Sean Baker has lined up his first feature after Anora, and the project says plenty about where both the filmmaker and Warner Bros. want to go next. Baker’s new film, Ti Amo!, will launch through Clockwork, the studio’s new specialty label, with a 2027 release planned. The announcement came at CinemaCon, where Warner Bros. used Baker’s post-Anora heat to introduce a label built around smartly budgeted theatrical films and a small annual slate.
The move gives Baker a studio-backed release while keeping him in the lane he has publicly said he wants to protect. After Anora won best picture and handed Baker four Academy Awards for the same film, he made clear he was not hunting for franchise scale.
In interviews last year and this February, he said his next movie would stay in the independent space and described it as “my love letter to the Italian sex comedies of the ’60s and ’70s,” adding that he hoped to shoot in 2026. Trade reports now say he will write, direct, edit, cast and produce Ti Amo! with Alex Coco and Samantha Quan, with Warner Bros. handling global distribution and holding worldwide rights outside France.
That pairing also serves Warner Bros. at a useful moment. The studio created the label in December under former Neon marketing chief Christian Parkes, alongside Jason Wald and Spencer Collantes, and described its mission as making “smartly budgeted global theatrical releases” with bold marketing. Reports from January said the label was already chasing prestige acquisitions at Sundance, which framed Clockwork less as a vanity imprint and more as a serious play for filmmaker-driven cinema inside a major studio system.
The timing gives the news extra weight. Warner Bros. arrived at CinemaCon under pressure from industry unease tied to its proposed Paramount deal, with theater owners and filmmakers warning that consolidation can shrink theatrical output. Against that backdrop, unveiling a Sean Baker film as Clockwork’s first release let the studio send a clear message to exhibitors: it still wants a place in the market for adult, director-led movies that live or die in theaters.
