Ann Sarnoff stands inside the lobby of a theater on the Warner Bros. back lot, staring at a wall of men. Before her are 16 black-and-white photographs of previous Warner Bros. studio chiefs. Tucked down in the bottom right corner is Sarnoff: blond and beaming, the first woman to reign over the legendary studio since its founding in 1923. “Seeing this,” she says, “was literally my moment of, Oh my God.”
As we walk the lot, Sarnoff shows me the secret door in her office where studio founder Jack Warner used to slip out to play tennis on the lawn, then points out Clint Eastwood’s bungalow and the iconic Friends fountain. She tells me she was a Friends superfan in the ’90s and early 2000s, when she’d come home from the office, put her two young kids to bed, and toil through the evening. “Friends was always on at 11 at night in syndication, and it took work off my mind,” she says, “so I know literally every episode.” As we talk, fans lean out of the tour tram to take pictures of the fountain. They have no idea that the elegant woman in the fitted denim blazer and slim white pants photobombing their shots is the chair and CEO of WarnerMedia’s studios and networks.
When Sarnoff arrived at WarnerMedia in the summer of 2019, she was an unknown quantity to many in Hollywood—a New Yorker who’d spent decades as an executive at Nickelodeon, VH1, and BBC Studios Americas. What was it like to suddenly be crowned “the most powerful woman in Hollywood”? Sarnoff shakes her head. “It was incredibly exciting but daunting, because I’m now representing women.”
Two years into the job, Sarnoff exudes serene poise—impressive considering that some power players in town were dismissive of her because they hadn’t seen her on the vaunted Hollywood social scene. She also took over during a messy moment, replacing Kevin Tsujihara, who left WarnerMedia after allegations that he arranged movie roles for an actress in exchange for sex. (Tsujihara's lawyer denied the accusation, and Tsujihara resigned after acknowledging the extramarital affair.) Not long into Sarnoff's tenure, WarnerMedia was racing to launch HBO Max, which was crucial to its future, in the midst of a global pandemic. As theaters closed, Sarnoff and her team made a controversial decision to put the company’s 2021 slate of theatrical films on their new streamer. Kim Masters at The Hollywood Reporter dubbed December 3, 2020, “a day that will live in infamy” because many actors and filmmakers did not find out until they read about the plan in the trades.
Sitting in her grand office—home to an electric piano given to her by J.J. Abrams, which she plays to relax—Sarnoff talks me through the agonizing dilemmas the company faced because of COVID. After endless meetings trying to read epidemiologists’ predictions like tea leaves, she released Christopher Nolan’s $200 million Tenet at the end of the summer of 2020 wherever theaters were open. It grossed $363 million worldwide, mostly from overseas business—a disappointing figure in normal circumstances. By the end of 2020, Sarnoff felt she had to pull the trigger on the rest of their slate. “COVID kept getting worse and worse, and we said the only way we can afford to open a movie is to have another way to monetize it,” she says. “So we came up with the [HBO Max] strategy.”
Sarnoff says they had begun to alert and renegotiate with the people behind the affected movies, but word of “Project Popcorn,” as it was named internally, leaked. “By no means did we intend to have it be a big surprise,” she says. “We were really trying to call people to tell them. On the other hand, we had 17 movies and 181 participants, so realistically, we knew we weren’t going to get to everybody [before it leaked].” The backlash from creative partners was brutal, with Dune director Denis Villeneuve raging against WarnerMedia’s owners in Variety: “With this decision AT&T has hijacked one of the most respectable and important studios in film history.”
A top agent who thinks Sarnoff has done amazing work synergizing the studio and cooling its masculine culture admits the controversy played into skeptics’ hands. “When you do something like that with all these filmmakers, a level of trust is broken,” the agent says. “Ann just thinks hard work wins. But if she had relationships [with artists and agents], she could have navigated through this better.”
Sarnoff notes that they ultimately did right by talent, compensating them and giving them a full global marketing budget and simultaneous theatrical releases wherever cinemas were open, as well as a 31-day run on HBO Max. (Disney might have saved itself some drama with Scarlett Johansson if it had paid closer attention.) And the new films did boost subscriptions during a shortage of new content: HBO Max and HBO gained 10.7 million domestic customers in just over a year. As for the firestorm, Sarnoff says with a rueful laugh, “That was an accelerant for me getting to know quite a few people!” Has the studio healed its relationships? “I think so. I really do. Once people heard the rationale—you know, maybe some people disagreed—but you can see the results of what it’s been like to try to open movies in a pandemic while the theaters were closed. It’s impossible to do.”
Sarnoff grew up in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. Her dad was a blue-collar worker who helped build the local country club and later became its groundskeeper; her mom worked at Sears. Sarnoff was a latchkey kid from the age of six, but she was sporty and competitive—captain of three varsity sports in high school—which paved a route to college (Georgetown) and then business school (Harvard). “There weren’t businesspeople or professionals in my life” to serve as role models, she says. “If you don’t have anybody leading the way for you, you have to take risks.”
Before landing at WarnerMedia, Sarnoff demonstrated a gift for the nostalgia market. At Nickelodeon in the mid-’90s, she noticed “classic shows just kind of sitting on the shelf.” That led to TV Land, a wayback machine for the cable TV era. Later, Sarnoff also helped create retro channel VH1 Classic and Anglophile streamer BritBox. All of which positions her well for finding old WarnerMedia properties to reimagine.
Sarnoff has also worked hard to get departments collaborating, which she says is “night and day from what it used to be, which was kind of every division for themselves.” Her team now has weekly meetings where they plot out a spiderweb of movies, series, live events, products, and video games. The DC Comics franchise, Warner’s rival to Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, has five movies in production for next year, plus TV and gaming spin-offs. (Sarnoff’s father-in-law was an exec at Warner for years and helped broker the DC deal.)
And, of course, Sarnoff remains focused on HBO Max. Early in her tenure, she hired Channing Dungey away from Netflix to run Warner’s TV arm. The studio currently produces series for other networks and streamers (including Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso), but Dungey tells me, “The biggest mandate she gave me was for Warner Bros. television to be the premier supplier for HBO Max.” Warner Bros. will also produce 10 movies for the streamer in 2022 on top of its theatrical slate.
Sarnoff can already point to major victories—HBO Max’s ascent, the 179 Emmy nominations that Warner studios and networks nabbed this year, the box office success of Godzilla vs. Kong, a slate of 2022 blockbusters ready to roll—and Dungey has been impressed with how her boss is building relationships. “What’s great about Ann is that she really engages with you,” she says. “There are a lot of people [where] you get the feeling that they’re constantly looking around the room for who else they should be talking to.” Once people spend time with Sarnoff, she adds, “They’re always really surprised by the genuine connection.”
Sarnoff knows that the ride ahead will not be smooth. Aside from the lingering pandemic, there’s a WarnerMedia/Discovery merger on the table. If approved, it’d create a behemoth that could hold its own against Disney and Netflix—as well as sparking corporate chaos. “People get nervous about change,” Sarnoff says. “Certain things you can control and certain things you can’t, so just do what you can with what you can control.” When I ask how she plans to keep the team focused through the turbulence, she chuckles. “Serenity prayer?”
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to clarify the circumstances of Kevin Tsujihara's departure from WarnerMedia.
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