Who links the Minions, Tom Cruise, Christopher Nolan, Fifty Shades of Grey, the gangster rap collective NWA., and the Isle of Wight? The answer is the greatest – and unlikeliest – British Hollywood success story in modern times.
A little over three decades ago, Donna Langley relocated from the UK to Los Angeles with neither connections nor career plan. What followed was a rags-to-riches story worthy of the movie business’s golden age. Methodically and unfussily – though with no little drama along the way – Langley worked her way up from an assistant’s post to the chairwoman of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, the oldest and currently most thriving studio on earth. (Of last year’s five highest-grossing films, three were Universal’s.)
Langley is the first British woman to run a major American studio, and the only woman to presently hold the role full stop. Since being promoted to the top job in 2009 – initially as co-chair, then in charge outright from 2013 – Langley has reversed her previously ailing studio’s fortunes. Yet this formerly working class mother of two – who was herself adopted as a baby, teased as a child for her half-Egyptian ethnicity, and used to daydream that her biological father was Omar Sharif – defies every media-mogul cliché in the book.
For one thing, the 56-year-old still keeps a relatively low profile. Shortly after her elevation to the top job, The Hollywood Reporter noted she never held court at industry haunts, describing her as “coolly chic” and “as smooth and opaque as polished marble”. (Though colleagues describe her as an enthusiastic dancer, and she has been spotted boogying at private functions with Rihanna and Meryl Streep.)
But then why make yourself a celebrity when the results can speak for themselves? Last year’s included the dizzyingly high takings of the Super Mario Bros animation and Fast X, and winning the Best Picture Oscar with (the also wildly profitable) Oppenheimer, which she secured for the studio after poaching Christopher Nolan from Warner Bros, where he’d been lucratively ensconced for 20 years.
Langley had been courting Nolan and his wife and producing partner Emma Thomas for much of that time. And after the director spoke out against his old studio’s mid-Covid maneuverings – releasing all of its 2021 titles simultaneously in cinemas and on HBO Max – the time came to strike.
Langley is the first British woman to run a major American studio, and the only woman to presently hold the role full stop.
She was one of a handful of execs to travel personally to Nolan’s LA compound to read the Oppenheimer script. After doing so, she promised him a $100 million budget (with the same again spent on marketing), full creative control, and an exclusive 100-day theatrical run before home viewing options kicked in.
With years of groundwork already done, Nolan happily jumped ship. But Langley clearly has a gift for handling and landing such A-list egos. Her similar long-term pursuit of Tom Cruise resulted in the Mission: Impossible star building his long-brewing $200m spacewalk film at Universal, which will be partly shot in outer space. She announced the film in October 2022, three months after being spotted in Mayfair, taking Cruise to dinner at Scott’s.
As for this year’s successes – well, you can’t talk about the hits of 2024 without mentioning bloody Wicked, which has already become the highest-grossing adaptation of a stage musical ever released.
Note also that the top two are also both Langley pet projects. In second place is 2012’s Les Misérables, which she personally talked Tom Hooper into directing after seeing The King’s Speech. (She also went all-in on Hooper’s disastrous Cats, but let’s set aside that particular saucer of milk for now.)
And in first place is 2008’s Mamma Mia!, which Langley threw herself behind shortly after moving to Universal, in the face of no little corporate skepticism. Two years ago, she told BBC News that one of her earliest cinema-going memories was seeing 1977’s Abba: The Movie with her older sister – an experience she described as “90 minutes of heaven”.
A little over three decades later, her own 109-minute contribution to the group’s big-screen oeuvre would take more than $600m worldwide. Nor has the obsession ebbed since: Thank You For the Music was her first pick last year on Desert Island Discs.
Exactly which multiplex or fleapit hosted that formative trip to see Abba is not known. But it was presumably somewhere on the Isle of Wight, where Langley was raised after being adopted by her father, a radar systems engineer, and mother, a seasoned ecological activist. (As a child, she and her mum would tramp the streets with Greenpeace leaflets.)
She never sought out her biological parents, but was bullied at school for her part-Arab roots. So after graduating sixth form at Kent College, an independent school in Canterbury close to her grandparents, she made for the city – first London, and then in 1991 Los Angeles, on the suggestion of Tania Landau, a friend she made while renting in Hampstead in the late 1980s, who would go on to become a producer herself.
It was there that the 23-year-old Langley found work as a hostess at the Roxbury: a nightclub on the Sunset Strip known for its spangly clientele, which made it networking heaven. Among the A-list stars and studio executives who frequented its VIP room was the producer Michael De Luca, who was taken with Langley’s sense of humor and no-nonsense attitude and offered her an assistant’s post at his company, New Line Cinema.
Not long after arriving she sidestepped into production, and over the next seven years became known for her eye for unlikely but promising scripts. (The first two Austin Powers films, by no means obvious smashes, were partly shepherded by her.)
So when Universal took her on as their head of production in 2001, that was what they wanted from her – and eventually, what they got. First, though, the studio had to weather the rest of its tumultuous noughties, culminating in a 2009 peppered with high-profile commercial failures. These ranged from the would-be-prestigious pictures (Public Enemies, Duplicity, State of Play) to the, ahem, less so (Land of the Lost) – so when the old co-chairs were swept out at the year’s end, an obvious replacement was on hand.
Throughout that time, Langley had both been working closely with Universal’s UK subsidiary Working Title, and helping to pioneer the filming of blockbusters in Britain before it was fashionable. The second and third Bourne films were made on her watch, as were Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Children of Men from Alfonso Cuarón.
Her early days in the top job coincided with motherhood. (She and her husband, the interior designer Ramin Shamshiri, now have two teenage sons and live in the small city of Ojai, 75 miles west of Los Angeles.) But professionally they were consumed with trying to repeat the Mamma Mia! magic trick: finding splashy, accessible, not overly expensive properties that would hit big with under-served audiences. During Hollywood’s great diversity drive of the 2010s, Langley was arguably the studio chief most concerned with finding it in her customers.
Among her early successes were Bridesmaids, the female-centered comedy smash starring and co-written by Kristen Wiig; and Fast Five, which transformed the previously wobbly Fast & Furious street-racing franchise into a multiracial blockbusting powerhouse. Soon after those came Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation, Jordan Peele’s satirical politically charged horror Get Out; and Straight Outta Compton, an awards-friendly musical biopic which told the story of the rap collective NWA. (Founding member Ice Cube was especially taken by her unflappable air and steely resolve during the making of the latter, later telling an audience of cinema owners: “Sorry, guys, some of you all don’t have balls as big as Donna Langley.”)
All of the titles above struck a chord with previously underrepresented cinema-goers, while making an absolute packet. When we think of the film business responding to political and demographic trends, we tend to picture franchises like Marvel and Star Wars, with their heavily workshopped progressive credentials pinned to their lapels. But Langley has arguably done more than any other studio chief to rewire Hollywood itself for the 21st century audience in all its jumbly variance. Rather than crowbarring an Abba vibe into Jurassic World, she simply made Abba films.
“Sorry, guys, some of you all don’t have balls as big as Donna Langley.”
A similar ethos lies behind her grisliest flops, of which (as for any studio chief) there have been more than a few. Cats, like Wicked and Les Mis, was an attempt by Langley to woo the Broadway-junkie demographic, and cash in on decades of goodwill built on the stage. Instead, it ended up as a litter-tray-scraping career low.
Then there was Dolittle: Robert Downey Jr’s first post-Marvel engagement, which tried to revive the old-fashioned family-friendly live-action adventure. And how about RIPD, which put Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds into a supernatural action comedy in the Ghostbusters mould?
If you can remember either of those films, congratulations: their collective losses, somewhere in the region of $200m, ensured they were rapidly memory-holed. Then there were Battleship and Warcraft, which in the 2010s used familiar brands as springboards for similarly dormant genres – the alien invasion and sword-and-sorcery spectaculars respectively. Together they lost the studio another $200m.
There was also the question of how to handle China. Langley’s attempted answer was The Great Wall, a near-unwatchable fantasy epic in which Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal helped the Song dynasty’s army fight alien monsters. Made in a spirit of cross-cultural collaboration, the film bombed in both the east and west, with Damon later admitting one of his daughters had taken to calling it “The Wall”, on the grounds that there was nothing great about it.
Working at that scale, Langley has generally been on surer ground with franchises, both homegrown and acquired. She won Bond from Sony and Lego from Warner Bros – though sat out the superhero wars, focusing instead on the studio’s Jurassic World series, a seventh installment of which is due next year.
She also navigated covid better than many of her rivals. Barely one month into lockdown, she pioneered the straight-to-streaming distribution model with Trolls World Tour, but determinedly held back the really big guns (like No Time To Die) until the pandemic had eased.
In each case, the trick was sensing a widespread need and meeting it before her competitors. The Trolls sequel was manna for trapped-at-home families, and took $100m on premium VOD in three weeks – more than the original had made over its entire five-month theatrical run.
And when Bond 25 finally surfaced in October 2021, it enjoyed the biggest UK opening weekend in the franchise’s history as cinemas finally had a title that proclaimed they’d reopened for business. The following July she was made a Dame by the King, then Prince Charles, who reportedly spoke to her at the investiture about the imminent release of Minions: The Rise of Gru.
Her latest challenge is the arrival of the tech giants – Apple, Netflix and Amazon, whose practices fly in the face of traditional studio rules. In an attempt to compete, she recently blew $400m on a new Exorcist trilogy from the (formerly low-budget) horror outfit Blumhouse, the second and third parts of which were quietly shelved last year after the dire first one was released.
By traditional studio rules, the splurge was incomprehensible. But it proved that Langley was willing to take on her new tech-based rivals like Apple and Amazon on their own plumply extravagant terms, paying once, all up front, rather than offering the talent shares of profits that could theoretically roll in for years.
But to play at this level takes nerve – and the Universal board clearly likes hers. Only last month, her role at the studio was expanded yet again, to give her final say on all content and marketing spending across film, TV and streaming. Speaking to Variety, one veteran agent described the promotion as a “coronation”. Long may her reign endure.
Robbie Collin is the U.K.-based chief film critic at The Telegraph
