Time Warner Consolidates Warner Bros., New Line (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

Time Warner Inc. has consolidated its Warner Bros. Entertainment and New Line Cinema, the studio behind the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, in an effort to cut costs and boost revenue.

New Line Co-Chairmen Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, two Hollywood veterans who have long been the core of the studio, will leave but are in talks for possible future business relationships with the company.

The contracts of Mr. Shaye, 68 years old, and his one-time attorney Mr. Lynne, 66, are up at the end of the year. They said they would explore new entrepreneurial opportunities.

They added, "New Line has been our respective life's work as well as our second family. While we're sad to be leaving, we're enormously proud to have overseen its extraordinary growth. New Line represents innovation, creativity and independent success. We hope that the company can continue to be a leader in creating entertainment that resonates around the world."

Time Warner, New York media and entertainment giant, said New Line will be operated as a unit of Warner Bros., but will maintain separate development, production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operations.

Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes is under pressure to take a more radical approach to managing the media conglomerate in an effort to revive its stock price, which sunk this year to levels not seen since 2003. The shares were flat at $16.02 in after-hours trading.

Mr. Bewkes said, "We are moving quickly to improve our business performance and financial returns. New Line has built a strong franchise of cutting-edge entertainment. We can enhance its value by combining it with Warner Bros."

He noted that with fewer movie releases, New Line and Warner Bros. will have more complementary release slates.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/business/la-fi-newline29feb29,0,7998130,full.story
From the Los Angeles Times
New Line Cinema to merge into Warner Bros.
The studio behind ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and other popular movie franchises will become a significantly smaller version of itself.
By Claudia Eller
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 29, 2008

Roll the credits on New Line Cinema, the 40-year-old studio behind such iconic movie franchises as “The Lord of the Rings,” “Austin Powers” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

The company will lay off hundreds of employees between its Los Angeles and New York facilities and be merged into its corporate sibling, Warner Bros.

The consolidation marks the end of the line for the once scrappy producer that prided itself on taking creative risks that other studios wouldn’t. But in recent years New Line strayed from its street-smart roots with a slew of costly flops that ended its role as a big-time player in the volatile movie business.

In a sign of retrenchment that is increasingly prevalent in Hollywood, the company will now focus on making fewer movies limited to the kind of smaller, low-cost “genre” horror and comedy pictures upon which it built its name.

New Line becomes the latest free-standing Hollywood studio to abandon its ambitions as a full-fledged company in a market in which bloated overhead and soaring production and marketing costs have squeezed profits amid flat movie attendance and sagging DVD sales.

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