Warner’s Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy Are Safe (for Now) After ‘Sinners’ and ‘Minecraft’ Success

How quickly the fortunes of a Hollywood studio head can change.

Just weeks after the word around town was that their jobs were in jeopardy, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group studio heads Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy have passed a key test of their film strategy and will likely live to fight another day thanks to the critical and commercial success of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” and the birth of a new franchise with Jared Hess’ “A Minecraft Movie,” according to multiple insiders who spoke with TheWrap.

Coogler’s vampire horror film’s $48 million domestic opening weekend and extremely rare A CinemaScore — the first for a horror film in 39 years — has strengthened the pair’s position following earlier misfires like Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux” and Bong Joon-ho’s “Mickey 17.”

Even more impressive: Warner Bros. achieved what no studio has accomplished since 2009, with two films – “Sinners” and “Minecraft” – each grossing over $40 million on the same weekend, as “Minecraft,” with $720 million grossed so far, is on track to become the eighth film in studio history to gross $1 billion worldwide.

“To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of their demise have been exaggerated — I always thought it felt like rivals trying to will it to happen,” one franchise film producer told TheWrap. “These guys have an extensive rapport with almost every filmmaker that matters. Warners would lose a lot losing them.”

Representatives for Warner Bros. Discovery declined TheWrap’s request for comment.

While the performance of “Minecraft” and “Sinners” have tamped down talk about De Luca and Abdy being ousted, one top agent cautioned that bigger challenges still lie ahead: “The real test is upcoming” — in James Gunn’s “Superman,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride,” and an untitled Alejandro González Iñárritu film. Other upcoming titles that will test their skill will be “Animal Friends,” “Flowervale Street” and “Wuthering Heights.”

On the eve of CinemaCon earlier this month, TheWrap reported that Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav was having “informal” meetings with potential replacements for De Luca and Abdy after the misfires for “Joker: Folie a Deux” and “Mickey 17″— and ahead of a risky slate.

“Zaslav is not patient once he turns,” a source familiar with Warner Bros. and Zaslav told TheWrap at the time. “But it would be a shame to punish them for taking big creative swings.”

De Luca and Abdy, who were installed in 2022 and whose contracts expire next year, have staked their reputations on big-budget auteur projects from filmmakers like Coogler, Anderson and Gunn.

It is a strategy that, to some degree, predates them. Prior to “Sinners,” the films on Warner’s slate were ones that were greenlit by De Luca and Abdy’s predecessor, Toby Emmerich, with the two execs overseeing those projects to completion. That includes hits like “Minecraft” and busts like “Mickey 17,” both of which entered active production in the final months of Emmerich’s tenure in early 2022 prior to Warner’s merger with Discovery.

Insiders at the studio tell TheWrap that bringing in Coogler and “Sinners” was a doubling down on the filmmaker-first strategy by De Luca and Abdy. The two executives arrived as Warner was still reeling from its “Project Popcorn” experiment in which the studio released all of its 2021 films in theaters and on streaming simultaneously.

The plan led to major friction between WB and one of its major production partners, Legendary Pictures, that Abdy and De Luca had to smooth over. “Project Popcorn” also brought public condemnation from top directors like Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan, the latter of whom ended his decade-plus relationship with Warner and brought his eventual Best Picture Oscar winner “Oppenheimer” to Universal.

De Luca and Abdy sought to reestablish Warner Bros. as a studio that welcomed filmmakers with unique visions, and were willing to stake hundreds of millions to rebuild that image. It is why they agreed to extremely favorable terms for Coogler to bring “Sinners,” his first post-“Black Panther” film and his first original film since his 2013 debut “Fruitvale Station,” to their slate.

Among those terms was a reported $90 million net production budget before marketing, an abnormally high spend for the typically thrifty horror genre that enabled Coogler to fulfill his vision of stylized vampire fight scenes, supernatural musical sequences and a historically accurate Great Depression Mississippi, all shot with Imax and Ultra Panavision cameras.

More unusual, and to the consternation of rival executives, Abdy and De Luca agreed to return ownership of “Sinners” to Coogler after 25 years, a deal that the filmmaker told TheWrap he wanted because of the deeply personal nature of the film. Only Quentin Tarantino has made a similar deal in recent memory with “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”

Their gamble appears to be paying off. “Sinners” now stands as the best opening weekend for an original film this decade and is enjoying the strongest critical and audience reviews of any film this year. Box office sources tell TheWrap that with such strong acclaim, they expect “Sinners” to earn at least a 3x multiple, which would equate to a domestic theatrical total of at least $144 million.

The flipside is that “Sinners,” with its specific focus on Black American culture and history, isn’t getting much turnout from international audiences with a $16 million overseas launch. Given the film’s marketing costs and a first-dollar revenue deal for Coogler, “Sinners” will likely require post-theatrical revenue like PVOD and streaming licensing deals to turn a profit. But Warner insiders told TheWrap that they are confident the film will be profitable because of its universal audience buzz.

This is also where the ongoing success of “A Minecraft Movie” comes in, serving as the tentpole that supports financially riskier endeavors like “Sinners.” With “Minecraft” on its way to $1 billion and DC’s “Superman” potentially reaching that mark if it wins over a global audience, Warner Bros. could finally have its first year with multiple $1 billion hits, an achievement that Universal pulled off in 2015 and 2017 and which Disney did every year from 2015 to 2019 and again in 2024 with “Inside Out 2,” “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Moana 2.”

Such a box office achievement would be a feather in De Luca and Abdy’s caps, all while establishing a potentially long-lasting relationship with Coogler similar to the one Warner once had with Nolan.

However, not everyone in town is convinced that “Sinners” has done enough to prove that De Luca and Abdy’s big spends on original filmmaking will be worth it to their parent company in the long run.

“When you have studio heads spinning the very solid, but not spectacular, domestic opening of an expensive movie in their own favor while disregarding its shockingly low overseas opening, you are entering the territory of ‘smoke and mirrors,’” one industry insider said, noting that “you can only move so many potential misses to 2027 for breathing room.”

Along with “Superman,” the next big test for De Luca and Abdy will be “One Battle After Another,” which will be released in late September with full premium format support, including Imax 70mm and the once obsolete format VistaVision.

Anderson is revered among cinephiles, with 11 Oscar nominations to his name and the distinction of being the only filmmaker to win directorial awards at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals.

But unlike Coogler, who rode into Warner with the box office clout of his “Black Panther” films and “Creed,” Anderson’s highest grossing film is his 2007 drama “There Will Be Blood” at just $77 million worldwide.

In total, Anderson’s 10 films have earned a combined lifetime gross before inflation adjustment of $317 million, according to The Numbers. At a budget reported to be as much as $150 million, “One Battle After Another” will probably have to match that figure to get into break even territory theatrically.

To do so will require another campaign from Warner Bros. that sells “One Battle After Another” as an event release as effectively as they did “Sinners,” fighting against industry trends that have made franchises the only reliable moneymakers for the box office while studios and theaters have to fight harder to convince enough people to spend the time and money to give original films a chance.

For now, with Anderson’s film still five months away, De Luca and Abdy took a victory lap on Sunday, releasing a statement celebrating Warner’s one-two success on the box office charts.

“As we continue to strive to bring an array of films to moviegoers, we are thrilled to see how Ryan Coogler’s original movie ‘Sinners,’ and a movie based on the fan favorite ‘Minecraft’ game, have resonated with audiences in such a stellar way,” the statement read. “Movies have the power to transport us to worlds only seen on the big screen, and Warner Bros. Pictures remains committed to bringing singular in-theater experiences to audiences looking for bold movies, both original and those based on beloved existing properties.”

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