As markets continued their downward skid Monday thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, there was one stock bucking the trend: that of Warner Bros. film heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy.
Warner Bros. and Legendary’s A Minecraft Movie bested already high expectations at the weekend box office to earn a massive $162.7 million domestically and more than $313 million in worldwide ticket sales in its opening weekend. After a string of underperforming titles — and a rumor mill that has been churning since the top of the year about De Luca and Abdy’s fate at Warners — Minecraft is the type of win that should silence critics. In a memo to Warner Bros Discovery staff, De Luca and Abdy touted the success, writing, “This is what happens when we believe in the power of our creativity, each other, and the strength of great storytelling.”
But how much time can Minecraft buy an executive in the current Hollywood climate?
Since they took over the studio in mid-2022, the De Luca-Abdy tenure has been marked by manic highs (Barbie, Dune: Part 2) and extreme lows (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Joker 2). These uneven fortunes have been a change of pace for Warners, long been seen as one of the more reliable operations in town.
To recap 2025 thus far: Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 opened to a poor $43 million at the global box office on a $118 million budget. That film is said to be the final green light left over from former Warner Bros. boss Toby Emmerich, and was sitting around for two years. The movie started filming the month after Barbie wrapped production as Bong, who had final cut, tinkered with the edit over the course of several release date changes. The Alto Knights ($9 million worldwide on a $45 million budget), featured not one but two Robert De Niros and had Barry Levinson in the director’s chair — both talents whose box office draw was most felt in the 1990s. It was personally greenlit by David Zaslav, giving De Luca and Abdy cover.
A Minecraft Movie is seen internally as De Luca and Abdy’s first true greenlight. The film is based on the multi-platform game that stands as the best-selling video game of all time. With IP that boasts such a massive built-in audience (over 200 million monthly active users, according to video game industry estimates), a movie adaption seems like a no-brainer. But Minecraft had been in development for nearly a dozen years, with almost as many director attachments (Shawn Levy and Rob McElhenney, among them). Early drafts were written by Jon Spaihts, the scribe behind heady sci-fi flicks like Prometheus and Dune Part 2, and it had a much more serious tone. (By comparison, Minecraft features Jason Momoa’s character in a fuchsia fringe leather jacket wrestling a baby zombie.) The movie went through multiple incarnations to finally land at the family-friendly version that De Luca and Abdy ultimately pushed through.
Adding pressure to De Luca and Abdy, one insider notes, was that Warners was up against a ticking clock. Greg Silverman, former President of Warner Bros., spent five years acquiring the rights to Minecraft, but Emmerich was uninterested in the IP, says the source, so much so that by the time De Luca and Abdy took the reins, Warners was in danger of losing the Minecraft rights if the project didn’t go forward. Internally, president of production Jesse Ehrman advocated for the project, with the co-heads ultimately giving it the final thumbs up.
“This movie would not exist if it wasn’t for Mike and Pam believing in the IP,” Roy Lee, one of the movie’s producers, tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Warner Bros. Pictures sold 25 percent of the film to Legendary and 10 percent to Domain Entertainment, with Warner retaining 65 percent of the film, copyright and revenue. Legendary’s Mary Parent, who is rumored to have met with Zaslav about taking over De Luca and Abdy’s post at Warners, was instrumental in the making of the movie, bringing on director Jared Hess, who championed a comedic tone.
As Minecraft continues its box office domination, Hollywood insiders agree that De Luca and Abdy have bought themselves some time, but are not out of the woods yet. Coming up, the studio is staring down a slate full of original (and expensive) swings from big-name filmmakers with A-list talent that the industry at large describes as inspirational and alarming in equal measure.
Next up is Ryan Coolger’s original vampire movie Sinners on April 18. De Luca and Abdy wanted to make a big statement with the Coogler deal, signaling they would pay top dollar for top talent and do right by them. After all, Warner Bros. was still working to repair damage after the studio, under former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, sent its entire 2021 slate to day-and-date to the company’s nascent streaming service during the pandemic. The move torched relationships with filmmakers like Christopher Nolan.
Warners, which initially greenlit Sinners at $80 million, won the bidding war for the vampire film thanks to a deal that gives Coogler the rights back to the movie after a certain number of years. (De Luca has a history of making big statement acquisitions going back to his days at New Line in the 1990s, when he paid a then-record $4 million for the Shane Black script Long Kiss Goodnight.)
“We needed to bring creative people back to the company. And so, in some cases, we may have overspent,” Zaslav acknowledged in March at a Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. “I don’t think we did. Because we wanted to bring the best and the brightest people back to Warner Bros.”
Currently, Sinners is tracking for an Easter weekend opening between $30 million and $40 million. While not reaching blockbuster territory, it is a seemingly respectable number for the film that has an R-rating and production budget that climbed to $100 million, according to sources.
The biggest swings to date of the De Luca and Abdy regime are still on the horizon. First is Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Reports vary on the film’s cost, falling somewhere in the $130 million to $160 million range. It is seen as a make-or-break moment for the pair. Recently, the film moved out of its August release to an awards-friendly fall date in September, a slot once occupied by Warner title The Bride. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s $80 million punk rock take on The Bride of Frankenstein moving off its fall 2025 release date to spring 2026 could be a further reprieve for the executives, allowing a half year between big bets. The Bride now finds Abdy busy in the editing room and incredibly hands-on, according to sources.
Outside of Warners proper, the New Line slate, which includes a Final Destination reboot and a Conjuring installment, will bolster the studio’s box office. And if Minecraft continues on its current trajectory, it could gross $1 billion.
The double-edged sword is that the success of Minecraft, based on a piece of intellectual property, will cast a harsh light on De Luca and Abdy’s filmmaker-first modus operandi should those types of titles not work. “Their whole strategy is fancy filmmakers and original movies, and that is what they will be graded on,” says one source connected to the studio of the Minecraft win. “This buys them some time, but they are not out of the hot seat yet.”
—Pamela McClintock contributed to this story.
