Donna Langley has done it all. She slowly worked her way up the ranks at Universal Studios and now runs the whole entertainment side of NBCUniversal — motion pictures, Focus Features, television, and Peacock.
She’s one of the Hollywood executives who knows talent and how to make good, commercial movies. She’s kept the “Fast and the Furious” franchise going strong and landed Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” which scored almost $1 billion for the studio, along with seven Oscar wins, including Best Picture.
In short, she knows what she’s doing and, at a wide-ranging Kering Women in Motion chat at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this week, where she was on hand to accept her award as the 2024 Women In Motion Award honoree, Variety’s co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh tried to pry some of her genius out of her to share.
Where is the business now?
“What are we experiencing across the whole media landscape are the trends that were put in motion before the pandemic, but were accelerated by that,” she said. “So we’re seeing a shift in consumer behavior, which is driving a lot of rethinking and reshaping of our business.”
She continued, “Theatrically, the global marketplace is generally down about 20 percent from pre-pandemic times, from 2019 to now, and we don’t really think we’re going to recapture that. It’s OK. As an industry we can withstand it, but the strikes last year impacted us again, and there’s just less volume going through the marketplace at the moment. if there’s not too many things to go see, you lose the habit and lose the will to get yourself up off your couch and go to a movie. There’s so many good options of course at home and streaming so we need volume to come back. We need more great movies in the marketplace.”
What inspires audiences to turn out?
“We saw last year, with the great Barbenheimer, big, all-audience, highly cinematic experiences, that you can go see on an IMAX screen or a large format screen, definitely what the audience seems to be very excited about,” she said.
On Universal’s market-share-topping year
The studio side of Universal had a tremendously successful last year, with “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Cocaine Bear,” “Me3an,” “Fast 10” and “Oppenheimer.”
“There are no rules in the movie business,” said Langley. “I remember when we bought the [‘Oppenheimer’], it was highly competitive. Everybody wanted it — of course, who wouldn’t want a Christopher Nolan film? And then when we got it, it was immediately deemed a disaster before it had come out. It was industry gossip that it would be an historical drama, how could that possibly [work], and we paid too much for it? The rest of this is history.”
She added, “What ‘Oppenheimer’ shows you: If you make it great they will come. We had a world-class master filmmaker at the helm of that story. But it does defy odds, in some ways. It’s a three hour-historical drama, but it’s propulsive. It is one of the best screenplays I’ve ever read. It really was a tremendous story, not just historical, but it was epic. And it was also very deeply emotional and intimate. So it was a big scale, and it was an intimate story. So it goes to show you that there are no rules in cinema, which is why we love it.”
About that “Oppenheimer” box office
“I knew the movie was great,” Langley said. “But in terms of where the box office was going, it was how the audience was interacting when it arrived in theaters. There were showings as early as 7 a.m. in Los Angeles, maybe even more, and people were coming dressed up in hats and coats, and interacting with the film in a fan-ship way. And so we knew that we would have a really strong playing out.”
Langley’s new NBCUniversal purview
“The responsibility to have all of the content In some ways report up to me is exciting,” said Langley. “It’s a great opportunity. Because big media companies like ours, we have so many great assets, our props, we have everything from the film studio and two animation studios. And then on the television, ‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,’ Seth Meyers, ‘SNL,’ we’ve got these amazing brands and franchises. Also deals with filmmakers that go across Jordan Peele, David Leitch, Kelly McCormick, and Judd Apatow. And so the idea that we can now go in with a concerted strategy to maximize those across the entire portfolio, because we we’ve also got many different distribution opportunities. The best is yet to come.”
After Universal films have been in the theatrical marketplace and home entertainment, they go to streaming, straight to Peacock. “That is good for the film economics, but it’s also really good for Peacock,” said Langley. “It’s helped to fuel their subscribership.”
Keeping “Fast and Furious” alive
“We love ‘Fast and Furious,’ said Langley. “And that’s one of the things that is actually responsible for our success is that, it could easily be something that we are cynical about and we’re not. We treat the characters with respect and care. We love them. We buy into la familia, and we really believe in the family. We believe it exists. … We did pivot the franchise from being a genre movie to being a world-globe-trotting heist franchise, and we added Dwayne Johnson to the cast at that time. That pivot took us out of being this gearhead car movie to something that was much broader in terms of the audience and much more global.”
“Wicked” is finally moving from Broadway to movies
“If you know the show, the movie is the show,” said Langley. “Only one of the things that surprised us, is that it’s 20-years-old. But the themes are as resonant today as they were 20 years ago. That’s a beautiful thing. The film has the themes of otherness with the Elphaba character. Of course, the partnership between the two women is resonant. There’s a whole storyline with the animals in the show; they are ostracized, and silenced. You can think about today’s politics, it fits nicely.”
She added, “If you don’t know the show, and there are some some territories around the world where the show did not travel, it’s a musical. But it’s got magic, it’s got flying monkeys, it’s the ‘Wizard of Oz.’ It’s ‘Wonka.’ It’s a big, world-building epic adventure with this beautiful friendship at the center of it. And, and of course, our cast is extraordinary.”
Women storytellers are moving up
Langley called out Focus stars like AV Rockwell and Emerald Fennell, and pointed to the future. “There’s so many great next generation filmmakers out there,” she said. “The proliferation of streaming and the volume of things that are made has given more opportunity, but it’s never going to be enough. We have just always got to keep pushing. It’s a very, very hard job for women to do when they’re getting into their careers and starting a family and figuring out that balance. It’s tough for everybody. It’s not necessarily a gender thing.”
She continued, “I was hearing great anecdotes about the set of Greta Gerwig with ‘Barbie,’ and when you have a film, directed, produced, and written by women, the set becomes a friendly environment for women to work in and find a work-life balance there. Again, it’s not to say that it’s not like that on male sets, but just having an intentional approach to the environment that you’re creating on the set really helps those things help in that sense.
Langley made some changes in Universal’s efforts to create more inclusion. When she launched the global talent development and inclusion department at Universal, “the thinking behind that at the time was that we need dedicated financial resources,” she said, “which we got. And then also, that department and team needed to report into the studio at the highest level. It was the first of its kind. Prior to that these initiatives would report into HR or report into the place where you’re not accessing decision-making power, right? So getting those things out of the way, it made a big difference.”
How Langley fell for Hollywood
“I didn’t grow up thinking, ‘I’m going to work in the movie business.’ I grew up in a small island in the South of England. We didn’t know about the movie business. But I did grow up reading,” Langley said. “My family is a family of avid readers, and so I fell in love with storytelling when I was younger. I just grew up loving, loving story. When I moved to Los Angeles, and I saw that there’s actually people who can do this for living, there’s a vocational aspect to it, I could actually get a job. That’s when I fell in love with it.”
Mostly, Langley loves to get movies made, “where you’re facilitating somebody’s vision, someone’s dream, someone’s story idea,” she said. “It’s so exciting when somebody walks through the door with an idea. And you have the resources and the ability to say, ‘yes.’ It’s hard to get to a ‘yes,’ it’s much easier to say ‘no.’ Figuring out how to weave your way to that, it’s a great feeling. And it’s a great feeling to work in a creative medium around brilliant people.”
