In the wake of Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 performing poorly at the box office, Warner Bros moves a bunch of release dates around.
Around a week ago, a report surfaced claiming that Warner Bros’ upcoming slate was so commercially risky that the studio was pinning its future as a filmmaking entity on James Gunn’s Superman. While Warner Bros likely isn’t a favourite among film fans these days due to some lamentable business decisions, nobody will be cheering on the demise of another of Hollywood’s major studios.
Hopefully the stakes aren’t that high for Warner Bros, but a new report today certainly won’t stop the buzz around this topic.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the studio has announced a reshuffle of some of its expensive and commercially-risky projects, said to be the root of the problem with its 2025 slate. With several films releasing this year that are both expensive and original, Warner Bros should be commended for investing in major cinematic talents such as Bong Joon-ho, Paul Thomas Anderson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ryan Coogler.
However, with Bong’s Mickey 17 first out of the gate in 2025 and set to leave Warner Bros’ balance sheet in the red, eyes are already beginning to turn towards Coogler’s Sinners, releasing next month.
The latter half of 2025 looks a little different in the wake of a studio reshuffle. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride, a musical remake of The Bride Of Frankenstein, has been pushed from September of this year into March of 2026. As a result, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has been pushed back a month into The Bride's former release slot meaning it snags an IMAX run now as well.
Read more: Mickey 17 review | Another Bong hit
Finally, now that Warner Bros has an August slot vacant, Zach Cregger’s highly-anticipated ‘horror opus’, Weapons has been bought forward from January of 2026, all the way into August of this year. Stories circled a while ago that the studio was mooting bringing this one forward and if reports suggesting that post-production work on The Bride has run into some hiccups are accurate, the situation has presented itself for Warner Bros to do just that.
Does this make the studio’s 2025 slate look less of a risky proposition? Horror is a financially reliable genre, so adding in a big studio scare-em-up from a hot director certainly could bolster the coffers, while moving one (of several) risky projects into 2026 surely can’t hurt.
We’re sure that Warner Bros executives are already drawing up contingency plans anyway, ranging from slinging its under-performing films onto PVOD within a matter of days, selling them on to other studios or if all else fails, simply deleting them as a tax write-off.
Whatever happens next, it promises to be an interesting year for the studio.
The Alto Knights (review below) is next out of the gate…
