Dan Lin Won’t Lead DC Comics Film & TV Unit

Mike Fleming Jr
·2 min read
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Dan Lin is not going to take the DC job, after all. Back to the drawing board for David Zaslav and Warner Bros Discovery.

This first hit on CNBC.com, which put a spin that Lin rejected the offer. Others in the studio sphere say different. Bottom line, Lin is staying at his Rideback company. Warner Bros Discovery’s film studio has been going through a lot of shaking up, most recently with the exit of Courtenay Valenti. They will try to find a big name to turn DC into something more than it is, something more akin to superhero rival Marvel. When Deadline first broke word that Lin was the choice the studio zeroed in on — he was once a tenured exec at the studio, and oversaw its Lego film franchise — we said there would be a lot of hurdles to overcome.

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Lin’s Rideback has a deal at Universal, for instance, and Warner Bros would have had to fold Rideback within the studio or work something else out. That seems to be where these discussions hit the rocks. They couldn’t find a way to make this work. At the time Deadline revealed his courtship, studio sources maintained that no offer had been made. So DC remains under the thumb of Mike De Luca, who probably would be the dream choice to run this business, if he and Pam Abdy weren’t tasked with running the whole studio. Where that leaves Walter Hamada also remains to be seen. DC has a lot of stuff to figure out, including whether the public at large believes or cares the studio’s spin on The Flash, that star Ezra Miller is getting “help” and turning this into a mental health issue. Given the long list of troubling spats Miller has gotten into, we’ll have to see how this crisis PR maneuvering impacts the movie when it premieres next year. But let’s not be surprised if Miller does one or two TV appearances or a lengthy sympathetic profile as part of this image rehab campaign. The studio is in a tough place; they’ve got a $200 million film that apparently is a winner, and a star who at this moment, could never be the center of a PR campaign. So what other choice was there but this? Stay tuned.

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