Perhaps the most notable piece of information in a just-published THR piece, tackling Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca’s impending Warner Bros exit, has boss David Zaslav giving up on original storytelling.
Sources close to the situation say Zaslav wants to focus on big IP, versus the sort of filmmaker-driven fare that Abdy and De Luca are known for […] He is also said to be unhappy with the amount of money the two are spending on these non-IP projects. Abdy and De Luca allies say the two executives are consummate professionals and are resigned to the fact that their fate at Warners is uncertain amid a changing climate.
A few months ago, Bloomberg recently had a report describing Zaslav’s love for auteur-driven films, and how this infatuation for cinema might sadly, and quite epically, backfire on him in 2025. It already has with “Mickey 17,” and “Alto Knights,” and there's sadly many more titles to come.
At least Zaslav tried. Sure, it’s wrong to not release already-completed films (“Coyote vs Acme”), but hes one of the very few major studio execs willing to dish out hundreds of millions of dollars on auteur-driven passion projects. Who else is doing that? That’s right, almost nobody.
Under Zaslav’s tenure, Warner Bros, compared to other studios, was letting filmmakers freely cook; They recognized talent. Since 2022, Warners helmed new films from Bong Joon-ho, Denis Villeneuve, Clint Eastwood, Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig, George Miller, Zach Cregger, Emerald Fennell, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Philips, Steven Soderbergh, and Baz Luhrmann.
Sadly, it looks like Zaslav is done with original non-IP filmmaking. Do you blame him? De Luca and Abdy greenlit an inordinate amount of non-IP, all with wildly excessive budgets, and most of them might not break even.
More recently, there have been reports, from a variety of outlets, that before the year is done, Zaslav will be replacing De Luca and Abdy. An additional Bloomberg write-up took it a step further by claiming that Zaslav had already started meeting with candidates.
Complicating matters, and amidst reports of their inevitable firings, De Luca and Abdy have just landed in Vegas where they’re expected to introduce the Warners slate later this week at CinemaCon.
The theatrical version runs 108 minutes, so we're talking a nearly 2-hour-10-minute cut of a movie that works because it's lean, and I'm not sure anyone needs that.