept half measures.”The studios defended their proposal as offering the highest wage increase to writers in more than three decades. The studios also said that they had offered “landmark protections” against artificial intelligence, and that they vowed to offer some degree of streaming viewership data to the guild, information that had previously been held under lock and key.Both the writers and the actors have called this moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era has deteriorated their working conditions as well as their compensation levels.Nicole Sperling More

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    Can Paramount+ Succeed? One Producer Hopes to Make It So.

    Like so many other writer-directors, Alex Kurtzman grew up worshiping film.But he is adaptable — and in the streaming era, that is a very lucrative trait.Mr. Kurtzman, the onetime writer of the “Transformers” movies and the director of the 2017 film “The Mummy,” recently renegotiated his deal at CBS Studios into one of the richest there. Under the $160 million, five-and-a-half-year agreement, he will continue to shepherd the growing “Star Trek” television universe for ViacomCBS’s Paramount+ streaming platform.He will also create shows, including a limited series based on “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” which he will direct for Showtime, and the long-awaited adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” That limited series is likely to be sold to an outside streaming service.Mr. Kurtzman’s deal is the latest in a string intended to give prolific producers, like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy for Netflix and Jordan Peele with Amazon Studios, free rein to create content that can feed insatiable consumer appetites and hopefully boost subscriptions for streaming. This one puts the ambitions of CBS Studios — the production arm for the networks and channels under the ViacomCBS umbrella — squarely in the hands of the 47-year-old Mr. Kurtzman.“From the first meeting I had with Alex, it was so obvious to me that he’s our future,” George Cheeks, the president and chief executive of the CBS Entertainment Group, said in an interview. “The guy can develop for broadcast. He can develop for premium streaming, broad streaming. He understands the business. He’s got tremendous empathy. He’s creatively nimble.“When you make these investments,” Mr. Cheeks continued, “you need to know that this talent can actually deliver multiple projects at the same time across multiple platforms.”“Star Trek: Discovery” is one of five “Star Trek” shows that Mr. Kurtzman has produced.Michael Gibson/CBSThe road ahead won’t be easy for ViacomCBS. Its fledgling Paramount+ was a late entry into streaming, and is essentially a rebranded and expanded version of CBS All Access. The company promotes the service’s news and live sports, including National Football League games, along with “a mountain of movies.” (“A Quiet Place 2” debuted on it on July 13.) But Paramount+, in combination with a smaller Showtime streaming offering, had just 36 million subscribers as of May.While it hopes to reach 65 million to 75 million global subscribers by 2024, that’s still a far cry from Netflix’s worldwide total of almost 210 million and the nearly 104 million for Disney+. Even NBCUniversal announced on Thursday that it had 54 million subscribers for its Peacock streaming service, thanks to an Olympic push.And with consolidation mania consuming Hollywood, many analysts are not confident that ViacomCBS will be able to continue to compete with the larger companies on its own.“I think it’s hard to imagine any of these companies going it alone; I think they are all too small,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners. “The challenge, whether it’s Peacock, Paramount+, Disney+ or Hulu, is that all of these companies are still conflicted over what do they put on linear TV, what do they put in a movie theater and what do they put on streaming.“Netflix, Amazon and Apple do not have that debate every day,” he added. “All their assets go into one thing. Here, they have to balance, and that makes all of their streaming services suboptimal.”Those corporate considerations don’t seem to bother Mr. Kurtzman. Rather than bemoaning the diminished state of movies or anguishing over the lack of viable buyers as the market shrinks, he said he was finding the current climate to be creatively invigorating and remarkably fluid.Mr. Kurtzman said he wanted to make the “Star Trek” universe as expansive as the Marvel universe.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“I do believe that the line between movies and television is gone now, and that to me is a tremendous opportunity,” he said in an interview. “For me and for showrunners like me, we can tell stories in a new way. We are not limited by the narrow definition of how you tell a story — something must be told in 10 hours, or something must be told in two hours.”Mr. Kurtzman began working with CBS in 2009 when he developed the reboot of “Hawaii Five-0” with his former writing partner, Roberto Orci. In 2017, he began reimagining the “Star Trek” universe for the company, building on his familiarity with the franchise after co-writing the two J.J. Abrams-directed “Star Trek” movies several years earlier.Since then, he has produced five shows in the universe initially imagined in the 1960s by Gene Roddenberry, and all will be on Paramount+. They are “Star Trek: Discovery”; “Star Trek: Picard”; “Star Trek: Lower Decks”; “Star Trek: Prodigy,” which will debut in the fall; and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” set for release in 2022. ViacomCBS says “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Star Trek: Picard” are among the most watched original series on Paramount+.Also in the works are “Section 31,” starring Michelle Yeoh, and a show built around the “Starfleet Academy,” which will be aimed at a younger audience.But how much “Star Trek” does one planet need?“I think we’re just getting started,” Mr. Kurtzman said. “There’s just so much more to be had.”He recently finished a four-month shoot in London for the first half of “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” a 10-episode series based on the 1976 David Bowie film. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a new alien character who arrives on Earth at a turning point in human evolution.Mr. Kurtzman said he loved the experience of working on the series, buoyed by the fact that the pandemic allowed him and his writing partner, Jenny Lumet, the opportunity to complete all the episodes before production began.“I would absolutely not be doing anything differently if we were making this as a film,” he said. “I’m working with movie stars in three different countries, shooting sequences that are certainly not typical television sequences, all of which I can only do because of my experience working in films.”Ms. Lumet met Mr. Kurtzman in 2015. He requested getting together after seeing the film “Rachel Getting Married,” which she wrote. Ms. Lumet said she was surprised that this “sci-fi robot guy in khakis” was interested in meeting her at all.“All he wanted to do was talk about tiny moments, tiny real moments in movies and tiny moments in television shows, and he was so gentle and willing to listen,” she said. “Usually, the robot guys aren’t willing to listen to anything, and that’s all he wanted to do. It was really cool.”The two have worked on everything from “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” to the short-lived “Clarice” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” Next, they plan to tackle the story of Ms. Lumet’s grandmother Lena Horne in a limited series for Showtime.Those around Mr. Kurtzman credit his early experience in television (“Alias,” “Fringe,” “Sleepy Hollow”) for giving him the ability to manage multiple projects at one time without appearing to be overwhelmed. “He has an almost supernatural ability to keep separate train tracks in his head, this show, this show and this show, and he can jump from one to the other,” Ms. Lumet said. “He is one of the few people who can keep all the trains running.”His work as a film screenwriter began on Michael Bay’s 2005 film, “The Island.” Soon, he and Mr. Orci were being called “Hollywood’s secret weapons” for their ability to crack scripts on lucrative existing properties that others couldn’t (like “Transformers”). That led him to consider “Star Trek” in the same expansive terms that Marvel Studios views its cinematic universe. It’s a strategy that CBS Studios thoroughly endorses.Mr. Kurtzman wrote two “Star Trek” films with Roberto Orci, right. J.J. Abrams, middle, directed both.Zade Rosenthal/Paramount PicturesDavid Stapf, president of CBS Studios, points to “Star Trek: Prodigy” as an example. The animated show, one of the first animated “Star Trek” shows geared at children, is set to debut in the fall on Paramount+ before moving to Nickelodeon.“It obviously builds fans at a much younger generation, which helps with consumer products,” Mr. Stapf said. “But it’s also a smart way to look at building an entire universe.”To Mr. Stapf, who has overseen CBS Studios since 2004, the “Marvelization” of “Star Trek” can mean many things.“Anything goes, as long as it can fit into the ‘Star Trek’ ethos of inspiration, optimism and the general idea that humankind is good,” he said. “So comedy, adult animation, kids’ animation — you name the genre, and there’s probably a ‘Star Trek’ version of it.”That’s good news to Mr. Kurtzman, who wants to get much weirder with the franchise, which will celebrate its 55th birthday this year. He points to a pitch from Graham Wagner (“Portlandia,” “Silicon Valley”), centered on the character Worf, that he calls “incredibly funny, poignant and touching.”“If it were up to me only, I would be pushing the boundaries much further than I think most people would want,” he said. “I think we might get there. Marvel has actually proven that you can. But you have to build a certain foundation in order to get there and we’re still building our foundation.” More

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    ‘It’s Magic What We Do.’ Movie Theaters Get Starry-Eyed Once More.

    The industry was decimated by the pandemic, with theaters shut across the country and new films delayed by Hollywood studios. But now cinemas are ready to fill up their seats again. Will audiences follow?LOS ANGELES — It’s time to go back to the movies! Now!That was the message sent on Wednesday over and over and over again when all five of Hollywood’s major studios, their independent subsidiaries and the stand-alone indie labels like A24 and Neon gathered in person at an AMC theater to show off their coming summer films and remind moviegoers who have become used to streaming their entertainment during the pandemic why they liked going to the movies in the first place. More