WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal and AMC Join Netflix and Disney in Opposing Georgia Abortion Ban
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Just a day after Disney’s CEO Bob Iger stated Disney would reconsider productions in Georgia if the state’s restrictive abortion law went into full effect, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal and AMC have all followed suit, per THR.
“We operate and produce work in many states and within several countries at any given time and while that doesn’t mean we agree with every position taken by a state or a country and their leaders, we do respect due process,” WarnerMedia said in a company statement. “We will watch the situation closely and if the new law holds we will reconsider Georgia as the home to any new productions. As is always the case, we will work closely with our production partners and talent to determine how and where to shoot any given project.”
WarnerMedia acts as the parent company to HBO, Turner and Warner Bros. J.J. Abrams and Jordan Peele’s HBO show Lovecraft Country is currently in production in the state, but the creators have promised to donate their salaries and earnings to the ACLU of Georgia and Fair Fight Georgia.
Similar to WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal’s statement says if the heartbeat bill is enacted, it will strongly influence their decision to work in the state. “We fully expect that the heartbeat bills and similar laws in various states will face serious legal challenges and will not go into effect while the process proceeds in court. If any of these laws are upheld, it would strongly impact our decision-making on where we produce our content in the future.”
The Walking Dead has been filming in Georgia since the beginning of the series, and AMC, its network, has also fed into the line of studio statements reconsidering the state if the ban is put into full effect: “Similar bills—some even more restrictive—have passed in multiple states and have been challenged. This is likely to be a long and complicated fight and we are watching it all very closely.”
The three companies’ statements are the latest in Hollywood’s stances from major studios, which Netflix’s Ted Sarandos started earlier in the week and Disney recently echoed.
A slew of smaller production companies, including Vox Lux’s Killer Farms and the actor-writer-brother duo Duplass Productions, were some of the first in the industry to respond to the restrictive law.