For months, it looked like Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy were just waiting for their pink slips. Everyone in Hollywood knew the clock was ticking. The co-chairs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group were seen as dead men walking. Then something remarkable happened. Six films in a row blew past expectations. Minecraft, Sinners, Superman, Final Destination, The Conjuring: Last Rites, and F1 each opened north of $40 million. In an industry beset by major flops, that kind of streak is unheard of. It made one thing clear: under David Zaslav, Warner Bros. isn’t just surviving, it’s dominating.
Strong leadership is about accountability. The hard reset Zaslav brought to a studio that once seemed more like a mess of boardroom drama than a creative powerhouse, did something few dared to: he cleaned house and demanded results. Maybe that’s why Warner Bros. now stands as the best-run studio in the business. And yet, co-chairs De Luca and Abdy finally decided to talk about their own role in the WBD revival, and as they spoke, the obvious brilliance of David Zaslav was hard to ignore.
Sitting down with The Wrap, they revisited the one misfire that nearly ended their run, the infamous sequel to a billion dollar franchise: Joker: Folie à Deux.
“I really liked the movie. I still do,” Abdy said. De Luca added, “It was really revisionist. And it may be that it was too revisionist for a global mainstream audience, but I thought that Todd (Phillips) and his screenwriting partner Scott (Silver) did the thing that most people making sequels don’t do, which is they decided to not repeat themselves.”
Translation? They swung for the fences and missed. De Luca even admitted the film’s failure was on them. They skipped test screenings in favor of a friends-and-family showing, and that decision might have doomed the entire project. Hollywood loves “artistic integrity,” but ignoring the audience isn’t courage, it’s arrogance. Did their friends and family applaud the film’s final act? (Spoiler Alert) You remember, the one where Arthur Fleck (Joker) insults Arkham guards during his court trial, and afterward, the guards beat him, wash off his makeup, tear up his suit, and rape him in the shower room?
The studio clearly trusted Phillips, or were willing to do anything for a sequel, granting him “final cut” and a splashy world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. This was a celebration of a director who purposely subverted audience expectations in a bizarre attempt to punish those who may have viewed the Joker as an aspirational figure after the first movie. But it backfired bigly. The early showing turned into a PR disaster. By the time Folie à Deux hit theaters, bad word-of-mouth had spread like wildfire. The “toxic buzz” killed any momentum before it began and the box office showed.
The difference between vision and vanity became brutally clear. In 2019, the original Joker pulled in $1.1 billion and two Oscars. The sequel was an unmitigated disaster, only managing to eek out $207 million worldwide, barely breaking even on a $200 million budget making it a massive loss for Warner Bros. That’s what Hollywood refers to as “a cautionary tale.”
But back to David Zaslav. According to World of Reel, he saw the warning signs early and wasn’t completely sold on Folie à Deux despite De Luca and Abdy saying they were “thrilled with the early cut” of ‘Folie à Deux’—full-on “this is genius” mode. Maybe that’s why the studio is now running like a machine under his watch. He doesn’t chase trends or bow to hype. He understands the audience, reads the room, calls out failure, and keeps the hits coming. In today’s Hollywood, that’s a rare skill. No wonder Netflix and Paramount are fighting over the most successful studio of 2025.
Is Warner Bros. perfect? Of course not. But look at the scoreboard. Others see chaos, Zaslav sees opportunity, and right now, he’s the one turning that vision into gold. Maybe it’s time the rest of Hollywood takes notes. Meanwhile I still hope neither Netflix nor Paramount prevail, and WBD stands, and succeeds, on their own.
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English (US) · 