Warner Brothers Inc

Warner Bros. hopes to cure a case of superhero envy. After years of lagging rival Marvel Entertainment in adapting comic-book properties for the big screen and other media, the Burbank studio unveiled a major restructuring of its DC Comics unit Wednesday that will bring its operations under tighter control. The move is an effort by Warner Bros. and corporate parent Time Warner Inc. to implement a new strategy for DC Comics, which will face stiffer competition from a steroid-charged Marvel as a result of Walt Disney Co.'s deal last week to acquire it for $4 billion.

Warner Bros., following a trend that is now all too familiar among American companies, is preparing to outsource jobs to India and Poland as part of a studio-wide cost-cutting move. The Time Warner Inc.-owned studio will join other media companies, including NBC/Universal and Viacom Inc., that have initiated cutbacks and layoffs in the face of weakening entertainment industry revenue and the deepening recession.

Warner Bros. has emerged as the only bidder for Midway Games Inc., all but assuring that it will take control of the bankrupt video game publisher previously owned by Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone and become a major force in the video game industry. Midway had hoped that the film studio's $33-million offer, made in late May, would spark a bidding war that would boost its price.

Warner Bros. is setting its sights on Redbox and Netflix amid the latest sign that consumers are abandoning retail DVD stores in favor of the fast-growing rental kiosks and mail subscription companies. The Time Warner-owned studio on Thursday joined 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures in announcing that it would not provide movies to leading kiosk operator Redbox until 28 days after they go on sale. In a surprising move that hasn't yet been made by any of its competitors, Warner said it would impose the same restriction on Netflix and other DVD-by-mail subscription providers unless they agreed to "a day-and-date revenue sharing option."

The court fight over "The Watchmen" is costing Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, but the biggest bill of all could fall to the film's producer, Larry Gordon, his lawyers and their insurers, who could be on the hook for substantially more money. Court documents in the nearly yearlong dispute over the superhero movie's distribution rights show that Warner Bros.

Clearing the way to move forward with its two planned films of "The Hobbit," Warner Bros. resolved a nasty legal battle with the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien over profit from the "Lord of the Rings" films. Last year, two of Tolkien's children, Christopher, 84, and Priscilla, 80, sued New Line, now a unit of Warner Bros., for an estimated $150 million that they claimed was owed from the three "Lord of the Rings" movies, which amassed $2.96 billion at the worldwide box office and at least $3 billion in DVD and other ancillary sales, according to the lawsuit.

The stakes in the industry's most competitive moviegoing season are high for all Hollywood studios, which spend heavily to sell their big-budget popcorn titles around the world. This summer, the risks are particularly steep for Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. studio, which has hundreds of millions of dollars riding on three major releases: “Speed Racer,” the Batman sequel “The Dark Knight” and “Get Smart,” a big-screen adaptation of the 1960s sitcom.

Holy opening weekend, Batman! "The Dark Knight," the long-awaited sequel from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures, sold $155.3 million in tickets this weekend, according to early estimates from its distributor, setting a record for the biggest three-day take and cementing the primacy of superhero movies at the cineplex. Batman's haul surpassed the bar set last year by Sony Pictures Entertainment's "Spider-Man 3" by $4.

For Warner Bros., the mission was to keep "The Dark Knight" from seeing the light of day. In an era of instantaneous digital copying and widely available high-speed Internet access, the premature and unauthorized release of a movie to the public -- especially a coveted summer blockbuster -- can spell disaster. If the movie's a stinker, the word will travel at the speed of a mouse click, ruining chances of making back money.

Talk about a disappearing act: Harry Potter just vanished from the 2008 movie schedule. Warner Bros. shocked fans around the globe Thursday when it announced that "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth installment in the massively successful film franchise about a young wizard and his friends, would not hit theaters in November as planned. The film will instead be delayed eight months and arrive on July 17, according to Alan Horn, Warner Bros. president and chief operating officer.