New Line To The Gutter

It's official. New Line Cinema is technically no more. The Risky Biz Blog reports that New Line Cinema will be absorbed into Warner Brothers. While the studio has scored big with movies such as the Lord of the Rings franchise in the past, it has stumbled of late with movies like Rush Hour 3, and The Golden Compass. The decision to absorb New Line Cinema is part of new Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewke's plan to cut costs within the company.

What is interesting here is that New Line Cinema got its start as a genre house with old John Waters comedies (Hairspray, Pecker) and the Friday the 13th franchise. After some Oscar nominations and wins, the studio started to get carried away, and began to branch away from its strengths in the horror and comedy genres, and started acting like a mini major. In essence, New Line lost its way. Now, according to The Hollywood Reporter, "Going forward, the slimmed-down New Line will focus on genre movies, such as horror and lower-budgeted comedies..." No offense to co-founders and former CEO's Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, but this is probably for the best.

In any marketing course you learn that if nothing else, for a brand to be successful, it must be consistent. Take Lysol for an example. Would you buy Lysol cereal? Or a brand new Lysol pomegranate juice drink? No. Of course you wouldn't. The Lysol brand name is synonymous with with disinfectant cleaning chemicals. Well New Line Cinema used to be synonymous with low budget comedies and horror films. It was what they did well. Even though they had some success when they strayed from the formula, they clearly had more costly failures, otherwise Warner Brothers wouldn't feel the need to absorb the company.

The branding, or not branding, of a movie studio is an interesting topic. I get the impression that most studio's don't stand for a particular genre. And that may be fine for the larger studios, you could throw them under the P&G style of branding (Tide, Pringles, etc.), let each product stand on its own with little influence from the large corporate owner. But when you're a smaller studio with a smaller budget, I think the films you make have to fit under a certain category so that when a movie goer sees a trailer with the New Line Cinema logo plastered to the front they know what to expect. To me it's branding 101, and I think that New Line Cinema can only prosper by going back to their roots.