De Luca and Abdy exit Warner with one earner from six auteur bets

Six times between October 2024 and this week, Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy gave a famous director a large budget and no franchise to hide behind. Those six films cost between $653m and $733m to produce, on the figures Warner Bros and the trade press have put in print. They have grossed $959.7m worldwide between them. One made money.

Both are now leaving. Puck reported on Friday morning, citing two sources, that neither De Luca nor Abdy will be part of David Ellison's management team once the $110bn Paramount-Warner Bros Discovery merger closes on Tuesday 6 October, as TheWrap relayed. TheWrap could not independently confirm it. World of Reel, carrying the same report, said Ellison had not yet made the calls and was expected to by Tuesday morning.

Ellison spent Friday on a different announcement. The merged company will be called Skydance, trade under the ticker SKYD, and keep Paramount and Warner Bros as sub-brands, he said in a post on X, per Variety.

Six swings, one earner

De Luca and Abdy took over Warner Bros Pictures Group in July 2022, replacing Toby Emmerich, with a brief to make the studio somewhere serious directors wanted to work. They were unusually literal about it.

Todd Phillips's Joker: Folie à Deux cost $190m to $200m and took $207.5m worldwide in October 2024; Deadline's annual profit-and-loss accounting put the net loss at $144.25m the following April, against $106.3m of print and advertising. Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 cost $118m after UK tax credits and took $133.3m, with a projected theatrical loss of $75m to $80m. Barry Levinson's The Alto Knights cost $45m to $50m and took $10.2m. Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! cost $80m to $90m and took $24m. Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another cost $130m by Warner's count and $175m by Variety's, took $213.1m, and was reported by Variety to be heading for a $100m theatrical loss.

Warner Bros disputes that one. A spokesperson said the studio "refutes Variety's anonymous sources and their uninformed estimates" and pointed to more than $4bn of 2025 box office across the slate.

Then there is Sinners. Ryan Coogler's film cost $90m to $100m, grossed $371.6m, and Variety reported in September 2025 that it was expected to clear roughly $60m in theatrical profit. It is the one.

It also carried more weight than its share. Sinners on its own out-grossed Joker: Folie à Deux, Mickey 17 and The Alto Knights put together, which is $371.6m against $351m, and those three cost between $353m and $368m to make.

Take Sinners out of the column and the rest stops being arguable. The other five films cost between $563m and $633m to produce and grossed $588.1m worldwide. Cinemas keep roughly half of a ticket, so the studio's share of that came to something near $294m against more than half a billion of production spend, before a dollar of marketing. The working assumption in the industry is that a film needs two to two and a half times its budget before anyone is in profit.

Add up the loss estimates published for four of the six and the total clears $400m: $144.25m on Joker: Folie à Deux, $75m to $80m on Mickey 17, about $100m on One Battle After Another and as much as $100m on The Bride!. Four reports, four methods, one of them contested by the studio, so the sum is a direction rather than a figure. Set against Sinners it runs roughly seven to one.

The best picture that lost $100m

Warner Bros' 2025 slate won 11 Academy Awards at the ceremony in March from an industry-leading 30 nominations, tying the record for most wins by one studio in a single night. The other holders are MGM for Ben-Hur in 1959, Paramount for Titanic in 1997 and New Line for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003. Six of the 11 went to One Battle After Another, including best picture and best director.

That is the film reported to have lost $100m.

Those two paragraphs are the whole tenure. De Luca and Abdy were asked to restore the studio's standing with filmmakers, they did it about as thoroughly as anyone could, and the ledger that proves it is why neither is on the new organisation chart.

$364 a cinema

Digger opened on Friday, which is the sort of timing nobody plans. Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Tom Cruise satire took $1.2m in Thursday previews from more than 3,300 North American sites, per The Hollywood Reporter, which works out at less than $364 a cinema.

Verity, Michael Showalter's Colleen Hoover adaptation for Amazon MGM, took $4.5m from 3,510 sites the same night, Variety reported. That is $1,282 a cinema, and Verity cost $40m.

Now set both against their budgets. Verity returned 11.3% of its production cost on the first night. Digger returned 0.96% against the $125m Warner Bros has given reporters, and 0.67% against the $180m World of Reel published this week. A Hoover adaptation sitting at 39% on Rotten Tomatoes was somewhere between twelve and seventeen times as efficient on opening night as a Cruise film from a four-time Oscar winner.

We went through what Digger needs to break even last week, and the lower budget figure already put it north of $310m. Warner Bros is guiding to $12m to $15m for the weekend. Puck's source put it under $10m. Either would be Cruise's weakest wide opening in twenty years.

What replaces them prefers a known title

Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, co-chairs of Paramount Pictures, are expected to oversee both studios, with a further hire to run Warner that nobody has named. The reading across the trades is that the combined operation will favour recognisable titles over director-led originals, which is what Ellison's Paramount has done so far.

That is a defensible answer to the arithmetic above, and it is still a loss. A studio that only makes films from things audiences have already heard of is cheaper to run and produces very little anyone remembers.

The layer above is already assembled. Mattel's Ynon Kreiz joined as co-CEO of the combined company this week, days after Cindy Holland left Paramount's streaming business after 418 days.

The merger closes on Tuesday 6 October. Digger's actual opening weekend lands two days earlier, on Sunday.