What Zaslav Learned From Flopping

Don’t let the smashing success of A Minecraft Movie cause you to forget The Alto Knights is a real movie distributed in theaters by Warner Bros. at the behest of David Zaslav in 2025. And the lesson Zaslav learned from its flop? “Film drama is dead,” Michael Wolff writes in an April 14 Intelligencer report. Notably, Zaslav chose to make the movie because his friend Nick Pileggi (GoodFellas) wrote the script. It stars Robert De Niro as two separate mobsters and was directed by Barry Levinson. The film opened to $3 million in total box office, against a budget that’s estimated to be between $45 and 50 million. Multiple other studios turned it down, including Zaslav’s own Warner Bros. before Zaslav “proudly pushed” it, according to the Intelligencer piece. And now, the combined message of Alto Knights’s failure and Minecraft’s success is that “building franchises is film’s future.” Because that always works out for Warner Bros.

• [The Intelligencer]

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