Warner Bros. Discovery Ends Tuesday as Paramount Skydance Deal Closes; Film Chiefs Out

MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2026 — Tomorrow, one of the oldest names in Hollywood changes hands for the last time. Paramount Skydance's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closes Tuesday, October 6 — and when it's done, the executives who ran the movie studio through one of the roughest years in its modern history will be gone with it.

Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, the Warner Bros. film chiefs, will not be joining the merged company once the deal closes, Bloomberg reported Friday. Their exit was reported alongside the news that the combined studios' future movie slate — a promised 30 releases a year — will be overseen by current Paramount Pictures chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein.

The last receipt of the old regime is already in. Tom Cruise's Digger, the Alejandro González Iñárritu comedy that cratered with an $8 million opening this weekend, is the final film released from Warner Bros. Discovery before the acquisition closes, the Associated Press reported. After a week of bad reviews and worse buzz, the $125-million-plus movie opened in fifth place — a grim bookend to the De Luca-Abdy era.

The year that ended the old regime

De Luca and Abdy's departure isn't happening in a vacuum. This has been a brutal year for Warner Bros. at the box office. Bloomberg's reporting tied their exit to a string of commercial failures that includes The Bride! and The End of Oak Street, which have cumulatively lost the studio hundreds of millions of dollars. Digger is only the most visible casualty — a $160 million comedy that opened behind an animated holdover.

It's the kind of run that makes a corporate changing of the guard almost inevitable. When a new owner takes over, the first question is always who gets to spend the money next. The answer, per Bloomberg: not the people who spent it this year.

That doesn't make De Luca and Abdy's tenure a simple story of failure — they also shepherded real hits during their run — but in the merger math, the ledger of 2026 is what counted. And the ledger says the old Warner Bros. spent its final year losing money on swings that didn't connect.

What survives the merger

Not everyone is walking. James Gunn and Peter Safran, who run the DC Studios label at Warner Bros., will join the new company, Bloomberg reported — a sign that the superhero operation is considered an asset worth keeping intact, not a problem to be solved. HBO chief Casey Bloys is also staying, along with several other Warner Bros. Discovery executives.

That split tells you how the new owners see the pieces. The parts of Warner Bros. that have a clear creative identity and a functioning pipeline — DC's rebuilt universe, HBO's prestige television — are being kept. The traditional studio apparatus, the greenlight machine that produced this year's flops, is being replaced with Paramount's leadership.

For moviegoers, the concrete promise is volume: 30 releases a year from the two combined studios. In an era when major studios have been shrinking their theatrical slates and leaning harder on streaming, that's an unusually aggressive commitment to putting movies in theaters. Whether the new leadership can fill that slate with films people actually want to see is the entire question — and it's the question De Luca and Abdy's successors will now have to answer.

The end of an era, in one box-office weekend

There's a strange poetry to the timing. The final Warner Bros. Discovery release is a Tom Cruise movie that nobody went to see — a $8 million opening for a star who has carried the box office for forty years. Our box office desk broke down the full weekend: Anne Hathaway's Verity took the top spot with $32.6 million while Digger finished fifth, behind three holdovers.

The symbolism writes itself, but the business reality is bigger than one flop. Warner Bros. Discovery, the company, was always a debt-laden marriage of a cable empire and a century-old studio. Paramount Skydance is buying the library, the brands, and the franchises — and, judging by the executive moves, it intends to run them its own way from day one.

We've been tracking this story all year — the autopsy of the studio's losing-money thesis, what Digger says about Cruise's star power, and the movie's strange tell-all marketing campaign. Tomorrow, the company those stories were about stops existing. What comes next starts with thirty release dates and a new set of people deciding which movies get made.