Contact: Catherine Walsh, cwalsh@hbs.edu (617) 495-6391
Harvard Business School Communications
Alan Horn, President and COO of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Speaks at Harvard Business School
BOSTON -- "Greenlighting a movie is ultimately a leap of faith," said Alan F. Horn (MBA '71), president and chief operating officer of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., in a talk sponsored by the HBS Entertainment and Media Club on February 19. With blockbuster hits like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Ocean's Eleven, and Scooby-Doo, Horn has shown an instinct for picking screenplays with potential at the box office. But the soft-spoken movie mogul cautioned that while dreams can come true in Hollywood - he, after all, had started off his career as a junior brand manager for soap -- the film industry isn't an easy one. "Consumers pay the same amount for their ticket regardless of how much money you spend making a movie," he quipped.
Horn noted that the movie business is a mercurial one in which studios compete for a limited audience and must increasingly grapple with piracy issues that eat into profits. Pointing out that some 200 films were released in 2003, an average of four a weekend, he added that even "the frequent movie-goer goes to a movie theater only once a month." According to Horn, the making of bootleg videos and DVDs compounds the competition problem. "Piracy is killing us," he said frankly. "For instance, there were as many illegal copies of DVDs in Germany last year as there were legitimate ones."
The drive to make timeless movies keeps him going, said Horn. "If you go into any building on the Warner Bros. lot, you'll see photos of Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood, and other stars. I constantly ask myself and the people I work with, 'What are you doing today to be up on that wall?'"