Why Did Warner Bros. Bury Clint Eastwood’s New Movie?

Photo: Warner Bros

What is it like to be directed by 94-year-old Clint Eastwood? There are certain givens on an Eastwood set: He doesn’t say “Action” or “Cut” (instead, he quietly utters “Okay” from amid the cluster of playback equipment known as video village). He works fast and minimally, wrapping scenes in the fewest takes possible. And surrounded by a creative quorum of producers, production designers, second-unit directors, even property masters who have made movie after movie with him over the decades and seem to intuit his needs before he articulates them, the prolific director observes “French hours”: ten-hour shooting days with no breaks for lunch that often result in Eastwood’s films coming in early and underbudget.

On the set of his 40th and presumably final film, the well-reviewed legal thriller Juror #2, however, Eastwood — then just 93 — added to that highly specific mise-en-scène in an unexpected (and initially mysterious) way. “We’re in the courtroom and we’re doing this dramatic scene,” recalls Phil Biedron, who appears in a supporting role as one of lead actor Nicholas Hoult’s fellow jurors. “And then you hear this light crunch sound. It was actually Clint, who’s eating Cheez-Its and making the noise. Anyone else doing that on set would have been a bit … iffy. But, hey, it’s his movie. And he’s a big Cheez-Its guy.”

Over the weekend, Juror #2 slunk into just 28 cinemas across the country ahead of what industry trade reporting has described as a “small awards campaign” by its distributor, Warner Bros. — never mind that the title does not appear on Warner’s “For Your Consideration” website. Despite its filmmaking pedigree and a starry cast that also includes Toni Collette and J.K. Simmons, the studio has no plans to platform the $35 million film into more theaters. And even while Juror took in $5 million internationally, Warner will not be announcing its domestic-box-office tallies (a move typically understood as a vote of financial no confidence by studios). On Tuesday, the studio confirmed the drama will exit theaters on Thursday after less than a week in release before hitting paid video on-demand later this month.

Which is all to say that after a long and profitable run distributing Eastwood’s directorial efforts — including Million Dollar Baby and 1993’s Unforgiven, which sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of tickets, and both of which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director — Warner Bros. seems to be burying what could be his swan song and is, at the very least, a solid late-career feature by a legendary filmmaker. The studio did not respond to a request for comment from Vulture. But conventional wisdom around Hollywood posits that David Zaslav, chief executive of its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, is ultimately responsible for withholding Juror #2’s release and marketing resources — in much the same way he has canceled completed movies, including Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme — presumably in service of managing WBD’s $40 billion in corporate debt. “Money is all that matters to Zas,” says an entertainment-industry consigliere who has ties to multiple studios and has worked with Eastwood. “His bean counters know that Clint’s movies don’t bring in money anymore. And Clint is content to make them and likely shove them onto Max or PVOD. [Zaslav] is not an emotional person. He’s a transactional fuck.”

The nonagenarian filmmaker, for his part, faced challenges getting Juror #2 to the screen, the likes of which he had never confronted over a lifetime on either side of the clapper board. Almost all of them, in some way or another, related to his age. By Biedron’s account, there were at least three days when the cast and crew reported to set only to be told “We’re not filming today” as a result of Eastwood’s unspecified “health issues,” requiring him to seek medical treatment. Of even greater existential peril, a little more than halfway through principal photography in Savannah in the summer of 2023, a labor strike by the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists abruptly halted production. The hiatus eventually extended to four months, leading Eastwood’s collaborators to wonder among themselves. “There was a lot of talk of ‘Is this production actually coming back?’” recalls Biedron, whose TV and movie filmography dates back to 2011 and who calls Eastwood the most “generous” filmmaker he’s ever worked with. “‘Does Clint have any grandfatherly power to keep his production running and get finished?’ Because he’s at an age where it’s like, Will he make it to the end of this movie?”

In fairness to Zaslav and his bean counters, Eastwood’s movies have not been bankable in recent years or a significant part of the awards conversation since 2015, when American Sniper landed six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture (on the heels of ranking as 2014’s highest-grossing North American release, taking in more than $350 million). The director’s last movie, the period western Cry Macho, starring Eastwood as an aging rodeo star tasked with traveling to Mexico to kidnap his former boss’s estranged son, was received as a flop. It grossed a mere $16.5 million, versus a $33 million production budget, though that figure comes with the COVID-era asterisk of reaching theaters when the world was shut down. In an infamous 2022 Wall Street Journal profile of Zaslav, the then–newly installed WBD mogul had grilled studio suits about why Cry Macho had been green-lit. Eastwood’s 2019 bio-drama, Richard Jewell, had sold a lackluster $44 million worth of tickets globally, and the kind of mid-budget, adult-skewing fare the director favored was becoming a dying breed at the box office. The execs said they knew Cry Macho was unlikely to make money but replied that Eastwood had given Warner many hits and never turned in anything late or overbudget. Which prompted Zaslav to reportedly quote the Jerry Maguire asshole aphorism: “It’s not show friends — it’s show business.”

Despite its legacy reputation as Hollywood’s quintessentially “talent-friendly” studio (meaning WB extended any number of generous first-look deals to auteurs like Eastwood, ferrying them around on studio jets and even putting them up for extended stays at an opulent, studio-owned Mexican villa), Warner Bros. has faced a great deal of financial tumult in recent years and has basically reversed that renown. During the pandemic era and under a previous regime (when the studio’s corporate parent was WarnerMedia), senior management — AT&T CEO John Stankey, WarnerMedia chairperson Ann Sarnoff, and WarnerMedia chief exec Jason Kilar — infuriated the town’s biggest directors, Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, in its rush to appease Wall Street. In 2020, the company announced it would shift its entire 2021 film roster, releasing impending blockbusters such as Villeneuve’s Dune onto the HBO Max streaming service the same day they would arrive in whatever theaters remained in operation. The situation compelled theatrical-moviegoing evangelist Nolan to piquantly remark, “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they are working for the worst streaming service.” Nolan, of course, jumped studios to make Oppenheimer at Universal. And talentwise since then, things at Warner Bros. have hardly improved.

If Eastwood is unhappy about Warner’s hush-hush Juror rollout, he is keeping his opprobrium to himself — perhaps content the movie’s tagline, “Justice is blind; guilt sees everything,” is also applicable to studio neglect. He skipped Juror’s premiere at Los Angeles’s AFI Fest on October 27 and to date has not done any press for it. From the premiere stage, Hoult recalled his excitement at discovering Eastwood wanted him for the film’s central role but also the director’s self-effacing dig at his own advancing age. “I was very effusive on the phone,” the actor remembered. “I said, ‘I love the script! I love the script! I love the script!’ And he said” — here, Hoult lapsed into a gravelly, laconic imitation of Eastwood’s signature drawl — “‘Well, if you like it so much, I guess I’ll have to read it.’”

Biedron, for his part, hopes that once audiences do see the film, WB’s strategy will age poorly. “Maybe we’ll get people saying, ‘That movie was really good. How come it was just a limited release?’ And that creates a little bit more publicity for it. Then maybe the studios will be like, ‘Oh, sorry. Please, we didn’t know it was going to be received this well.’”

Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly mentioned Tenet as one of the films to which WBD gave a day-and-date streaming release.