Warner Bros. Pictures could have been the biggest studio in Hollywood. While MGM had a more efficient assembly line process for making pictures, Warner Bros. was always the more well rounded studio. It was the only studio with an animation department that could rival Disney and it was often at the forefront of new technology. Its biggest stumbling blocks were its founders- the Warner Brothers themselves. The four brothers were often at odds with each other and in their later years were seemingly out of touch with what was going on in their own studio.
When television came on the scene, the living Warner Brothers stubbornly refused to have anything to do with it, entering the business relatively late. Even worse, the studio started selling off its Crown Jewels- its back catalog- to stay afloat. Its Looney Tunes cartoons were a huge hit on television but because the company had sold them off, the lucrative profits went elsewhere.
Unlike Universal Pictures, which benefited from its founder’s decision to build a massive studio lot, Warner Bros. suffered from its founders’ decision to sell off anything not nailed down. Its saving grace would come from an outside company that owned and operated parking lots- Kinney National, which sought to diversify its holdings. Kinney would combine Warner Bros. with its other media holdings like DC Comics. This would re-energize the company, which would successfully buy back its back catalog of films as well as those of MGM. Kinney would divest itself of its non-media holdings and become Warner Communications.
