UPDATE 8/26: TheWrap says Paramount plans to keep Gunn and Safran “alongside other top creative execs.” Per our insiders, only until the contracts run out, the same way Kelley’s and Register’s did.
UPDATE: The parade continues. The head of WB Animation, Sam Register, exits WB, and his contract expires. Per our insiders, James Gunn’s DC farewell is already written, with the WB exodus running on expiring contracts.
The Supergirl fallout is no longer just a box office story.
Warner Bros. EVP of Communications Katie Martin Kelley is leaving the studio for Netflix, and while the move is being described as a shock, our insiders tell us it was anything but.
Deadline reports Martin Kelley is heading to Netflix as VP of Communications, Film, where she will oversee the comms operation around Dan Lin’s feature slate.
She starts September 8 and reports to Netflix Chief Communications Officer Dani Dudeck.
Deadline’s sources say her contract at WBD is up, and it’s not clear whether the role gets backfilled while the Paramount merger sits in front of a judge.
At Warner Bros., Martin Kelley led media relations and corporate communications for Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, and the studio’s new genre label Clockwork, working under Motion Picture Group co-chairs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy.
Worth being clear about the org chart.
Supergirl is a DC Studios production under James Gunn and Peter Safran, a separate operation at the time from De Luca and Abdy’s Motion Picture Group, which had nothing to do with making the movie.
The studio’s comms apparatus handles the press machinery for everything Warner Bros. releases, which is how the rollout of a DC film lands on the Motion Picture Group’s media relations chief.
‘This Isn’t A Sudden Exit’
Deadline calls it a sudden departure.
Per our insiders, it wasn’t. We’re also told that Deadline’s description of Kelley as De Luca and Pam Abdy’s “right hand” is exaggerated.
We’re told the Supergirl messaging with the media was viewed inside the studio as botched, and that the failure hung over the communications operation for months.
“This isn’t a sudden exit,” our source says. Nobody inside was surprised.
The press handling around the movie speaks for itself.
When an official Supergirl featurette revealed AI was used to design Jason Momoa’s Lobo, WBD yanked the video off YouTube as the criticism mounted, which only made the story bigger.
The Influencer Campaign That Backfired
The most public failure came before the movie even opened.
Warner Bros. ran the standard influencer screening playbook for Supergirl, the one designed to flood social media with early praise before reviews land. Instead, the campaign collapsed in real time.
Film Threat’s Chris Gore called the film “terrible” out of his screening, Grace Randolph posted a cryptic “how unfortunate,” and the film settled at 53% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The backfire was visible enough to change another studio’s strategy.
Days later, Universal scrapped influencer screenings for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey entirely and went straight to professional critics.
When your press rollout fails so publicly that a rival studio (and Nolan no less) rewrites its release plan in response, that is the kind of failure that hangs over a communications operation.
The Bomb That Keeps Costing Warner Bros.
The damage this exit traces back to is well documented.
Supergirl opened to $37 million, collapsed 80% in its second weekend, lost 1,018 theaters heading into its third, and left theaters as the lowest-grossing DC movie of all time. The film has been projected to be a $244 million theatrical loss.
Then the bill came due on Wall Street.
WBD’s studio profits crashed 89% in Q2, a $96 million quarter for the entire Warner Bros. studio, with the company pointing at Supergirl in its own earnings materials.
The whiplash is what makes it sting.
This is the same studio, under De Luca, coming off a $4 billion 2025 built on One Battle After Another, Sinners, Weapons, Final Destination: Bloodlines and A Minecraft Movie.
In 2026, Supergirl and The Bride! bombed outright, Mortal Kombat II underwhelmed, and The End of Oak Street just tanked. A hot streak sells itself. Supergirl needed a story, and the studio never found one.
More Exits Are Already In Motion
Martin Kelley is the second high-level WBD executive out the door in a month.
Pia Barlow, EVP of Originals Marketing for HBO Max, left for Amazon MGM in July, and WBD sued over that one because Barlow’s contract ran through October 2027.
There is no lawsuit here. Martin Kelley’s deal was simply up, and we’re told that a lot of contracts across the Burbank lot are in the same position.
Per our insiders, more people are already in the process of leaving as the Paramount and Warner Bros. consolidation moves forward, and some of these departures will be dressed up as career moves.
As our source puts it, some of this is spin coming from the people themselves.
The traffic isn’t all one direction, either.
We’re also hearing that some people are already in talks to move from Disney and Amazon to Warner Bros. as the Paramount consolidation takes shape.
It lines up with what our insiders just told us about the theater chains: there’s real excitement about Paramount’s theatrical strategy, and they “got a glimpse into what the audience wants.”
The exits land as questions continue to swirl around James Gunn and DC Studios following the Supergirl collapse, with the merger held up by the states’ antitrust suit and trial set for March. Expect the parade to continue. More to come.
