DC Entertainment Relocating Offices From NY To Burbank; President Diane Nelson Says DC Films Won't Emulate Marvel's
Most of DC Entertainment, the newly reorganized company that is comprised of a large multimedia division and the DC Comics publishing enterprise, is being moved from New York to Burbank, in the Los Angeles area. There's a lot of musing about what this really means for the future of DC Comics and the related properties lodged at Warner Bros.
What we know is this: the multimedia aspects of DCE (film, TV, online and digital publishing) will move to Burbank by 2011, with some layoffs taking place as part of the move. That's via Deadline, which runs a quote from Jeff Robinov, president of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group:
This strategic business realignment allows us to fully integrate and expand the DC brand in feature films as well as across multiple distribution platforms of Warner Bros. and Time Warner. We are creating a seamless, cohesive unit.
In other words, as we've known would happen, Warner Bros. is pulling as much of DC's operation as possible close to home in Burbank. There have been suggestions recently that we'd soon start hearing about WB and DC's plans for the future with respect to leveraging DC characters into films. This is the first step in the company's new plan.
DC Comics publishing will stay in New York, and there will no doubt be a great deal of scrutiny within the industry on the moves DC Entertainment makes with DC Comics. Will the unit remain autonomous, as has been promised? There's already a great amount of suspicion that the answer to that is 'no.' But there's no hard evidence to support that.
Just as this news broke, IGN ran a brief interview with DC Entertainment president Diane Nelson, who took her position at the company one year ago. Nelson bristled at the notion that Marvel Studios was setting trends for DC to follow, telling the site that connectivity isn't the name of DC's game:
People make an assumption that we're going to mirror Marvel's strategy, for example with Avengers...We do have a very different attitude about how you build a content slate. And it isn't necessarily about connecting those properties together to build into a single thing. We think we've got great stories and characters that will lend themselves to great standalone experiences, and that's the way we're focusing on it...we do not spend our days thinking about what Marvel is doing...there is not a single thing we've done that has been reactive to Marvel from the creation of DC Entertainment to today. People can speculate, but they are wrong.