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Mike De Luca began hearing the rumor over a month ago: He and his Warner Bros. film co-head Pam Abdy were on the chopping block.
The source of the rumor was not David Ellison, whom the duo had met months earlier and seemed to indicate they would stay on in a post-merger world. No, De Luca was hearing that this was coming from Josh Greenstein, co-chair of Paramount Pictures.
Greenstein, according to sources familiar with the meeting, told other executives in a cross-town engagement that he wanted to get rid of Abdy and De Luca. Other sources, also with direct knowledge of the conversation, countered the remark was directed toward the general stability of Warner Bros., and was made in the context of Greenstein vying for a project and peacocking Paramount’s own superior stability and executives.
Regardless, De Luca, never one to sit on his hands, decided to go head on and called Greenstein.
“Are you seriously saying this?” He demanded to know, according to sources familiar with the conversation.
Greenstein denied the accusations and blamed it on a bad game of telephone. Because the deal was still in limbo given the antitrust suit, he was not legally allowed to make personnel decisions.
But on Friday, that conversation feels prescient in hindsight as Abdy and De Luca are exiting the studio they have run since 2022.
They learned that Greenstein and his co-chief Dana Goldberg would be taking control of both film divisions — and that they were out of a job – just before a Puck report broke the news late Thursday night.
It was the end of four years of highs and lows, during which the duo has been the subject of the Hollywood rumor mill, with constant questions about potential ousters and contract renewals, in almost equal measure.
They have faced accusations of overspending on movies with limited commercial prospects, like this weekend’s Tom Cruise bomb Digger, and have been hailed as cinema heroes thanks to major box office wins like Sinners and Weapons, and for bringing home best picture for One Battle After Another.
For months leading up to the merger, De Luca and Abdy believed they were safe after a meeting with Ellison, in which he suggested they would stay, according to a high-level Warners source. They told people they believed there could be a friendly rivalry between themselves and Greenstein and Goldberg, given that they all had their own relationships with talent and filmmakers. Maybe the competition could even inspire each other to be better.
“Clearly a lot has changed since then,” says the Warners source.
Now, De Luca and Abdy are left to plot their next moves. They have told associates they could go to Netflix, and De Luca is said to have grown close with Netflix mogul Ted Sarandos during a series of conversations they had when the streaming giant was tipped to buy Warner Bros. late last year.
Could they help Netflix move more into the theatrical space? Could they bring their auteur-driven philosophy to the streamer, which counts middle of the road movies like Carry-On and Red Notice as among its most viewed movies ever?
“All of their relationships are theatrical relationships. You aren’t going to convince those filmmakers to go make their big streaming movie,” cautions one source who has business with both Warners and Netflix. “If I were Ted, I’d say, ‘Come over, I’ll give you a sweetheart deal, and help us think through what theatrical could look like.”
Netflix showed a willingness to get into the theatrical business when it was going to acquire Warner Bros., and is giving its longest theatrical window ever for its Cannes acquisition La Bola Negra as it hunts for an elusive best picture Oscar.
“Netflix’s audience taste is more down the middle. It would be interesting to have them and their more filmmaker-driven approach at Netflix,” says one observer with business at Warners. “I just don’t know if the Netflix audience wants that. They want Red Notice, not May December or Roma or Lost Daughter.”
In the weeks since California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that a settlement with Paramount Skydance would clear the way for a merger, reps and studio execs across the industry expressed doubt that a single executive team could lead the 30-film slate that was laid out in the settlement.
Per the agreement, the combined studios must release 30 films for two years and then 32 for the next three years. There are penalties if this threshold isn’t met. For every movie that Skydance falls short of, the studio must pay $30 million to health and pension funds, split among the guilds. Additionally, a judge can force it to sell or spin out Miramax, which was behind the 2026 Paramount Skydance hit Scary Movie.
Of course, Goldberg and Greenstein are not completely alone in the oversight of the combined Paramount and Warners film slate, with studio labels actively run by veteran executives.
DC Studios, which is still in the middle of a turnaround and coming off of an unfortunate showing with Supergirl, will continue to be led by James Gunn and Peter Safran, while it is believed that Richard Brener is safe for the time being at New Line, home of lucrative franchises like The Conjuring and The Lord of the Rings. And then there is Warner’s newest studio label, Clockwork, the boutique outfit run by a trio of former Neon executives. Clockwork is readying for its first big theatrical release, a remastering of the 1971 British film The Devils, out Oct. 16, and has proved a player at festival markets, landing upcoming film from Sean Baker and Park Chan-Wook. It’s also looking to get into the low-budget genre game.
“At the end of the day, you can’t have four chairmen,” says the Warners insider, assessing the notion of De Luca, Abdy, Greenstein and Goldberg all working together. “You can’t share marketing and distribution. You can’t have people fighting over who gets Memorial Day, who gets the Super Bowl ads, and who gets the big spend.”
Greenstein and Goldberg’s mandate at Skydance is meat and potatoes and franchise movies, rather than the swings of De Luca and Abdy, known for offering a studio home and big budgets to filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, Alejandro Iñárritu and Emerald Fennell, to varying degrees of commercial success.
In this way, De Luca and Abdy’s Warners filled the void left behind when Megan Ellison’s Annapurna, once the place where filmmakers like Anderson could find patronage and distribution, paused its film operations. (Annapurna began reopening its doors for at least some business earlier this year.) And while Neon and A24 have certainly taken up the auteur mantle in the past half-decade, these studios can offer low-to-mid-level budgets, a far cry from the $100 million-plus that De Luca and Abdy greenlit.
It is these big swings from name brand directors that will mark De Luca and Abdy’s time at Warner Bros., for better and for worse.
There was Sinners, Coogler’s vampire movie that delivered $370 million in ticket sales and Academy Awards glory. Coogler, who took home the original screenplay Oscar, repeatedly credited De Luca and Abdy’s support during the awards campaign, including in his Oscars speech. On the other end of the spectrum, there were films like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! ($23.9 million on a $90 million budget), and Cruise starrer Digger, which is tracking to open this weekend to a dismal $8 million to $15 million on a $125 million-plus budget.
The detractors categorized the chiefs as overzealous with budgets to the detriment of the larger studio slate, while champions heralded them as Medici-esque in their commitment to ensuring that some of the best films of the past couple of years made it in front of audiences. Hollywood, a town that has never particularly enjoyed any shade of gray, is likely to continue arguing along this binary.
Ultimately, it is these strong filmmaker relationships, as well as those with their powerful reps (they are known to be close to CAA’s Bryan Lourd), that De Luca and Abdy will carry with them into their next act.
—Alex Weprin contributed to this story.
English (US) ·