Walter Hamada’s run as the president of DC Films ended recently when he stepped down after the release of Black Adam, following years of tumult at the struggling studio—which had been trying and failing to replicate the success of Disney’s Marvel Studios for a long time. Not all of those failures deserve to be laid at Hamada’s feet, since he merely came in to replace previous DC Films bosses Jon Berg and Geoff Johns a few years ago, but with new Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav coming in with some big plans that make sense to nobody but him, it must’ve felt like a perfect time for Hamada to bounce. (DC Films itself has since been completely restructured into DC Studios, which is now run by Peter Safran and James Gunn.)
But there’s no need to worry about Walter Hamada, unless you’re one of those Snyder Cut obsessives who was praying for him to be launched into space or something even though he gave you the exact thing you were screaming for, because he’s going to be just fine. According to Variety, he’ll have a new gig on January 1 working on Paramount Pictures’ development of “mainstream horror movies.” Buoyed by the surprising box office success of Smile, Hamada’s goal will be to release “several low-to-mid-budget films per year across theatrical and streaming,” which sounds quite a bit easier than ripping off the most successful cinematic pop culture machine of all time.
Also: We’ll get a lot of new horror movies out of it, and that’s cool. Some may be good, some may be bad, but since we won’t be constantly comparing them to a unified cinematic universe where every release is tightly controlled and planned out in advance, it’ll be okay.