As Courtenay Valenti Exits Warner Bros, Production Boss Won’t Be Idle For Long: The Dish
Friday, we hear, is Courtenay Valenti’s last day as Warner Bros President of Production and Development after we told you first last month that she was exiting the Burbank, CA lot after a 33-year run.
Valenti is a free agent, with no strings attached to Warner Bros iscovery, I hear, and given her development track record in the thick of such Warner Bros Oscar movies like Argo, A Star Is Born and Mad Max Fury Road, she is a production boss whose talents will be prized wherever she lands. We’ve heard for some time that she had some sit-downs at Netflix and Amazon’s MGM for a key production job, with the former being buzzed to have the greater edge. Others tell us no offers are being papered, but it won’t be shocking to hear that Valenti makes a great landing in the near future.
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She has a keen sensibility when it comes to not only tentpoles — i.e., she was working on Furiosa, the George Miller-directed spinoff of Mad Max Fury Road before she left — but also was a linchpin with adult-skewing titles. That included Warners’ current Oscar contender, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, which in the wake of world premiering at the Cannes Film Festival continued on to bring adults back to cinemas during the pandemic, grossing $286 million at the global box office.
Netflix is looking to be an even better version of itself with mass-appealing tentpoles like Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (getting a one-week sneak preview theatrical in 600 theaters) and an awards-season lineup that includes The Good Nurse, Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, the Florence Pugh title The Wonder, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio among others. Valenti’s addition to Scott Stuber’s team will only raise the bar, and continue to make them a magnet for filmmakers.
That same talent of balancing tentpoles with crossover, adult-skewing titles that Valenti is known for will also prove to be an asset at Amazon, where they’re looking to return to theatrical with their purchase of MGM. Amazon is truly trying to figure that out now. Harry Styles’ fans delivered a $19.3 million opening for the upscale New Line genre movie Don’t Worry Darling. The mind wonders how much more the pop icon-turned-actor’s My Policeman could make off of a wider release; the pic is currently in theatrical release in around 400 locations, and we hear last weekend’s numbers have been robust for arthouses (around $300,000, per rival sources). My Policeman hits Prime Video on November 4. In addition to her cinema smarts, Valenti is known for her ease of working with others; a winning attribute in the layered exec environment at Amazon.
At Warners, Valenti leaves behind an attractive lineup, not just Furiosa but also Greta Gerwig’s Barbie starring Margot Robbie in the title role and Ryan Gosling as Ken, and the feature adaptation of Broadway musical The Color Purple produced by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey.
Valenti was a force in returning Warners to animation with the Lego franchise and the Oscar-winning Miller-directed Happy Feet. She was also behind Luhrmann’s two-time Oscar winner and $354 million-grossing The Great Gatsby.
Earlier in her career, the daughter of late MPAA boss Jack Valenti developed and supervised films such as Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, Alfonso Cuarón’s A Little Princess, Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, Cameron Crowe’s Singles, Robert Zemeckis’ Contact and Gregory Nava’s Selena among others.
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