We all saw this coming. According to Matt Belloni at Puck, citing two well-placed sources, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are out as Warner Bros. film chiefs and will not be part of the merged Paramount–Warner Bros. company.
The decision has reportedly been made, though David Ellison apparently hasn't delivered the news to them directly yet. Those calls are expected by Tuesday morning.
The timing is brutal. Their final release under Warner Bros will be "Digger," Alejandro G. Iñárritu's $180M art film starring Tom Cruise. Critics have mostly, and unfairly, been unkind, and tracking points to a domestic opening under $10M.
But who are we kidding? It wasn’t just that movie. Since 2022, De Luca and Abdy bet big on auteurs. Bless their hearts. You loved to see it, even when plenty of those bets lost money. Nobody else in Hollywood had the balls to greenlight the stuff they did. Who else would hand $80M–$100M+ budgets to Todd Phillips ("Joker: Folie à Deux"), Bong Joon-ho ("Mickey 17"), Barry Levinson ("The Alto Knights"), Paul Thomas Anderson ("One Battle After Another"), Maggie Gyllenhaal ("The Bride"), David Robert Mitchell ("End of Oak Street") and Iñárritu ("Digger")?
The only one who actually turned his passion project into real money was Ryan Coogler ("Sinners"). Even then, much to Hollywood's shock, he convinced De Luca and Abdy to let the rights to "Sinners" revert to him after 25 years.
At Monday's "Digger" premiere, Belloni reports, Tom Cruise praised Abdy and De Luca for committing so fast that he doubted they'd even turned a single page on the script: "You didn't even take a breath when we brought you this film. I don't even think you turned the page on it. You're just like—you're in."
As a compliment, it's lovely. As a business strategy, it perfectly explains De Luca and Abdy's tenure at Warner Bros. The numbers are what sank them, and things might get worse. Next year, delayed and very pricey projects they greenlit from Jonah Hill, J.J. Abrams, Sam Esmail and Nancy Meyers will finally come out.
Taking over for De Luca and Abdy will be Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, who currently run Paramount. They will oversee both studios and will no doubt focus more on IP and less on auteurs. I'll say this: as a moviegoer, I'm going to miss having a studio that greenlit things like "Digger." Studios need executives willing to take swings like that. They also need those swings to land more often than these did.
The wheels are already turning to lock in a sequel to Greta Gerwig's 2023 blockbuster, and it sounds like an inevitability: "There's no way “Barbie 2” doesn't happen."