It is almost unbelievable how much Warner Bros has impacted the entertainment industry. It's overwhelming for almost a century. Now they've been one of the largest media companies, just as a sample we could list Batman, Six Flags, Bugs Bunny, HBO, TIME magazine, CNN, Harry Potter all things that have heavily involved Warner Bros. In this post, we are going to focus on the more pivotal eras for Warner Bros, specifically three separate times where they had fallen and were practically struggling to survive and how they were able to recover from them back.
In the early 1900s, Sam Warner was working as a projectionist at an amusement park in Ohio. The job exposed them to the industry and helped him see the potential of it, so he was able to convince his two brothers Harry and Albert to put together their savings and invest that one thousand dollars into buying their own projector. They then established their own business when they took that projector on the road to exhibit films in various buildings all around the state of Ohio, in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania. By 1903 they had stopped traveling when they stayed in Pennsylvania to open a stationary nickelodeon theater and as the name implies, this truly was a family business, it was here that they were joined by their fourth brother Jack, who at only 11 years old would go up and sing for the crowd during intermissions.
Almost a decade later, by 1915 Sam and Jack had moved to Hollywood to produce their films. While Harry and Albert had moved to the business hub of New York to run their headquarters. They were successfully making and showing movies, but this was still on a comparatively small scale. Making a movie requires a fair amount of money upfront, so through most of the 1920s, their survival was always dependent on the success of their next few movies. Luckily they did have one big star under contract, that would reliably attract an audience when they needed it, his name was Rin-Tin-Tin and he was a German shepherd. In the 1920s he starred in a bunch of successful movies and was just about the biggest thing that Warner Bros had going for them. Over this time they did grow from a 1000$ projector into making million-dollar movies, but by 1927 they had become too inconsistent. They were thought to be on the verge of bankruptcy and they had become far too reliant on their biggest star which again was a dog but in October of that year everything turned around for Warner Bros when they helped revolutionize the entire industry with the introduction of a single movie called "The Jazz Singer". It's easily one of the most significant movies ever made because it's considered to be the first-ever feature-length talking picture without getting technical the Vita phone was a piece of technology that would synchronize the audio of a record to the visual of the projection much like with that initial projector more than 20 years earlier Sam Warner was the one to see the potential for it and convinced the rest of his family to buy the rights to the technology from the company that had developed it. Now Warner Bros had already used it for a film called "Don Juan" about a year earlier to sync the music and sound effects but no actual talking since that one received such a positive response from the audiences they were convinced that, they needed to put everything on the line and go really big with their next movie that utilized it. Jack Warner was able to convince popular musician Al Jolson to star in it by offering him a portion of the profits. Harry Warner personally contributed to the film's more than 400 thousand dollar budget and the end result was "The Jazz Singer", in the first line of the film, he says "you ain't heard nothing yet" which was actually really fitting because it completely changed the industry by pretty much killing silent films. The audience loved it it received an honorary academy award and maybe most importantly for Warner Bros, it proved to be a huge financial success returning over five times their investment. They then used that money to buy a significant production company in addition to another significant chain of movie theaters. Over the next couple of decades, they went on to contract some of the biggest names in Hollywood like Errol Flynn, Betty Davis, Humphrey Bogart and used them to create some of the biggest most successful movies of all time like Casablanca, but the fact is that through the 1930s and 1940s Warner Bros was easily one of the most successful film studios and it all started with the jazz singer though there is some extremely bad luck attached to this it.
In October of 1927, when they had their big New York City premiere and introduced the world to talking pictures, none of the four Warner brothers were in attendance and the reason for that is because Sam Warner had died of a brain hemorrhage at age 40 only one day before and the other three were across the country at his funeral so they all missed the premiere and even though he was maybe most responsible for it Sam never got to see what Warner Bros became.
In 1948, there was a supreme court ruling intended to break up and prevent monopolies in the film industry, up until that point major studios like Warner Bros would produce the movie distribute the movie and show it in their theaters maintaining control from beginning to end in a vertical monopoly type situation, well it was that ruling that put an end to it and essentially forced them to get rid of all their movie theaters and of course now they were forced to work with theaters owned by other people which for multiple reasons is less profitable, then making things worse television was becoming popular so more and more people were choosing to stay home and watch that instead of going out to see movies and then with the lower sales they were no longer able to maintain the contracts for their talent, so they were forced to let them go. All pretty common in the industry at the time but Warner Bros was bigger and more affected and unique to them. The Warner family was breaking apart in 1956 some complex deals happened that separated Harry and Albert from the business and then Harry died two years later for all of those reasons, it's pretty clear that things were coming apart over at Warner Bros know that from this point the rest of the post is going to be heavily focused on various mergers and acquisitions because this is where things started to get crazy.
In 1967 Jack Warner sold it to Seven Arts who only owned it for two years before selling it to this other company called Kinney National led by Steve Ross is responsible for their next rise. Before this Kinney was all over the place, they owned a bunch of different unrelated companies including an office cleaning business and a maker of wood flooring, but more notably in 1966, they bought a major talent agency called Ashley Famous getting them involved in entertainment and the next year they bought the company that would later become known as DC comics, when they bought the struggling Warner Bros, two years later they made that their central focus they spun off everything that was unrelated and renamed the company Warner Communication. Now with enough resources focused on the brand they were able to rebuild it through the 1970s mostly through a line of successful movies such as "The Exorcist". In 1973 that has of course since become a classic owning the DC characters allowed them to make SuperMan. In 1978 in the batman movie starting with the Michael Keaton one, in 1989 that turned out to be their biggest box office success. They also made a lot of Clint Eastwood movies including "The Dirty Hairy" series starting in 1971. It was also during this time when they started doing a lot of other things outside of movies. In 1976 they bought Atari which went really well at first but then kind of went bad with the video game crash so they sold the consumer products division of it in 1983. Also the Looney tunes, they were big during Warner's first period of popularity and by the 1980s they were having somewhat of a resurgence, with the rest of the Warner company. The demand for their merchandise along with the DC characters led to the creation of Warner Bros studio store in 1991, which lasted throughout the rest of that decade, and the licensing of those characters led to Warner Bros acquiring all of six flags in 1993, which again was sold a few years later. So we can definitely say that the success of their movies and their characters allowed them to pursue some unexpected things around that time.
But the biggest part of the rise would have to be their 1989 merger with TIME. Well technically TIME bought Warner for 14 billion dollars and the two came together to form Time Warner. Considering time already owned a bunch of media assets like TIME magazine and HBO. It was really a big deal when the two came together and as if that wasn't enough they went on to buy Turner broadcasting system in a 7.5 billion dollar stock deal. Right there they added all of these TV channels to the company including CNN, Cartoon Network, TBS, and TNT, and as if that wasn't enough time Warner Bros was then involved in the largest merger ever in American history which is also commonly considered to be the worst ever merger in American history.
By the year 2000 Aol had become one of the biggest internet companies out there valued at around 200 billion dollars on the stock markets, which was actually more valuable than Time Warner. So that year they were able to use that strong stock price to acquire Time Warner in a 182 billion stock deal. The two companies came together but the initial Aol company would own the majority of it. It was revolutionary and exciting it gave time Warner Bros, a very quick and aggressive involvement in the internet, but the biggest issue with all of it was that AOL was not worth 200 billion dollars. This merger happened right around the peak of the dot-com bubble when everyone was getting caught up in the hype of investing in internet companies based on very little actual data, so the stock value of many of them, including AOL, was way overinflated almost immediately after the bubble burst. The public no longer believed that Aol was nearly as valuable and there were other internal issues as well. The following year, they reported a 99 billion dollars loss partially resulting from a 46 billion dollar goodwill impairment. They were forced to sell divisions of the company to bring down their 26 billion dollars in debt and just the way everything went so bad so fast. Luckily they were able to re-stabilize partially by distancing themselves from AOL. In 2003 they stopped using it in the name of the company and in 2009 they became uninvolved completely when they spun it off into its own company. The recovery was also held by some successful movie series released over that time including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and "The Matrix". Somewhat recently in 2018 they were acquired again this time by for 85 billion dollars and renamed Warner Media and one thing have to say that it's pretty cool how the Warner name has been so strong through all of these acquisitions and renaming, that everyone has always included Warner in the name. They have since introduced the streaming platform HBO Max and Warner Bros has been releasing their movies on there. Then finally in may of 2021 a new deal was announced, where Warner Media is set to be separated into its own new company, that'll be 71 owned by AT&T shareholders and 29 owned by Discovery. Having Discovery involved it. now creates all of these new possibilities for streaming and everything else, so it'll be exciting to see what happens future path of Warner Bros.