Harvey Weinstein has always prided himself on being a maverick, the go-to guy for filmmakers whose visions didn’t fit within the standard Hollywood rules. And it used to work pretty well for him. “Let me see someone break my [Oscar] record,” he boasts in this week’s FORTUNE Magazine. “I’ll be the first to give them the cup. I’ll be Bobby Hull passing the baton to Wayne Gretzky.” But both Harvey’s record and his reputation were largely cultivated on Disney’s dime, and in a post-Miramax world, success-via-audacity has proven harder to come by. Here are three signs from recent press stories that the Weinstein camp is starting to look a lot like a “real” studio”

1. Harvey Sides With Powerful Politician Over Filmmaker

One of the more entertaining segments in Sicko is a montage devoted to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to reform health care in the early 1990s. Using long-forgotten TV clips and archival photos, Michael Moore first paints the first lady as a hero, a glamorous spitfire (that hair! those suits!) who gave those grumpy old men of Congress an injection of much needed “sass.” But in typical Moore style, it’s all set-up for the real volley: not only did Hillary fail to actually socialize American medicine, but as a Senator Mrs. Clinton has become the second-highest recipient of financial contributions from health care companies.

Harvey Weinstein is not only a Clinton supporter, but a family friend. According to the Washington Post, the mogul “begged” Moore to remove the second, damning part of the montage from the film. Moore refused, and Harvey eventually gave up — but does this sound like the same Harvey Weinstein whose support Moore thanked God for when Disney wouldn’t distribute his last film?

2. Quentin’s Making Sequels

You might not have noticed this, but Hollywood makes a lot of sequels (and prequels, and (gag) threequels, and ad infinitum). This is not because fine auteurs like Tim Story and Gore Verbinski really believe they need six or eight hours spread across three years in order to tell their epic stories properly–it’s because, in accordance with simple consumer theory, the studios believe that what they were able to sell once, they’ll be able to sell again.

IMDB currently knows nothing about it, but this past weekend, Kill Bill producer Bennett Walsh told press at the Shanghai Film Festival that two Bill sequels are potentially on the way. Quentin Tarantino had previously alluded to following up with several of the Bill characters years down the road, but according to Walsh, “plotlines [have] already been written”, and production could begin in China “somewhat earlier” than originally expected.

This is all speculation, but bear with me. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a much-ballyhooed director coming off a super-pricey failure, one your longtime friend/producer and his studio clearly see as an embarrassment. Would it be inconceivable for someone (maybe even that longtime friend/producer, who is under pressure to come up with a handful of hits, and fast) to suggest that your safest bet going forward would be to shore up commercial credibility by pushing up plans to revisit a past success?

3. The Weinstein Board is Hiring A CEO

That FORTUNE story also promises that the board of The Weinstein Company is looking for an outside CEO-type to come in and manage day-to-day operations, so that Harvey can get back to the business of supporting filmmakers. It would be a big deal if it actually happens, but who’s gonna want the job of telling Harvey (and Quentin and Kevin and Bob Rodriguez…) to reign in the spending? As Nikki Finke puts it, “Good luck finding, as one board director said, somebody who’s both a top-level CEO and would be compatible with the market and investors and the brothers.”