‘It’s Going to Be a Disaster’

When word came down early Friday morning that Pam Abdy and Mike DeLuca are reportedly being pushed out as Warner Bros. motion picture group co-chairpersons/co-CEOs, the news made a certain amount of sense, but it also raised questions. To be sure, the duo’s creator-first, “big swing” strategy of green-lighting expensive projects for visionary filmmakers worked great last year with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Zack Cregger’s Weapons harvesting money at the box office and One Battle After Another taking home Best Picture (even as the Paul Thomas Anderson drama is said to have lost $100 million for the studio). But after quietly pushing a number of potentially money-losing titles into 2026, DeLuca and Abdy’s hot streak ran very cold. Not a single movie they put into development managed to gross more than $100 million domestically this year, with director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! and Supergirl flopping super hard as prelude to the catastrophic wipeout of Tom Cruise’s Digger (which reportedly cost between $160 million and $180 million and is on track to earn less than $20 million over its opening this weekend).

And so, just as Paramount’s $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. is finally set to go through under David Ellison’s newly pithy Skydance moniker, Mike and Pam are being shown the door. Current co-chairs of Paramount Pictures Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, meanwhile, will reportedly now oversee both studios until someone else is hired — or not — to run Burbank-based Warner Bros.

But according to studio insiders and industry machers who have done business with Ellison, Goldberg and Greenstein, Abdy and DeLuca, things didn’t have to end this way. Under a corporate leader not named David Ellison, as the thinking goes, Mike and Pam might have stayed on to maximize their deep relationships to top talent, with their big-swing instincts constrained by a new content czar. Toward that end, Page Six Hollywood reported Friday that ParaBros’s newly installed co-CEO Ynon Kreiz was recently spotted having a three-hour dinner with former Walt Disney Television chairman Peter Rice, leading to speculation that the well-regarded British executive “is being courted for a potential role above or parallel to Greenstein and Goldberg.” That Rice could function something like Dana Walden’s new role of president and chief creative officer at Disney, guiding creative strategies and synergies across the company’s entire creative ecosystem.

It all compels certain questions. Namely: as Skydance ramps up to meet its legal obligation to release 30 feature films a year for the next two years, are Goldberg and Greenstein up to juggling a force magnitude of new IP and managing hefty producing deals with the Duffer brothers, Jon M. Chu, Ryan Reynolds and BoulderLight Pictures that Ellison has signed over the past couple of years? Moreover, given the demonstrated finesse with franchise films like Dune, Final Destination and The Conjuring that Abdy and DeLuca have shown over the years, why not just keep them as co-chairs alongside the other co-chairs?

In a word, loyalty. Goldberg is a longtime executive of Ellison’s pre-Paramount Skydance Media who helped found its Skydance Television division and executive produced Top Gun: Maverick. Former Sony motion picture group president of marketing and distribution Greenstein helped steer the first three Tom Holland-led Spider-Man movies to become multi-billion-dollar successes and engineered a blockbuster reboot of the Dwayne Johnson-Jack Black-Kevin Hart-starring Jumanji franchise. Perhaps more importantly, though, he is a close personal Friend of David who is known to drive high-performance race cars with the 43-year-old mogul on weekends. “Ellison wants his own people,” says a well-connected corporate strategist. “Pam and Mike are not his own people. He’s like, I don’t want Pam and Mike’s shit.”

Inside Melrose Avenue-based Paramount, meanwhile, expectations are not high for Goldberg and Greenstein’s dual studio tenure. “This is too big a job for Josh and Dana,” says one Paramount insider. “They don’t have the chops. And David doesn’t care. He just cares about loyalty. Producers can’t stand them — they just roll their eyes. In terms of quality control, it’s going to be a disaster.” (Representatives at Warner Bros. and Paramount declined to immediately comment for this story.)