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On Sept. 29, a special screening of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger” was held at the David Geffen Theater on Wilshire. The screening was open to various guilds (including Academy voters), along with press and was meant as a celebratory dot on the promotional circuit. Director Iñárritu and most of the cast was there. It was supposed to be an opening salvo for the movie’s glittery awards campaign. But it ended up being a farewell stop.

During the post-screening Q&A, “Digger” star and producer Tom Cruise, sitting beside Iñárritu and fellow performers John Goodman, Sandra Hüller and Michael Stuhlbarg, called out to Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, the (now former) film heads at Warner Bros. Pictures, who were sitting in the audience.

Beaming and pointing to the pair, Cruise said, “I want to thank Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca. When we brought it to you, you didn’t take a breath. It was like, ‘Yes, thank you.’” His appreciation felt sincere, heartfelt even.

A few moments later, Iñárritu added, “Warner Bros., I don’t know how we lied to them and how they trusted us to make this film work. Thank God you are crazy.”

It’s that “craziness” that Iñárritu called out that made Abdy and De Luca two of the most exciting executives working in Hollywood. They had great taste and were willing to take risks; their movies had personality and verve and texture. And their slate at Warner Bros. was unlike any others, full of bold originals, genre oddities and populist franchise fare, eclectic and deeply enviable. And to Cruise’s point, it’s hard to imagine any executive team besides Abdy and De Luca giving the go-head to a movie so deeply bonkers, pointedly political and formally audacious.

They never stood a chance.

Now that the David Ellison-led mega-studio Skydance is beginning to take shape, Abdy and De Luca are out. Paramount film heads Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein will now oversee both movie studios.

It comes at a time when “Digger,” for all of its oversized ambition and artfulness, fell flat in a disastrous inaugural weekend, capping off a dreary and flop-heavy year that feels like an inverse of 2025’s epically successful run. But as the bumper sticker once so eloquently said, shit happens.

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When De Luca came to Warner Bros. Discovery, it was something of a homecoming.

He started his career writing episodes of “Freddy’s Nightmares,” a spinoff of the wildly successful “Nightmare on Elm Street” film series from New Line Cinema, which would eventually become a part of Turner Broadcasting System and, later, Warner Bros. In 1993, a year before the sale to Turner, De Luca became president and COO of New Line Cinema. Under his tenure, he encouraged filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson (who made breakthroughs “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia” for New Line), David Fincher (whose “Seven” would rescue him from the reputation of “Alien 3”) and John Carpenter (De Luca wrote Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness,” now considered an unsung classic). He also made hits like “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” “Dumb and Dumber” and the “Lord of the Rings” films. He knew “Blade” was cool before Marvel did.

Afterwards, he did stints at DreamWorks Pictures, was a producer at Sony (where he worked on Best Picture-nominated “Moneyball” and “The Social Network” with Fincher) and, with Abdy, worked at MGM Motion Picture Group, where he was able to reunite with Anderson for “Licorice Pizza” after Focus Features balked at the budget.

Abdy began her career as Danny DeVito’s assistant at Jersey Films, his influential production company while still attending college at Emerson in Boston. She ultimately became president of Jersey Films, before becoming Executive Vice President at Paramount Pictures, President of Scott Stuber’s Bluegrass Films and President of Production at New Regency. (Throughout this period with Iñárritu on “Babel” at Paramount and “Birdman” at New Regency.)

After New Regency she was a partner and Head of Film at Makeready, an independent production company, and at MGM oversaw a starry slate that included, in addition to “Licorice Pizza” (which netted studio’s first Best Picture nomination since “Rain Man” won in 1988), Michael B. Jordan’s “Creed III,” Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci” and Sarah Polley’s Best Picture-nominated “Women Talking.”

It should probably be noted that no other female film executive has championed female filmmakers like Abdy. At Jersey Films she co-produced Kasi Lemmons’ brilliant “The Caveman’s Valentine,” at Paramount she championed Kimberly Pierce’s “Stop-Loss” and Karyn Kusama’s underrated “Aeon Flux,” at Makeready she made Melina Matsoukas’ “Queen & Slim” and Sam Taylor-Johnson’s “ A Million Little Pieces” and partnered with Polley on “Women Talking.”

De Luca and Abdy together made perfect sense. De Luca has a reputation for being a brash bad boy, while Abdy’s career is defined by quiet determination and unflappable professionalism.

When beloved broadcast channel Turner Classic Movies looked like it was in danger of being erased in the Zaslav era, Abdy and De Luca became a part of a curatorial oversight committee, partnering with Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. You think Ellison could even find TCM on the dial?

In her 2023 commencement speech for alma mater Emerson, Abdy said, “You’re about to start a brand-new chapter, one filled with hope and inspiration, with searching and discovery, with challenges and hopefully much success. It’s not always going to be a thrill ride and it won’t always be easy and sometimes it won’t make sense. Where you end up might not be the destination you initially set out for yourself.”

Eventually Abdy and De Luca left MGM, which was subsequently acquired by Amazon, and took over as co-heads of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group in 2022.

Together, they navigated the demands of streaming and theatrical, shifting Steven Soderbergh’s third “Magic Mike” outing (“Magic Mike’s Last Dance”) from HBO Max to a theatrical release and partnering with Apple to theatrically exhibit“F1” (which made an astounding $634 million worldwide and was nominated for Best Picture).

And their commitment to mixing franchise fare with esoteric, auteur-driven gambles was perhaps best exemplified by their 2025 slate, which included Bong Joon-ho’s bonkers “Mickey 17,” Ryan Coogler’s period vampire epic “Sinners” (Warner Bros. even facilitated returning the rights to Coogler after 25 years), Zach Cregger’s shocker “Weapons” and Anderson’s sprawling “One Battle After Another,” with more surefire hits like video game-based family movie “A Minecraft Movie” (which brought in nearly $1 billion), horror sequels “Final Destination Bloodlines” and “The Conjuring: Last Rites.”

The only thing they can’t take credit for last year was “Superman,” from writer/director James Gunn, who also co-runs DC Studios with Peter Safran, since they report directly to Zaslav.

Earlier this year, at the Academy Awards, under Abdy and De Luca, Warner Bros. tied the record for the most wins for a single studio – 11 Oscars in all, for projects that they shepherded like “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “Weapons.” These were the movies that made sense to Abdy and De Luca and the ones that they believed in. They risked their reputations on them, and the risks paid off.

When Coogler accepted his trophy for Best Original Screenplay, he said, “I want to thank everybody that was involved in this movie, starting with Warner Bros. —  Mike and Pam…” Similarly, Anderson frequently cited them for protecting his vision.

They were fans of the art form and appreciative of the artists. Their slate felt less like a balanced spreadsheet meant to appease stockholders than a curated art gallery, full of works by the finest artists, each hung with precision and care. (We’ll say the more nakedly commercial stuff was in the gallery’s gift shop.)

But what comes up must come down and boy did 2026 come down.

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No studio wants a slate that performed as abysmally as Warner Bros.’ did this year. But looking at the titles on the calendar objectively, there was no real reason to be concerned.

“Wuthering Heights” started off 2026’s slate. Emerald Fennell’s hugely anticipated adaptation of the classic novel starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi had all the makings of a hit. Abdy and De Luca’s Warner Bros. had beaten Netflix for the movie by offering a smaller budget ($80 million) but a wide theatrical commitment. At $241 million worldwide it made a profit but just barely. The rest could not be same for the remainder of the slate.

“The Bride!,” originally meant for 2025, is perhaps the biggest example of Abdy and De Luca’s strategy backfiring. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ballsy, bewildering horror-romance-period-gangster-movie was championed by Abdy (again, no studio head has supported female filmmakers quite like her) but continued tweaks and reshoots left the final product feeling wishy-washy and watered-down. It cost nearly $90 million to produce and only made $24 million worldwide.

Others, you can see why they made them. “They Will Kill You” was produced by Andy and Barbara Muschietti, who had made the “It” movies and “The Flash” for Warner Bros. It only cost $20 million to produce but didn’t even make back its production budget.

“Mortal Kombat II” was a sequel to a popular pandemic-era videogame adaptation, placed in the same weekend where “Final Destination Bloodlines” cleaned up a year before, but it only eked out $129.5 million on a budget of $80 million.

And “The End of Oak Street” was a J.J. Abrams-produced dinosaur movie with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor – sounds like a slam dunk. Again, studio meddling and what we were told was apathy towards the finished movie led to it earning just $121.2 million against a budget of $90 million. (“Supergirl” was a tepid, costly follow-up to last year’s “Superman” but, again, this was not De Luca and Abdy’s boondoggle. That was pure DC Studios and David Zaslav. If any movie could have benefitted from a female filmmaker…)

“Practical Magic 2” also seemed like a no-brainer – a legacy sequel to a beloved 1990s original, opening at the start of spooky season and with both actresses (Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock) gamely making the rounds to promote it. But this will also be a money-loser; it’s currently at $96.2 million at the global box office, which would be pretty good if it didn’t cost $75 million to produce and Lord knows how much to market.

More successful was “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” a hip, hard-R spin on a classic monster, that made $91 million on a budget of just $22 million. And “Evil Dead Burn,” the latest film in the franchise, which made $72.3 million on a budget of $20 million. Those were both made under Richard Brenner’s New Line.

Somewhat tellingly, “Coyote vs. Acme,” a movie that WBD head David Zaslav tried to delete forever and which Abdy and De Luca did not attempt to rescue, wound up making more money than many of the projects on Warner Bros.’ 2026 slate, with more than $100 million worldwide.

And then there’s “Digger,” Iñárritu’s climate change social satire that stars an unrecognizable Cruise as a yee-hawing oil magnate who has to scramble to save the world after one of his drill sites causes a giant catastrophe. It is as big a swing as any major studio has taken, probably in the last 10 years or so, and its astronomical budget (rumored to be around $180 million) makes it more expensive than “One Battle After Another” or “Sinners.”

No matter what you think of the movie, this should be applauded.

But after receiving divisive reviews and some withering word of mouth, it pulled in just $8 million in its first weekend, an abysmal number by any stretch of the imagination but especially for Cruise’s first non-franchise movie in nearly a decade and for a project with that budget.

Under a different scenario, “Digger” would have simply been another box office disappointment. But after the year that Warner Bros. has endured, with its film leadership team in a precarious position, it served as an unfortunate swan song for Abdy and De Luca. At least the last movie that Warner Bros. released before it became just one icon on a logo plastered with a constellation of assets was a strident middle finger to the unerring greed of capitalism and the power-mad, ego-driven men actively making our lives worse.

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There are still lingering questions, of course.

We’re curious what will happen to Clockwork, the newly formed, independently-minded division that Abdy and De Luca set up with Christian Parkes, Jason Wald and Spencer Collantes. It was meant to be a competitor to A24 and Neon, a cooler-than-WB shingle that could release mid-to-low-budget movies that were edgier and more provocative. Clockwork’s first release is a 4K restoration of Ken Russell’s banned, NC-17-rated “The Devils,” hitting theaters for a week beginning on Oct. 16. It also has “Nasty,” Mary Bronstein’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You,” starring Rose Byrne and Jenna Ortega; Noah Baumbach’s next film; and “Ti Amo!,” an Italy-set sex comedy from “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker.

Does an Italy-set sex comedy from Sean Baker sound like something that is on the top of Ellison’s to-do list?

There’s also Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, a new theatrical animation division. Animation has never been hotter and WB’s new animation unit has exciting projects in the works leveraging the company’s legacy IP (there is a new “Looney Tunes” feature in development, along with “Tom and Jerry” and “The Flintstones”) with new ideas and literary adaptations. The first feature from the division, run by DreamWorks alum Bill Damaschke, is “The Cat in the Hat” starring Bill Hader, coming this Thanksgiving. It’s a terrific movie and a wonderful opening salvo for the division.

But how will Warner Bros. Pictures Animation feature when Skydance/Paramount already has two animation studios – Skydance Animation and Paramount Animation, each run by a different creative team. Do they really need three? Or will there be some kind of drastic consolidation? (Skydance Animation has to stick around as an autonomous unit at least until after its deal with Netflix expires next year.)

At a recent open house for the animation division, De Luca and Abdy walked around and said hi to guests – filmmakers and journalists alike. They were proud of what they had accomplished. Rightfully so.

Wherever Abdy and De Luca land, with some rumors suggesting they could take over for Dan Lin at Netflix, their next stop will be lucky to have them. There are few executives in Hollywood as creative, as fearless and as determined as these two. Warner Bros. made some of the most exciting movies ever under their watch. And it’ll be sad to see what happens when they’re gone. But Warner Bros. is not really a studio anymore; it’s now merely a brand in a large, overstuffed portfolio.

Under the new regime, it seems downright impossible that something like “Digger” would be given the go-ahead. This is a leadership team that has leaned on dusty franchises (“Scream,” “Scary Movie,” “Paw Patrol,” a clip-show version of “Jackass”) and wait, really? originals, like Brad Pitt-lost-in-the-woods-with-a-dog movie “Heart of the Beast” and the “‘Taken’ with a rodeo cowboy” thriller “The Rescue” starring Paramount+ star Brandon Sklenar.

Whether or not you liked “Digger” (or whether or not you saw it), you have to admit that such adventurousness is probably not part of the matrix at Skydance.

It’s somewhat telling that Cruise’s next film, slated for summer 2028, is a sequel to “Days of Thunder” starring Anne Hathaway, distributed by Paramount. Skydance would never make “Digger,” but a legacy sequel to a movie that, at the time, was seen as an artistic and financial disappointment?

Start your engines.