In a major coup for his production company, Greg Berlanti has brought in Warner Bros. production executive Sarah Schechter to serve as president of his Warners-based banner, a studio insider has told TheWrap.
Schechter, who is considered one of the brightest young studio executives in the movie business, will run both the film and TV divisions of Berlanti Productions. While Schechter will continue to work closely with the creative team at Warners, the new gig was simply too good of an opportunity to pass up, according to an individual familiar with the situation.
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Schecher joined Warner Bros. in 2005 as a creative executive and rose to VP and senior VP in 2007 and 2009, respectively. Most recently, she had been spending much of her time prepping the Berlanti-produced 3D Peter Pan movie “Pan,” which finds Joe Wright directing Hugh Jackman and Garrett Hedlund as Blackbeard and Hook, respectively. Schechter will join Berlanti as a producer on “Pan.”
Melissa Kellner Berman, the current president of Berlanti Productions, will exit her post when Schechter takes the reins in March and become a producer on some of the company’s projects. On the small screen, Berlanti is behind “Arrow,” “Flash” and “The Tomorrow People.”
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Schechter’s other upcoming movies at WB include Ben Affleck‘s “Live By Night” and the Whitey Bulger movie he has been developing for Matt Damon to star, as well as Jaume Collet-Serra’s live-action “Akira” and Etan Cohen’s Will Ferrell-Kevin Hart comedy “Get Hard.”
Schechter previously worked for Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple and for Barry Mendel’s Universal-based production company, where she worked on movies such as “Munich” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.”