Warner Bros. Billion Dollar Remake
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Warner Bros. Remake, Fox’s Time Travel and a Space Odyssey.
Let’s go!
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THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Warner Bros. is remaking The Bodyguard.
Fox is developing a series, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, with Sony Pictures TV.
David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, was paid $51.9M in 2024 (↑4%).
John Malone leaves the Warner Bros. Discovery board. His new role is Chair Emeritus.
Apple TV+ comedy Mythic Quest ends after four seasons.
AMC/AMC+.’s Nautilus premieres June 29.
Nicky Katt, who acted in Tarantino, Nolan, and Soderbergh films, has passed at 54.
Josh Holloway (Lost) will star in and produce Flint.
Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer Season 4 adds Jason Butler Harner (Ozark).
Ted Kotcheff (dir: Rambo’s First Blood) died at 94.
Xavier Gens (Under Paris) will direct Lady Chang, a Thailand-set psychological thriller for StudioCanal and Prime.
Production has begun on Spider Island, a comedy-horror from Vertigo Films (Spring Breakers).
Stevan Riley (Listen to Me Marlon) directs an upcoming doc on Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
The Bodyguard (1992) is getting a remake. Warner Bros., which made $411M at the box office (over $1bn in today’s dollars), has the remake in the works.
The original followed the ex-secret service bodyguard (Kevin Costner) who is hired to protect a glitzy pop singer (Whitney Houston, in her first film role) who has been receiving death threats. The two slowly begin to fall in love.
The 1992 NY Times review stated:
“Houston, the glittery singer, could have been drawn tantalizingly as both treacherous vixen and damsel in distress. She could have been dangerously ready to confuse Costner’s brand of peace and protection with love. Frank could have fallen, and fallen hard.”
The new film is being directed by Sam Wrench (Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour move) and written by Jonathan A. Abrams (Clint Eastwood’s Juror No. 2).
We’re excited to see what Abrams can do with the script. Juror No. 2 kept a seething, mounting tension with each successive shot, squeezing maximum narrative juice out of its elegant concept.
No word on the project's status, but check out the 30-year anniversary trailer for The Bodyguard here.
Fox’s Time Travel. Fox will develop the book Before the Coffee Gets Cold, into a show, with Sony Pictures TV co-producing.
It’s a great spin on the time travel premise, with a family’s coffee shop operating as a portal to the past. Caveat: The trip is up when your coffee gets cold. Patrons can choose a moment in their personal past to relive but can’t make changes. Things heat up when the family’s past comes back to haunt them.
SK Global (Anyone But You, Crazy Rich Asians) and The Jackal Group (Netflix’s Perfect Couple) serve as production companies.
Gideon Raff (writer: Homeland, Creator: Netflix’s The Spy starring Sacha Baron Cohen) will serve as writer and showrunner.
Raff is an interesting choice as his films/TV shows have been tactical and procedural. But in 2022, he directed Apple TV+’s miniseries Now & Then, which explored how five friends get blackmailed before a 20-year college reunion. So he’s clearly getting more interested in fractured time.
No word on production dates.
David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, got a 4% pay raise in 2024. Here’s how his salary stacked to other Hollywood CEOs for 2024:
$51.9M - Zaslav (WBD)
$49.8M Ted Sarandos (Netflix) - 2023
$41M - Bog Iger (Disney)
Up from $31.6M
$40M - Andy Jassy (Amazon)
$31.2M - Bob Bakish (Paramount) - 2023
Even by CEO standards, Zaslav is making a fortune. Wild as WBD’s revenue was down 4% in 2024 ($39.3 bn), with a $11.3bn net loss, including a $7.5bn write-down.
Tidbits:
Media mogul and cable cowboy John Malone will transition into the role of Chair Emeritus instead of going up for re-election for Warner Bros. Discovery’s board of directors. The major Warner Bros. investor will be less involved in the day-to-day oversight but will still attend board meetings and offer “strategic counseling”. Anton Levy, an investor and advisory director at General Atlantic, will join the board, while Malone will take on this new role when his current term expires by the end of the year.
Game Over Man: Apple TV+ comedy Mythic Quest ends after four seasons, with a bonus finale update airing next week. Created by Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Megan Ganz, the acclaimed workplace comedy followed a video game studio and earned high praise from critics. It was a funny show with some laugh-out-loud moments and a surprising amount of heart. We send it off with this great clip.
Nautilus, a 10-episode adventure series inspired by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, premieres June 29 on AMC/AMC+. Shazad Latif (Black Mirror) stars as Captain Nemo, a vengeful Indian prince who escapes captivity with a stolen submarine and crew. Originally shelved by Disney+, the series was revived by AMC. Teaser here.
Mini Tidbit:
Jayson Dumenigo (Stunts: The Man from Toronto) will receive an Academy plaque on April 29 for developing a hydrogel that enables longer, safer fire stunts.
The WGA West disciplined six members for writing during the 2023 writer’s strike. Four are appealing, citing due process concerns and accusing the board of overreach.
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Iconic character actor, Nicky Katt known for films like Boiler Room (2000) and School of Rock (2003) has passed at 54. Katt began his career as a child actor before exploding onto the indie scene in the 90s, carving out a niche of playing menacing and intimidating characters.
From the mega cocky high school bully Clint Bruno in Dazed and Confused (1993, scene) to the white supremacist in legal drama A Time to Kill (1996, scene), Katt was an incredibly reliable supporting actor.
Richard Linklater, who directed Katt in Waking Life, in addition to in addtion to Dazed and Confused said:
“He made something unique out of it, bringing his wicked humor, unpredictability, and smoldering quality to it. We worked up an entirely new scene for him and Matthew talking about car engines. I think he probably over-filled all his roles, which makes him memorable.”
He also appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.
His final role was in Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra (2013).
The film community will greatly miss him.
Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer Season 4 adds a familiar Netflix TV show favorite:
Jason Butler Harner (Ozark) will play Detective Drucker, a talented robbery homicide detective. He will push hard against the series lead, Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), who was found with a dead client in the back of his Lincoln.
Harner is the unsung villain of Ozark. He plays the stop-at-nothing cop who exploits Russ Langmore’s (Julia Garner’s character’s father) homo-sexuality. It’s a riveting role, and as Harner continues to lose against the master accounting turned criminal Marty Bell (Jason Bateman), he just gets darker and more twisted.
The Lincoln Lawyer has wrapped filming with no official release date.
Josh Holloway will star in and produce Flint, a Western film adaptation of Louis L’Amour’s novel of the same name, directed by Ryan Whitaker. Holloway will play James Kettleman, a businessman-turned-gunslinger caught in a frontier range war. Co-produced with L’Amour’s son Beau, the film begins shooting in New Mexico later this year.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Xavier Gens (Under Paris) will direct Lady Chang, a Thailand-set psychological thriller starring Anais Parello about a traumatized war photographer who becomes entangled in trafficking while rebuilding her life at an elephant sanctuary.
Gens is also currently developing the sequel to Under Paris for Netflix, which was a hit, garnering a record 41 million views in five days. Under Paris was like Jaws turned up to 11, a pack of mutated sharks terrorize the river Seine in France. This on paper sounds like a goofy B-movie plot, and while there is plenty of gore and a high kill count, Gens handles this fairly bonkers premise with a deft poise that creates real stakes all while delivering on pulse-pounding action and some truly beautiful underwater shots.
Trailer here.
Lady Chang begins shooting on May 12 and is backed by StudioCanal, Amazon Prime Video, and France Televisions.
Versatile Canadian director and prolific producer Ted Kotcheff has died at age 94. Kotcheff’s work ranged from low-budget features to hit Hollywood award-winners to cult classics like Weekend at Bernie’s (1989, trailer) and the world’s introduction to Rambo in First Blood (1982, trailer).
During his six-decade-long career, he was nominated for the Palme d’Or twice for his Australia-set 1971 thriller Wake in Fright (trailer) and Joshua Then and Now (1985), a dramedy starring James Woods and Alan Arkin.A staple in the festival scene throughout the 70s and 80s, his film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) won the coveted Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival.
With over two dozen movies under his belt, a through-line in Kotcheff’s resume is his visceral exploration of working class characters and social realism. Regardless if it was a violent action flick or a dramatic feature, his films were supercharged, dripping with the sweat of his emotionally charged storytelling.
Beyond his prolific film career, Kotcheff has exec produced well over a hundred episodes of Law & Order: SVU for thirteen years before he retired in 2017. Kotcheff will leave behind a gargantuan legacy where his many films and TV projects will be enjoyed for years to come.
Tidbit:
Production has begun on Spider Island, a comedy-horror from Vertigo Films (Spring Breakers, Bronson), directed by Christopher Smith (Creep) and filming in Mauritius, an island country in the Indian ocean. The story follows social media influencers who encounter deadly spiders at a tropical hotel launch. The cast will apparently be a mix of veteran actors and real-life influencers.
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a seminal film. The impact will be explored in an upcoming documentary, Monolith, co-funded by Time Studios and directed by Stevan Riley (Listen to Me Marlon, trailer). Leonardo DiCaprio serves as one of the producers. This doc is being done in collaboration with the Kubrick estate. We enjoyed Riley’s Brando doc, Listen to me Marlon, which featured at the time a groundbreaking scene (it premiered at Sundance 2015) in which they produced a 3D digital scan of Brando’s face, which would occasionally be used to hauntingly 'perform' select audio clips from old interviews It was a haunting new-age technique eerily prescient of AI vocal cloning techniques and a compelling way to give voice to HAL. Could you imagine if HAL was the narrator?
Set in postwar Rome, the black and white drama There's Still Tomorrow has completely surpassed its expected box office projections. After sweeping the awards at its premiere at the Rome Film Festival this past fall, Paola Cortellesi’s directorial debut not only became the 5th highest-performing film of all time for Italy but has done exceedingly well in other territories, grossing $50 M worldwide.
Italy grossed $41M
France grossed $5M
U.S. grossed $166K
U.K. grossed $117K
China grossed $6M
The success of There’s Still Tomorrow (trailer) follows a lengthy post-pandemic drought for European and arthouse films at the China box office, during which only a few titles have broken through.
See you tomorrow!
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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The Bodyguard remake follows a Secret Service agent who has to learn to skateboard in order to protect the President's Cool Daughter