Warner Bros. Had a Thesis This Year. The Thesis Was Losing Money.

Some years, a studio has a bad run. This year, Warner Bros. had a thesis. The Bride! — $24 million gross against a production budget between $80 and $90 million. Supergirl — roughly $126 million worldwide against an estimated $170 million budget, the lowest-grossing modern live-action DC film. And now Digger, Tom Cruise's Iñárritu picture, tracking toward a $12–15 million opening weekend against a reported cost of $160–180 million (the studio disputes the number; the studio would), with a break-even the studio itself puts near $300 million.

Add the arithmetic, which I have done so you don't have to: somewhere north of $400 million in production spending, against theatrical returns that will be fortunate to clear half of that. The Bride! was the prestige play that misfired. Supergirl was the franchise play that misfired on the one thing a superhero studio cannot afford to misfire on, which is the superhero movie. Digger is the auteur bet — the most respectable way to lose money in this business — being lost at a scale that stops being respectable.

What interests me is not the failure but the pattern of it, which is the pattern of a studio greenlighting movies for the talent involved rather than the audience waiting. Prestige play, franchise play, auteur play: each one had a real reason to exist in a pitch meeting and no reason for a general audience to show up on opening weekend that could survive contact with a tracking report. To the tracking reports' credit, they told the truth early. Nobody listened, because the talent was too good to argue with, and talent is the one thing a studio can photograph for the annual report.

The counterargument — that studios must take big swings, that the theatrical business needs event films, that you cannot cost-cut your way to culture — is correct in the abstract and ruinous in the specific, which is where studios actually live. A $170 million Supergirl is not a big swing; it is a franchise installment with a budget that assumed the franchise was healthy. A $180 million Iñárritu comedy of 'catastrophic proportions' is a big swing with a blindfold on. There is a difference between betting big and budgeting as if the bet already paid.

The industry will call this a rough patch. A rough patch is when two movies underperform. Three, at this scale, with this math, is a strategy that didn't work, and the difference matters, because strategies get repeated and patches get weathered. Warner Bros. will be fine — studios this size always are, which is part of the problem — but somewhere in Burbank there is a spreadsheet that says 'decide for yourself,' and it is the most honest document the studio has produced all year.

Grade: D+ — for the slate. The individual films may deserve better. The math does not.

A Friday-night addendum, because the thesis just got its closing argument. Digger opened October 2, and the numbers are in — and they are worse than the tracking, which was already the gloomiest document of the year. Thursday previews: $1.2 million. Friday: roughly $2 million, for an opening day around $3.25 million. The weekend is heading for $6–8 million, with most estimates settling near $7 million. Read that again: seven. Warner Bros. had projected $12–15 million. Box Office Pro’s long-range forecast, back when optimism was still legal, said $20–30 million. If $7 million holds, it’s Tom Cruise’s weakest opening since Lions for Lambs did $6.7 million in 2007 — nearly twenty years ago.

The math, updated: the film was greenlit at $125 million, and the budget reportedly grew to $160–180 million after production ran long — a number the studio disputes, because of course it does. Variety puts the break-even, marketing included, near $350 million. At a $7 million opening, break-even isn’t a target, it’s a rumor. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a blowhard oil tycoon whose company causes an ecological disaster, in what’s being sold as a polarizing black comedy — Iñárritu’s first English-language feature since The Revenant, and Cruise’s first Warner Bros. film since 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow. The cast around him is serious people: Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons. The audience response, per CinemaScore, is a C+. The critics are split down the middle at 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. One outlet called Digger the studio’s final release as a standalone company. Read into that what you will.

Meanwhile, the weekend’s actual winner tells you everything about the audience Warner Bros. keeps missing. Verity — the Colleen Hoover adaptation with Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett — did $4.5 million in previews alone and is heading for $32–33 million on the weekend. A mid-budget thriller for an audience that shows up. While Warners was spending $180 million to ask whether Tom Cruise can open an auteur comedy, the answer walked in wearing a different studio’s logo.

Let me widen the frame, because the autopsy deserves the full body. Supergirl opened to $37.1 million domestic and then fell 74 percent in its second weekend — a collapse that has the studio bracing for a loss north of $100 million on a $170 million production budget. They Will Kill You did $19 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. Warner Bros. Discovery’s own quarterly report put theatrical revenue down 46 percent year over year, and the shareholder letter named Supergirl among the disappointments by name — studios do not name their disappointments in shareholder letters unless the quarter is already a crime scene. This is the studio’s worst year since 2001, and it still hasn’t had a single film cross $100 million domestic. For the rest of the year’s box office picture, our movies desk is tracking every number.

And here is the detail that makes the whole thing feel like a farce with good lighting: the same weekend Digger face-planted, Warner film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy were reported to be leaving the company. The people who greenlit the thesis are exiting during the thesis’s final exam. Studios this size always survive — I said it in the original piece and I’ll say it again — but “survive” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

One grace note, because the industry is never only one thing: Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose $90 million The Bride! grossed $24 million, just got handed Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake — a Booker-shortlisted novel about an American spy infiltrating a French eco-collective — to adapt and direct for the same studio. Hollywood forgives directors faster than it forgives spreadsheets. The spreadsheet, meanwhile, still says “decide for yourself.” Final grade for the year: D. The individual films may deserve better. The math does not.