A year ago, there was every reason to believe Michael DeLuca and Pam Abdy would be fired. The Warner Bros. Studio co-chairs had already suffered through Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” and George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” and were about to face the critical and box-office indignity of Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux,”
This week, they took a victory lap and spoke with The Black List founder Franklin Leonard in a rare interview. They laid out their operating philosophies: for running a studio, for making decisions that please moviegoers and shareholders, and for winning bidding wars (as they did for this year’s biggest original breakouts, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” and Zach Cregger’s “Weapons”).
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They also represent a victory lap for anyone who believes that Hollywood doesn’t have to be solely defined by sequels and CGI — and that while anyone can read a spreadsheet, people who make movies should be hired for their taste.
I’ve known De Luca since he was a 27-year-old hotshot president at New Line Productions, empowered by his maverick boss Bob Shaye to take big swings like “Final Destination,” “Austin Powers,” and “Magnolia.” As a producer, he backed long shots like “Moneyball,” “Captain Phillips,” and “50 Shades of Grey.” This is the guy who wishes he had made “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — not because it was profitable, or won Oscars, but because he thinks it’s a perfect movie.
Hollywood also respects Abdy, his former MGM co-chief (“Queen & Slim,” “Garden State,” “47 Ronin”) who is a shrewd studio player. Many are rooting for them — probably some of the same people who predicted their demise or declared that their “Sinners” deal, which not only granted final cut and first-dollar gross but where rights revert to Coogler in 25 years, would destroy the business.
These are people who don’t outsource dealmaking. Acquisition decisions are a combination of gut response, listening to other team members, and crunching numbers — but when Zach Cregger went out with the “Weapons” script at 8 a.m. on January 23, 2023, De Luca was on his phone by 9:30 a.m. wanting to buy it. (New Line’s Richard Brenner made sure of it.)
And sometimes, you have to go without a plan. “I’ll just be honest, we had to have it,” said De Luca of “Sinners.” “We just were not prepared to lose that movie,” he said. “How many scripts do you get where you go, ‘I’ve never seen this before?’”
Added Abdy, “It’s so basic. ‘Did that script move me?’ Did we feel like these characters were telling a story that transports us to a place that we hadn’t seen before?”
Winning a script like that means you not only need an appetite for risk, but a different way of defining it. To DeLuca and Abdy, making that $90-million picture with a reversion deal was a judgment call based on prior results.
“This guy and Michael B. Jordan have generated billions of dollars of box office revenue,” said DeLuca. “‘Black Panther’ is not a billion-dollar movie because of the comic book ‘Black Panther.’ Ryan Coogler is the IP behind ‘Black Panther,’ the same as Greta Gerwig is the IP behind ‘Barbie.’ In Ryan’s case, given the specifics of that movie and the themes of African American ownership, it was specific to Ryan. He wasn’t going to ask for it on every movie he does.”
De Luca even made the comp to a failed Warners bid from a prior regime for Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.”
“Do you want 100 percent of zero, which is what Warners got when they refused to give it to Tarantino for ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’? I don’t think [Sony chief] Tom Rothman resents or regrets having that movie in his library for 20 years,” De Luca said. “So we did the calculus: We can either have no Ryan and no movie, or we can have 25 years of ‘Sinners,’ which is five years more than Quentin at Sony.”
All well and good, but when that maverick thinking fails (which it certainly can, or will), that’s game over. DeLuca knows that — he’s been fired before. But he also believes that can’t be a compass.
“You cannot do the job like you’re afraid to get fired,” said De Luca. “Because if you act like that, innovation dies. You’re just doing the job to protect yourself and you end up making the same movie over and over again, and the consumer moves on.”
The mandates Abdy and De Luca sold their boss David Zaslav were audiences want authenticity and a studio can succeed with a diverse slate of movies. This year, they delivered with not only “Sinners” and “Weapons” but also “Final Destination: Bloodlines” and “A Minecraft Movie.” (“Superman” is another Warners hit, but they don’t control DC Studios.)
That’s good enough to keep them on solid ground even if Paul Thomas Anderson’s Leonardo DiCaprio starrer “One Battle After Another” turns out to be a commercial dud.
“You just hope at the end of the year you’re in the black and not the red,” said De Luca. “We all agreed on an operating philosophy. We’re not going to make streaming originals.”
De Luca and Abdy want other studios to step up and return to the number of movies they used to make pre-pandemic. Box office is down 20 percent since 2019, but the number of studio releases declined 30 percent. “I firmly believe if you make more movies, more people will go,” said De Luca.
By the way: The day after the “Sinners” deal was announced, Abdy and De Luca said another filmmaker asked them for a reversion deal. Answer: Nope.
They landed the movie, anyway. “We didn’t ruin the business,” said Abdy.
