The studio that made Sinners just lost the people who said yes to it

Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are out at Warner Bros., exiting as Paramount Skydance's takeover closes and David Ellison hands both film studios to Paramount's Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein. The pair had run the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group since 2022, when they arrived from MGM — the studio Amazon bought out from under them.

What they leave behind is the strangest ledger in the business: the slate that made Warner Bros. the critical darling of 2025 and the slate that just produced one of 2026's biggest bombs. On one page, Sinners, Weapons, and One Battle After Another, an Oscars where WB tied the record for most wins by a single studio with 11, and Ryan Coogler thanking "Mike and Pam" from the Best Original Screenplay podium. On the other, The Bride! at $24 million against a near-$90 million cost, and Digger — the Iñárritu film with Tom Cruise, reportedly around $180 million — opening to $8 million the month they lost their jobs.

Warner Bros. tied the all-time record for Oscar wins by a studio in March. The executives who built that slate were out by October.

Where the next Sinners gets made

That question is the actual subject of the r/boxoffice thread about their exit, and the room there reached a consensus fast:

"Amazon MGM and Universal does seem like that they will fill the void left by WB. A24 is aggressively getting into bigger films overtime…"

— a commenter on r/boxoffice

The case for Universal came with names attached:

"I mean... it's Universal Studios, in large part to Donna Langley, Jason Blum, and Peter Kujawski providing auteurs ample support to their movies. A24 is in second place but they still have yet to prove themselves in the blockbuster space."

— a commenter on r/boxoffice

I'd sign under the thread's answer, Universal first. Langley's studio already runs the machine De Luca and Abdy were building by hand — Nolan, Jordan Peele, Blumhouse's horror pipeline, Focus for the arthouse — and it has the one thing A24 hasn't demonstrated yet, the ability to carry a $100 million original to a global opening. Skydance's own slate points the other way, toward franchises and legacy titles, and the first post-merger greenlights at WB have been exactly that: a Crazy Rich Asians series, Rogues' Gallery spin-offs, library revivals.

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The asterisks worth keeping

Two threads of the De Luca–Abdy project survive them, at least on paper. Clockwork, the indie label they launched as an A24 rival, has films from Sean Baker, Noah Baumbach, and Mary Bronstein in the pipeline, and nobody at Skydance has said what happens to it. And the executives themselves may land somewhere with a bigger checkbook than WB's — the rumor TheWrap flags has them succeeding Dan Lin at Netflix, which would move the "who greenlights the risky ones" question to a streamer that releases forty movies a year.

Until one of those turns real, the scoreboard reads the way the thread says it does. The studio that said yes to Sinners now answers to executives hired for a different kind of yes, and directors with a strange, expensive idea are learning a new address in the valley — most likely Universal's.

Previously we wrote: Mike Flanagan promises a faithful Dark Tower — fans already know which character won't survive the adaptation