The news Thursday about Universal Filmed Entertainment Group chairman Donna Langley’s ascent to bring TV content under her domain doesn’t just speak to the greater NBCUniversal plan to have a more unified strategy across theatrical, TV and streaming.
It’s also a testament to NBCU realizing and relishing the risk-taking, creative-friendly asset the company has in Langley.
There was talk following NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell’s exit over sexual harassment claims that Langley would inherit the post given her billion-dollar-grossing track record at the film studio and as a level-headed balancer of scales in negotiations. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts gave those interim duties to Comcast president Mike Cavanagh, but that wasn’t a means to sideline Langley.
While brass tacks oversee of news, sports and sundry NBCU ops are not her thing, Langley’s superpowers lie in building iconoclastic and franchise-creative content, strategizing and making it work financially. In her new role as Chairman, NBCUniversal Studio Group and Chief Content Officer, Langley will have a 30,000-foot view of content creation across the conglom as she expands her creative-team portfolio to include Universal Television, Universal Content Productions, Universal Television Alternative Studios and Universal International Studios (she already presides over the Filmed Entertainment Group which counts Universal Pictures, Focus Features and DreamWorks Animation).
Three years in, the Peacock service continues to struggle with a subscriber base of 22 million. While oversee of the streamer in its distribution and monetization falls to newly anointed NBCUniversal Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus, and original content to NBCUniversal Entertainment chairman Frances Berwick (who’ll report into Langley and Lazarus), Langley will work closely with the duo in building a strategic portfolio across theatrical, TV and streaming, which like her film slate isn’t dependent on one piece of IP.
While Langley isn’t vacating her film studio boss role with the new promotion, it’s reasonable to expect that her No. 2, Universal Pictures president Peter Cramer, a committed partner to her vision, will step into a greater leadership role in developing features.
With the departures of such brass as Shell, Jason Kilar at Warner Bros and Bob Chapek at Disney, you could say it’s been a case of “ding dong, the witch is dead” when it comes to their shared penchant for theatrical day-and-date strategies. Langley has always been a believer in the big screen — not just in being a scout and a champion for auteurs but also in the medium’s ancillary financial potency.
As she takes on her new post, Langley stands at an intriguing time for the studio. No longer in place are Universal’s black-and-white, definite theatrical gross-to-Premium VOD windows put in place with exhibition coming out of the pandemic (i.e., films opening to north of $50 million had 31 days to PVOD, while those opening under had 17 days before hitting homes). Despite getting blasted by AMC boss Adam Aron in the press over Universal’s day-and-date experimentation with Trolls: World Tour back in April 2020, Langley was never the architect of such distributor-exhibitor windows.
Nowadays, theatrical windows for Universal titles are bespoke depending on the movie, meaning an arthouse film can spend more time in theaters in order to grab the older, slower-moving moviegoers, or to mine the next Get Out. The contracts with top exhibitors like AMC and Regal were put in place as good faith to them as Universal looked to exploit the best possible financial outcome for each movie, this at a time when Peacock was being built into a movie’s financial waterfall. The decision to expire these gross-to-PVOD contracts comes as Uni has developed a greater understanding of the flexibility of PVOD and avoiding theatrical cannibalization. Interestingly enough, in the case of several Universal animated films, theatrical kept humming for months despite their simultaneous availability on PVOD.
Uni has built a solid means of capitalizing on theatrical, not only profiting off of PVOD but as the films go through a lengthy 18-month Pay One window that includes Peacock, Prime Video (for live action titles) and Netflix (for animated movies).
Despite Uni’s experiment with day-and-date theatrical on Peacock with Blumhouse titles such as Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends and the upcoming Five Nights at Freddy’s, filmmakers know that Langley is worth her word, and that her marketing and distribution corps have the acumen when it comes to turning an original movie into a theatrical event. A prime example: Sam Mendes’ World War I pic 1917, with a largely fresh-faced cast and its one-shot avant garde style, minted more than $159 million stateside and $385M worldwide before Covid shuttered theaters. Not a lot of Hollywood studios can turn what might look as counterprogramming on paper — like the femme-demo pics Girls Trip, the Mamma Mia movies and Bridesmaids– and mushroom them into blockbusters.
Such successes as well as other original titles-turned-events — i.e. Jordan Peele’s Get Out and F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton, which Langley took out of turnaround and turned into a late-summer 2015 blockbuster with $161M+ domestic and more than $201M worldwide — encouraged filmmakers like Christopher Nolan to jump studios. The Tenet filmmaker segued from his longtime Warner Bros home to Uni with his WWII-era drama Oppenheimer, which is eyeing a great box office opening of $40M-$50M U.S. in the face of Warners’ Barbie (with $80M+) during the July 21-23 frame.
Christopher Nolan discusses ‘Oppenheimer’ during Universal’s CinemaCon presentation in Aprile
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Along with Nolan, Universal is the home to such filmmakers and producers as Judd Apatow, Amy Pascal, Lord & Miller, Elizabeth Banks, Everything Everywhere All at Once Oscar winners The Daniels (who made a five-year exclusive theatrical pact with Uni), Peele, Jason Blum and Illumination titan Chris Meledandri to name a few.
Already, Uni has clocked close to $3 billion at the global box office, with Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros Movie not only giving birth to a new franchise but also securing bragging rights as the highest-grossing movie of 2023 YTD with $1.34 billion.
Other non-franchise pics looking to pop on Universal’s theatrical release calendar include the R-rated raunchy talking dog comedy Strays on August 18, Ethan Coen’s action comedy Drive-Away Dolls from Focus on September 22, a new Illumination animated pic Migration on December 22, and Blumhouse’s Bryce McGuire-directed horror movie Night Swim on January 5, 2024.
Justin Kroll contributed to this report
