Despite a $22 million box office open for their big swing on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Warner Bros. movie chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy see box office legs for the critical darling over time.
“I’m a believer. It’s a marathon with this movie, not a sprint. I think it will leg out to a movie we will be happy with. I’d be lying if I said we were divorcing it from the pride we have in it,” De Luca, co-chair and co-CEO of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group along with Abdy, told the Bloomberg Screentime investor conference on Thursday.
The reported net budget for One Battle After Another was between $135 million and $170 million, figures De Luca and Abdy balked at addressing. But Abdy recounted going last week with her daughter to a repeat screening of the Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn-starrer about an ex-revolutionary group that has seemingly captured the cultural zeitgeist.
“It was like being in a rock concert, the way it played. It was thrilling,” she told the Bloomberg conference. That audience euphoria is welcome to De Luca and Abdy, who are the Hollywood comeback story of the year after sustaining earlier criticism over box office misses.
They also faced speculation they had lost the confidence of Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav and would not be long in their jobs. That was before they released a string of hits this year, beginning with A Minecraft Movie and Sinners in April, followed by New Line’s Final Destination: Bloodlines and Weapons, the breakout horror hit of the 2025 from filmmaker Zach Cregger.
The duo, who have just earned a multiyear contract renewal at the studio, declined to comment on rumors that Zaslav had met with other candidates earlier in the year for their job, and said he had always been supportive.
“We can’t address the speculation and rumors and all that stuff,” said Abdy. “All I can say is, David, Mike and I had the privilege of seeing all these movies early. We knew what we had with the filmmakers and with these stories and we couldn’t wait for audiences to see them. David was supportive of every film, and of Mike and I, and the choices I made.”
De Luca also argued WBD is doing its part to increase Hollywood’s tentpole output to sustain an industry-wide box office rebound, having gone from four to six movies annually to around 12 films in 2025 and looking to get to 18 in all each year.
For Abdy, the route to to boost the studio’s output is building a diverse slate of films, whether a movie based on known IP, such as Minecraft, or an original swing, or rebooting a long-dormant franchise. The studio’s box office rebound began with A Minecraft Movie, which grossed $957 million globally.
That was followed by Ryan Coogler’s original horror pic Sinners, which gross nearly $370 million globally. Abdy said Coogler’s script for Sinners sold the studio on backing the movie. “Ryan is just such a singular vision, a visionary filmmaker,” she argued.
De Luca said reaching gamers with Minecraft and an African American audience with Sinners was also down to a marketing department revamp for the studio. “While you can’t plan for it, you can arrange the chess pieces to take advantage” of shifting movies audiences in the streaming era,” he told the conference.
