Warner Bros. TV Suspends Major Overall Deals With JJ Abrams, Greg Berlanti, Mindy Kaling, and Bill Lawrence
Warner Bros. TV has moved to suspending overall deals with some of their top showrunners after four months of strike have passed and there is no clear end in sight.
As reported by Deadline, Warner Bros. TV has already suspended deals with several of its top TV creators, including Greg Berlanti (via Greg Berlanti Productions), Bill Lawrence (via Doozer Productions), and Mindy Kaling (via Kaling International). They are also hearing that a JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot was being notified of the suspension as well. They join Chuck Lorre, whose deal was suspended back in May.
This isn’t WBTV taking out the axe just yet, though, as none of these deals have been terminated (nor has any overall deal under any studio since the strike began), something that did happen in the last writers’ strike. According to Deadline, some of them have been suspended with extension, meaning the time of suspension will be added at the end of the term. The suspension is just so they don’t have to pay the producers/writers while they are on strike. It’s an efficient tool to try to force the top talent to exert pressure on the guild and sign a new deal, but one that doesn’t go to the extreme lenghts of calling force majeure reasons to terminate the deals.
Deadline is hearing that this step hasn’t been taken as the studios have been pumping the production brakes over the past couple of years in general, so it’s not like they have a lot more content to fill up the pipeline in the meantime. Axing deals was done in 2007-08 to get rid of contracts they didn’t really like in the first place. The name of JJ Abrams coming up in this specific instance is very interesting, as I believe, like many others, that David Zaslav is just looking for the right opportunity to cut ties to the filmmaker and stop this $500M deal that has gone nowhere since it was signed — four years ago.
More names could be added to the pile, like Matt Reeves, Issa Rae, or Quinta Brunson.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
