UPDATE 10/3: The firings are now part of a bigger story: Ellison’s Skydance is off to an alarming start, woke and mid content included.
UPDATE 10/2: Puck’s Matthew Belloni now reports De Luca and Abdy will not join the merged company. THR adds the pair “felt secure” after meeting David Ellison, and insiders say Larry made the call.
UPDATE 9/29: Insiders say Casey Bloys is playing competing offers, with Disney and Netflix in the mix.
Puck News’ Kim Masters wrote this week that there is less confidence that Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy will stick around once David Ellison’s Paramount takes over Warner Bros.
Per our insiders, it’s the opposite.
“De Luca and Abdy are too valuable and Ellison knows their track record,” the insider tells us. “It would be disastrous if they left because Warners would have to poach someone from Universal or Sony, but even they wouldn’t be as good.”
“Even They Wouldn’t Be As Good”
De Luca and Abdy are the co-chairs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, the executives who greenlight the movies.
And they aren’t waiting around.
Back in July, our insiders said the pair were taking pitches from directors including Zack Snyder, Ben Affleck, Patty Jenkins, and Christopher McQuarrie.
In September, a Paramount source told us the two are “furiously working to clean up the mess and mend fences with MANY directors & creatives who were mistreated and pushed out.”
There is a lot of slate to fill. Insiders say the combined studio has promised 30 movies a year, and at least half must be blockbusters.
It goes beyond Warner Bros., too.
Our insiders said back in June that Ellison and De Luca are teaming to save Star Trek, and last week answered the fan questions that the Paramount-WBD merger changes everything.
The 2026 Slate Was Horror By Design
So where does the doubt come from?
Kim Masters points to Warner Bros.’ 2026 box office, a year where no release has opened above $40 million.
The insider says the year looked that way on purpose.
“Most of their slate this year was a lot of low-to-mid budget horror due to the sale and transition of WB, and creative accommodation for someone like Tom Cruise to keep him happy as a trade off for his franchise movies,” the insider explained.
“The massive bomb was under James Gunn with Supergirl,” the insider continued. “Dune is still coming and that’s going to be massive.”
The numbers line up.
New Line’s The Mummy made four times its $22 million budget worldwide, and Evil Dead Burn turned a profit on a $20 million spend. Those movies were never built to open huge.
Their biggest 2026 swing paid off. Wuthering Heights did about $240 million worldwide on an $80 million budget, the biggest Warner Bros. movie of the year.
Practical Magic 2, one of the “women pictures” our insiders said were coming, opened No. 1 this month.
Supergirl isn’t on their books at all. That is a DC Studios movie under James Gunn and Peter Safran, and Warner Bros. staffers told Deadline the company “chose the wrong comic book character” after it finished with $126.4 million worldwide.
Dune: Part Three arrives December 18.
And the Cruise accommodation is Digger, which opens Friday. Cruise signed his Warner Bros. deal under De Luca and Abdy, and Cruise is the relationship Ellison built Skydance on with Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible, and continues with Days of Thunder 2.
Ellison Already Graded Their Slate
Then there is 2025, the year the Puck News conveniently skipped past.
Under the same two executives, Warner Bros. put up a Hollywood-record seven straight $40 million-plus openings, with A Minecraft Movie, Sinners, and Weapons leading the year.
Ellison graded that year publicly. In March he called Warner Bros.’ 2025 “a powerhouse slate” that propelled the studio to $4 billion at the box office, and committed to releasing at least 15 Warner Bros. movies a year in theaters.
That is the pipeline De Luca is out taking pitches to fill.
As for the chatter saying they’re out, the insider points at the sourcing.
“Deadline and Puck are pretty much running rumors from competing execs in Warners-Par trying to save their reputations (see James Gunn),” the insider said, adding, “Once it settles, we’ll see major players developing franchise shows and films.”
The same drop laid out the goal for the combined studio: prestige blockbusters like The Odyssey and Dune, which is why insiders say The Dark Knight Returns is being looked at as a two-part event movie.
The merger is set to close, the pitches are flying, and per our insiders, the two executives taking those pitches are staying right where they are.
Also from this drop: John Lasseter’s Skydance Animation is going for 70s/80s Spielberg-Lucas event movies.
