Timothée Chalamet Signs First-Look Deal At WB
Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy’s latest recruit to the Warner Bros. team is none other than Timothée Chalamet, the leading man who has made the studio over a billion dollars worldwide within three months thanks to two back-to-back blockbusters.
Chalamet, according to Deadline, has signed a multi-year first-look feature film deal with the studio to act in and produce movies for them. He said in a statement:
“Working with Mike De Luca, Pam Abdy and their teams on Wonka and Dune over these last few years has been a deeply rewarding experience. These are studio heads who believe in real movie making, and I’m so grateful for their support as an actor, producer and collaborator. This partnership feels like a natural next step. Let’s go!”
What this actually means long-term is still undetermined. However, this is the nth press release of the type to have hit over the past few months, as De Luca and Abdy try their best to sign Hollywood’s top talent and pretty WB up for a sale. Previous stars include Tom Cruise, who signed a deal with the studio that was not much more than a glorified press release (don’t forget about the office he’ll have at the WB lot, though!), Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler, whose upcoming mystery project will start shooting soon and is targeting an early March 2025 date, and Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman’s T-Street, which is to produce two pics for them.
Signing Chalamet was a no-brainer for them. Wonka has grossed -strap in- more than $600M worldwide (!), and the whole concept was built around Chalamet, proving he is actually a movie star. Dune: Part Two will soon surpass it and, though it will probably not hit the mark, will come very close to the $1 billion threshold. It’s currently sitting at $575M worldwide. The actor is currently filming James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, where he stars as Bob Dylan.
But who will be next? There is one hot project that hasn’t signed a distribution deal yet, Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic, which will likely start shooting in the second half of the year. However, from all accounts, that’s Sony Pictures’ package to lose. The Tom Rothman-run studio released Tarantino’s last pic and both parties seemed pretty happy with the collaboration.
Interestingly, though, Robert Pattinson seems to have been left out of the party. The Batman star signed a first-look deal with Warners back in mid-2021, a year before David Zaslav took over the merged Warner Bros. Discovery. It’s possible that it may have expired by then, but Pattinson was just announced to be producing (and possibly leading?) Ross Evans’ How To Save a Marriage, which landed at Sony.
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.
