<\/p>\n
In just six months, Warner Bros has gone from ailing Hollywood giant reportedly mulling a leadership change to the industry’s hottest studio — and the rumored target of a $70 billion takeover bid.<\/p>\n
With a string of box offices smashes like “Superman,” “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners” — plus the acclaimed “One Battle After Another” starring Leonardo DiCaprio — Warner Bros Discovery’s film division was the first studio to hit $4 billion at the box office this year.<\/p>\n
It is a dramatic turnaround from as recently as March, when Warner was reeling from expensive flops like “Mickey 17” and its high-profile, roundly reviled “Joker” sequel.<\/p>\n
“We’re doing our part,” movie studio co-head Michael De Luca said Thursday, in an interview at the Bloomberg Screentime summit in Los Angeles that trade press dubbed a “victory lap.”<\/p>\n
“When there is a good run at a studio, morale is high,” he said.<\/p>\n
Renowned cinephiles De Luca and fellow studio boss Pamela Abdy were pilfered from Warner’s smaller rival MGM back in 2022.<\/p>\n
By this spring, the pair were rumored to be on the way out, with CEO David Zaslav reportedly even taking meetings with potential successors.<\/p>\n
This week, their contracts were renewed.<\/p>\n
“We can’t address the speculation and rumors and all that stuff,” said Abdy.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
– Horror hits –<\/p>\n
Having generally trailed rivals like Disney and Universal in recent years, Warner has had nine films that opened at the top of the box office charts this year — more than any other studio.<\/p>\n
That list included “Weapons,” one of several breakout horror hits this year from Warner, at a time when the until-recently thriving genre has suffered disappointing returns at rival studios.<\/p>\n
Other Warner horror hits included installments in two long-running franchises: “Final Destination” and “The Conjuring.”<\/p>\n
De Luca attributed the success to bringing in “fresh and innovative” ideas, like injecting more humor into the gory “Final Destination” universe.<\/p>\n
“With franchises that are particularly long in the tooth, you really have to innovate within the genre,” said De Luca.<\/p>\n
He added: “None of them were phoned in. None of them were a bunch of executives in a room saying ‘milk that franchise’.<\/p>\n
“Audiences can tell when something is not prefabricated.”<\/p>\n
– Takeover rumors –<\/p>\n
The sudden success has come at a nonetheless turbulent time for parent corporation Warner Bros Discovery, the product of a 2022 merger with Discovery.<\/p>\n
In June, Zaslav announced the business was again splitting, separating its booming streaming and movie divisions from the dwindling television channels.<\/p>\n
That has now been called into question by a potentially even bigger deal.<\/p>\n
In what would be the latest and most startling game of Hollywood musical chairs, Warner has been targeted by Paramount — recently acquired by the billionaire tech family of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest man.<\/p>\n
Larry’s son David Ellison, the new Paramount CEO, on Thursday declined to comment on the rumored bid, but said “there are a lot of options out there that are actionable in the near future.”<\/p>\n
He also made the case for scaling up, in order to produce “more movies, more television series” for consumers.<\/p>\n
“There’s always going to be speculation in our business — we’re in a time of massive disruption,” said Abdy.<\/p>\n
“You can’t focus on that.”<\/p>\n
amz\/hg\/sst<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In just six months, Warner Bros has gone from ailing Hollywood giant reportedly mulling a leadership change to the industry’s hottest studio — and the rumored target of a $70 billion takeover bid. With a string of box offices smashes like “Superman,” “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners” — plus the acclaimed “One Battle After Another” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2080817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[305116,23666,390912,391152,391151,306876,328922],"class_list":["post-2080816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-david-zaslav","tag-leonardo-dicaprio","tag-michael-de-luca","tag-movie-studio","tag-pamela-abdy","tag-warner-bros","tag-warner-bros-discovery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Comeback-studio-Warner-takes-victory-lap-amid-takeover-rumors.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2080816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2080818,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080816\/revisions\/2080818"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2080817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2080816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2080816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2080816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}