Coca-Cola Hires Dawn Steel to Run Columbia Pictures?
As you know, Bob, Coca-Cola decided to buy up some other stuff in the go-go 1980s, this included Columbia Pictures.
IOTL they brilliantly choose David Puttnam who ran the company well and... no, wait, they choose the entirely correct but certainly doomed David Puttnam and eventually bailed on the whole film thing but still cleared their shares for sucker's money to Sony down the line (that, as they say, is another thread). Dear god folks, he delayed Ghostbusters II!!!!! An excellent book on the subject is Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle For Hollywood. Not that he had the best slate of films to deal with when he took over or anything, but he also managed to piss basically everybody off. (Ishtar, for those wondering, is almost certainly the same regardless of who is running the studio
Let's say Coca-Cola hires somebody else, Dawn Steel earlier would be neat. So. Aside from getting Ghostbusters II off the ground a year + earlier--as no one else will delay that obvious of a film--what else happens with a more franchise/blockbuster focused executive in charge circa 1985? Dawn Steel comes from blockbuster loving Killer Diller infested Paramount, after all. Does Columbia competing harder in the mid 1980s change their overall position? Will Coca-Cola keep them? If not, do we run full circle into another Sony purchase?