Since Warner Bros. Pictures debuted the teaser trailer for “Practical Magic 2” on Monday, the video has racked up nearly 11 million views from fans — and several calls from marketing teams looking to work some magic of their own.
“We just dropped the trailer this week and we’re getting all these calls now for partnerships for that film,” Pam Abdy, Warner Bros. Pictures Group co-chair and CEO, said during the Variety Entertainment Marketing Summit presented by Deloitte on Wednesday.
Warner Bros. has been experimenting with different ways to promote its films over the past few years, including selling tickets for “Sinners” through a gaming integration on “Fortnite” and for “Wuthering Heights” via a Pinterest collab. But when it comes to companies approaching them for tie-in products and marketing, the response Abdy is seeing these days is unprecedented.
“It just depends,” Abdy told Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton on stage at the Beverly Hilton. “I think what ends up happening is brands see the movies, they see if it works for their audience — is there a collaboration? That, to me, is super exciting on the marketing level. That I didn’t experience when I started.”
Currently, Abdy and her Warner Bros Pictures co-chief Mike De Luca are leading the studio behind recent hits “Sinners,” “Weapons” and “One Battle After Another” amid a pending acquisition of the larger Warner Bros. Discovery by the Skydance-run Paramount. At this time, there’s little Abdy can say about what that means for the future of WB films, even as she and De Luca are greenlighting movies that are years away from hitting the screen.
“My job is to show up, to be present, to be transparent with our teams, to give them the resources and the support they need to be the best versions of themselves,” Abdy said. “And we have a job to do, Mike and I. There’s no time for worrying about things that you can’t control. What we can control is the quality of the films. We can control the films we’re choosing.”
One thing Abdy can confirm is that Warner Bros. is very bullish on Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” prequel. The Abdy says the movie, which is set to focus on the viral character Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), is still in the development stage.
“Yes, you can never get it out of your head,” Abdy said about Gladys’ look and how the character dominated the “Weapons” discourse post-release. “And people recreating it on social media was hysterical afterwards. But if you remember, we did not show you Aunt Gladys before the movie opened. We let the audience discover Aunt Gladys, and it was this mystery marketing tool that we used with what happened to these kids, so that it almost played like this really happened in real life.”
Two other priorities for the Warner Bros. film biz are making more “esoteric” films through the newly created Clockwork label, and building up its internal animation studio for more family-friendly fare.
“We felt like we were missing that space at Warner Brothers,” Abdy said of deciding to launch Clockwork in partnership with Neon vet Christian Parkes. “And Mike and I love what A24 and what Neon has done, and Searchlight over the years. I, as a producer, worked at Searchlight many times, and we really feel like, especially because Gen Z and Gen Alpha are engaged [and] do want to go to the theater, that there is a space that we’re missing.”
Later this year, Warner Bros. will show the effort it’s put into its refocused animation business with the release of “The Cat in the Hat.”
“Warner Bros. [has] made some great animated movies over the years with ‘The Lego Movie,’ but there wasn’t a consistent strategy,” Abdy said. “So we built an animation studio from the ground up, and we brought in Bill Damaschke, a longtime veteran of DreamWorks, and he’s incredible, and he has an incredible slate. Our first movie comes online this fall with ‘The Cat in the Hat,’ and we have movies greenlit and in production all the way through ’29.”
Abdy added: “It has to be part of the strategy, that family business. And that audience is dedicated, and they need more movies to [be able to] take their kids to the theater.”
