‘Verity’ Is Trash. But Is It Good Trash? Plus: ‘Digger’ Flopped and Warner Bros. Is No More.

The Big Picture

Sean and Amanda examine the box office collapse of Alejandro Iñárritu's Digger and the sweeping leadership changes at Warner Bros./Paramount as Mike DeLuca

Key takeaways

• Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy are exiting Warner Bros./Paramount as Skydance prepares to take over the merged studio's film division.
• Digger opened to $7.9 million against a budget north of $150 million, with negative buzz and tracking severely limiting its theatrical run.

Main topics

• Warner Bros./Paramount merger and Skydance takeover
• Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy studio leadership era

Notable quotes

Mike and Pam were the last people doing it. And now it's done.

Conclusion

The episode highlights a pivotal moment in Hollywood where traditional studio executives

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) you Speaker 1 (0:15) I'm Sean Fennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about verity and endings. Today on the show, we are talking about the new Colleen Hoover adaptation, Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. It was the biggest movie of the weekend and is also a heaping pile of steamy, pulpy trash. But is it good trash? And what do we mean by that exactly? Amanda and I will explain. There was also a dramatic change in studio leadership at the newly merged Warner Brothers Paramount over the weekend. We will talk about that as well as the failure of the movie Digger. It's all coming up right after this. Speaker 1 (0:49) Okay, Amanda, a lot happened over the weekend. I've been in New York living a fabulous life. You've been in Los Angeles living another life. I wish you well. How was Speaker 2 (1:02) dinner with my husband? Speaker 1 (1:04) I did, in fact, have dinner with your husband in New York. We were both away from our children and we were living it up. We went to an old haunt of ours that we... We dined in many times and we had a nice time. We are working here. Your husband is working and I'm working. Maybe not as hard as you're working. You know who wasn't working? It was the film Digger. The film Digger did not work for audiences around this great nation. $7.9 million opening weekend. Was that the final tally? I didn't even update the final numbers. But boy, this movie did not perform well on a budget north of $150 million. What do you make of that? Speaker 2 (1:39) Not surprised. The main reaction, the only thing that I was very sure about, well, I was sure of two things. One, I found the experience of watching the film irritating. And two, that it was not commercial. So that seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, that the movie just really was so uncommercial that people gave up going to see it. And I do feel... This weekend, anecdotally, everyone I saw wanted to ask me about Digger and what I thought about it, but none of them had seen it. And no one really had plans to see it. You know, we said on our Digger episode, which I hope people will listen to after seeing the film, that we hoped they would see the film before they listened to the podcast. No one did. Everyone was just like, no, no, no, I'm not going to bother with this. Maybe I'll check it out on streaming. But this is so DOA that... I don't have to go. So I do think that the reviews and just the negative buzz and tracking probably pressed it down even further. Speaker 1 (2:41) I think you're right. I think the word was out pretty quickly that this was maybe not for everyone, but is still it had a car crash quality. And so I think there was a curiosity about what it was that people were checking. So there's a lot of media about the film. There are a lot of takes flying around about the film. Yeah, I think you and I. anticipated correctly that there would also be a kind of counter wave, that there would be some defense of the movie, maybe even a rising cult of this movie. And that's interesting. I've been trying to sort it out. There's a couple things I wanted to talk to you about with respect to that. One of them is that, you know, many of Alejandro Iñárritu's compatriots publicly went to bat for him. Alfonso Cuarón took to X.com, the everything app. to share some thoughts about other films historically that received negative reviews and then were ultimately praised as all-time classics, which, you know what? I love my friends too. You know? I understand. And as you know, there are some things about Digger that I really quite liked. I came out mixed positive on the movie with some notes. The other thing is that the movie arrived at... at the exact moment when Pam Abdi and Mike DeLuca were beheaded publicly by David Ellison. They're not joining the Warner Brothers Paramount merger. They're not going to run the film slate at Warner Brothers anymore. And I do want to have a long conversation with you about what their reign meant and what it means for them to not be in that position. But there's one quick digger thing that I wanted to speak to you about. And I don't want to spoil the movie for anybody who skipped the last episode, but there's this kind of question of is the whole point of the movie to satirize satires? And I don't know that we had a very specific conversation about that, but this is the week of the social reckoning. And Aaron Sorkin has been identified as perhaps a target of the movie Digger. And I'm a little reluctant to be like that's the sum total of what the point of Digger is. Because that seems like the smallest target imaginable. And I felt like it was a bit bigger than that. And I think a lot of what we see in the Cruise characters emotional complication makes it a bit wider and deeper. Do you think it's as simple as like this is just this is a, you know, don't look up in the newsroom and shit like that is just very stupid and we should make fun of it because it doesn't change anything in the real world? Speaker 2 (5:12) No, I think that's good posting, right? I think that's using all of the proper nouns available to you and connecting the dots. And you got to have somewhere to go with the content. And also. You can't use the movie itself because really no one has seen the movie. So bring in extra memeable moments. See Aaron Sorkin's tan. I think that the movie is both bigger and smaller than that. I think that it is operating on a very grand, non-specific, what does it mean to make satire or make art? And what can art do? in the face of the world's great complications. And I think it's also just very much about Ina Ritu. So, and about the lone filmmaker or, you know, the actor, in this case, Tom Cruise, and there is a meta Tom Cruise quality to it. But it feels very, very turned inward or on the grandest scale possible. Like, I'm not sure that... I would be surprised if Ina Ritu crushed all... four seasons of The Newsroom? Three? Speaker 1 (6:22) I think it was three. I did watch all three and enjoyed it. And you don't have any Speaker 2 (6:28) Oscars, so. Speaker 1 (6:29) No, no. You think I'll get to over under two Oscars for me before I die? What do you think? Speaker 2 (6:35) I think under because you are historically against people having two Oscars. So if you got the first one, then you would sabotage the second. You'd try to spread the wealth. You know, that's the kind of guy you are. Speaker 1 (6:48) Wow. Yeah. Thank you for reading me that way. I agree with you about Digger. And, you know, I suspect we'll talk about it a little bit more because people are going to start checking it out and it's going to be on VOD probably in about two weeks here. So once that happens, we'll be able to. But Speaker 2 (7:01) which D? Like which? I guess it'll be. Which Speaker 1 (7:04) D Speaker 2 (7:04) indeed. Speaker 2 (7:09) Where will it be available? You know, you'll pay for it, but once it's free on streaming, which is where most people will watch the first 20 minutes, will they even make it to the twist is a big question. Speaker 1 (7:21) Oh, when will they check out? That's a fascinating, yes, that's a fascinating note. I mean, you know, presumably it goes to HBO Max by January. Okay, and that'll Speaker 2 (7:30) exist as HBO Max? I think so. Speaker 1 (7:33) When those two things will fuse is an elegant transition into our broader conversation about Warner Brothers and Paramount and everything that happened over the weekend. I do think that Digger is the last of its kind for now. Speaker 2 (7:48) The Speaker 1 (7:49) $150 million auteurist solipsistic fantasy with a massive movie star is the most emblematic possible movie of the Mike and Pam era for good and for ill. Speaker 1 (8:02) When you look at the movie that triumphed over it in Verity, Speaker 2 (8:05) which Speaker 1 (8:06) did very well this weekend and is kind of is IP. It is the opposite of the auteur driven movie that is original in theory. It's a pretty stark comp to where we're all headed here. I'm not sure that Digger should have been number one. Like, it's not really qualitative judgment. I think it's just indicative of. Speaker 1 (8:31) If you don't have the goods. see sinners or weapons. This business is really, really hard when trying to do those things. And one thing that I thought was quite cool about the Abdi and DeLuca era was that they somehow convinced David Zaslav that this was the way. And they had, I think, about as many wins as they did losses in this regime, which started in 2022, but probably really properly starts like end of 23, 24, because that's when they're... the films that they chose started to hit the border. We can talk about that, each one kind of individually briefly. But I don't know, what do you make of this news that they're not coming and that this period, this very brief post-COVID period from a major studio that was throwing all this stuff against the wall has ended and is now leading into... Skydance. Speaker 2 (9:23) It's pretty grim. I'm feeling quite sad about it. And I and and hopeless. I think we've traded places and maybe that's because we've literally traded places. And you've been in New York gallivanting around and seeing the future of cinema. Yeah. Look at those jazz hands. And I learned the Mike and Pam news like I think everyone possibly including Mike DeLuca from Matt Bellany's newsletter on Thursday night. And I read that newsletter 20 minutes before I walked into a party for a Netflix film. And the mood was quite interesting. And and the. Speaker 2 (10:07) it's not like I spoke to anyone. I didn't do any reporting. I just had a glass of wine and left. But the vibe of being at a party for a film that will go straight to streaming that we'll talk about that is not, it's, you know, it's not one battle after another. It's not Digger. It's just another movie. And these people have just had their, these people. who at least were trying to make original projects and put them in theaters have been fired. David Ellison is coming to bring, you know, all of his aviation movies to the masses and everyone, lots of people are going to get fired. And. Speaker 2 (10:51) The history of cinema in Paramount and Warner Brothers, which have existed for decades and are part of old Hollywood, are now being, you know, re-erased with Larry Ellison's money. It was just kind of grim. It was like, oh, so this is the future, huh? This seems this is exciting. Not. It's pretty grim. Yeah. Speaker 1 (11:14) Yeah. I mean, in addition to the news about Abdi and DeLuca, the news that Enon Crides, the former Mattel CEO, would be coming in as the CEO of Skydance and that he is an experienced business executive who will probably be responsible for executing the redundancies. reducing a lot of the synergies between the two companies and all that business stuff. And also that, you know, that was something that he did at Mattel and he also was responsible for helping to shepherd the IP maturation of Barbie and less successfully Masters of the Universe and He-Man and the Matchbox film that's coming to Apple this month. And so, yeah, Paramount and Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg. They will run the film division there, and they have been at Paramount for about a year. And look, they're pretty seasoned executives. Greenstein has mostly worked in movie marketing. He's been at a number of studios over the years, including he was at Paramount in the 2010s, and he came back. Dana Goldberg has worked for David Ellison at Skydance for 15 or 16 years. Look at the movies that Skydance made. They made some cool stuff, right? They made Top Gun Maverick. Top Gun Maverick. Big fan of that movie. Their first film was True Grit. Love that movie. They also made... Some other stuff. And that Speaker 2 (12:33) other stuff isn't great. Last night I was looking at, can we just read the slate of Paramount for the rest of 2026? Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:44) You do that and then I'll do the upside. Okay. Where Speaker 2 (12:46) is it? Yes. Okay. What makes you think this isn't an upside? Speaker 1 (12:50) Well, okay. We'll fire away. Speaker 2 (12:52) Okay. So upcoming. Speaker 2 (12:55) Your most anticipated film of October, Street Fighter, October 16th. Speaker 1 (12:59) I am pumped. I must say I am pumped. Speaker 2 (13:02) And that's good. Listen, we all have our enthusiasms. Mine is Top Gun Maverick. November 13th, Ebenezer starring Johnny Depp. November 25th, Fokker and Law, which is a co-production with Universal Pictures. I guess this is international distribution for Paramount. Okay, so here we go. Angry Birds Movie 3, December 23rd. Speaker 1 (13:25) Yeah, what did you think of Angry Birds Movie 2? Speaker 2 (13:29) Have you ever played any Angry Birds? Yes. You have? Speaker 1 (13:34) Yes. Speaker 2 (13:35) That's cool. Okay. Were you really into phone games? Speaker 1 (13:39) Was I really into phone games? No, I wasn't really into them. I've played phone games. Okay. Sure. I played Speaker 2 (13:46) some Candy Crush, but that's kind of it. Speaker 1 (13:48) Yeah. Brick Breaker? Nope. You never played Brick Breaker on your Blackberry? No. Do you have a Blackberry? Speaker 2 (13:56) Yes, but I didn't play any games with it. I just did the, what was the messaging called? Speaker 1 (14:02) The messaging? Speaker 2 (14:04) Yes. Speaker 1 (14:05) I don't know. I guess it wasn't called texting. Speaker 2 (14:08) No, it wasn't. It was something different. Anyway, Mr. Irrelevant. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. I am as well. Speaker 1 (14:14) Yeah, I saw the trailer for that ahead of Verity and I was like, yeah. Okay. Down the middle, sentimental sports drama, yes. Speaker 2 (14:20) Yes, but so Street Fighter, Ebenezer, Angry Birds Movie 3, and Mr. Irrelevant. Speaker 1 (14:26) Right. So I think based on that, I don't think that's the worst slate of all time. And honestly, Paramount has had a pretty mid last three or four years in general with the studio because they've been in this kind of transitory moment. I think that you can also look at all the people that they've signed up to make stuff in the last six to 12 months as also indicative of what they're interested in. Now, I do think that there is a little bit of like. Speaker 1 (14:53) Americana that feels meaningful to them. Sure. You know, like that there's going to be, they're making a Call of Duty movie with Peter Berg. Yes. Right, which I think is a very smart IP adaptation and Peter Berg is very good at war movies, but that does speak to a different kind of audience, I think, than what some of what Pam and Mike were doing. But, you know, they also signed the Duffer Brothers away from Netflix, the creators of Stranger Things, who I'm interested to see what kinds of movies they'll make. They signed John M. Chu to a multi-picture deal. I'm kind of a coin flip on John Chu movies. Neither of us really cared for Wicked at all, but I like Crazy Rich Asians. He's made some movies I like. Speaker 2 (15:27) I wish it, but Crazy Rich Asians just should be so much better. And that's one where I wish that they would just redo it. And they can even give John M. Chu another chance, but I'm just like, it's one of those where it's just not good enough. Yeah. I Speaker 1 (15:43) think he's like a steady Hollywood hand. That's not like an embarrassment. There's no code there for what it means that they hired John Chu. And then there's more people. The first thing that Goldberg and Greenstein did was they signed James Mangold and Timothee Chalamet to make a crime movie, which I'm great with that. Yes. I love that conceptually. They extended Dan Trachtenberg, who's been making the Predator films, for Fox to a new deal. Parker Finn who made the Smile movies, which I'm a little bit more mixed on, but now he's making a remake of Possession, which I don't think is necessarily the greatest idea in the world, but it's at least, it's aggressive. There's something fresh about that. And then Will Smith has a new deal at the studio as well, which is complicated. Speaker 2 (16:30) And Damien Chazelle's The Prison Movie is also. His prison movie Speaker 1 (16:34) is theoretically coming out next year starring Cillian Murphy and Daniel Craig. So I think there are some like optimistic notes. You know, Tiana Taylor's directorial debut comes out next year. There'll be some other stuff. I don't know if it's going to be amazing. But if you look back at Mike and Pam, and even the eras before that, right? You had a pretty successful stretch for the Warner Brothers Film Studio in the 2000s because it's also the same time as Harry Potter and the rise of the Nolan Batman films. And of course, all the Nolan movies all the way up until after the Tenet fiasco. And, you know, we also have had... the Dune movies have been coming out over this time, which are like, I'm not sure that Abdi and Diluc can necessarily get credit for that. But then when you had all that IP in place and then you stacked it on top of these movies, it was pretty exciting. So like, let's go through the list. What do you think? I put together the wins here. Speaker 2 (17:36) Yeah. Speaker 1 (17:36) And they're almost in order to me. But Speaker 2 (17:39) I'll start. Speaker 1 (17:41) Yeah, yeah. I mean, Sinners was the first film that came to mind because Sinners was a movie where like they made a really tough deal. on Sinners where they had to give the copyright back to the filmmaker and that was widely criticized and it turned out to be a really smart move because Sinners was such a huge hit and also an awards film and I think goes down as like a very memorable movie from if not this decade, maybe this century that people have a big relationship to. So if you make just one of those, that's pretty good. Will they be making Sinners at Paramount? I'm not sure. I Speaker 2 (18:11) mean, and they certainly won't be making that deal in order to... to land the film, both from a business perspective and also the Ryan Coogler's carve out or special contract, whatever you want to call it, was in part because of the text of the film and what the film was about. And it just does not really seem so far like this Skydance ownership is going to be sensitive to those kinds of themes and requests. But I guess we don't know. Maybe that's not fair to say. Speaker 1 (18:45) Yeah. Speaker 2 (18:45) But also, so you have in here sinners, weapons, and then one battle after another winning best picture all grouped in a row. But those were all in the same year. Speaker 1 (18:54) They were. Speaker 2 (18:54) Yeah. So that's a pretty good job. Speaker 1 (18:57) It's a really good job, though. I do have a question for you when we get through the wins and losses about that. Speaker 2 (19:02) Yeah. I want to talk about it, too, which is just kind of they stacked one amazing year that they coasted on for 18 months. Speaker 2 (19:11) That was clearly a strategy of sorts, though I do start to wonder how much of a strategy it is because all of these movies are big productions and with lots of people and you're working far in advance. And I think you have some say of when things are ready and when things are going to be rolled out. And but I don't do we think that they were there long enough and had enough foresight? And could arrange things enough that they were like, okay, we'll just do 2025 and stack all of our good movies at once so that then hopefully the sale goes through and we're in a good place. I Speaker 1 (19:53) mean, I think they and other people at the company knew which movies, not so much which movies to release. Because, you know, when you're in that environment, like these films are tested. They have an expectation of what audiences are going to do. There's a long range tracking for certain movies that have certain particular audiences. Speaker 1 (20:10) It's really more about what movies to hold. And what they did is they held six absolute stinkers till 2026 to make the film studio seem as attractive as possible in the negotiation phase. So that choice to me. made the 2025 Gambit look really good. I mean, in addition to those three movies that we talked about. And look, one battle after another is not like a massive financial success, but it is also basically a forever movie annuity having one best picture. So you put those three together, those are big wins. Also on Speaker 2 (20:40) this podcast, we do care about like the quality of films. No doubt. And doing the right thing and investing in art, which is also when you were talking about how... Mike and Pam were criticized for the Ryan Coogler deal, like criticized by who? Bankers. We're not bankers, right? That's Speaker 1 (20:56) right. Speaker 2 (20:56) So like, good job on that one. Speaker 1 (20:58) I know, but the problem is, is that like, you're right, but they're executives, you know, they're not creative. And we are having a Speaker 2 (21:04) conversation about their business decisions that led to a business decision of them no longer having a job. I get it. But I do also want us to remember that One Battle After Another was our favorite film of last year. And we like it when movies are good. Speaker 1 (21:19) Totally. There are many episodes in which you can hear me saying that very thing. I'm Speaker 2 (21:23) trying to hold on to our humanity. If no one else can, we're holding on to it. No, Speaker 1 (21:29) I've lost it. Mine's gone. It's over. It's over. I'm just a banker now. Dune. Kept the train on the tracks with Dune. Dune is obviously a legendary production. I don't mean that in the adjectival sense. I mean literally the company legendary. Getting a Minecraft movie out in the world the way that they did. I think Toby Emmerich's regime hired the director and got that movie started, but they marketed it well. They released it well, and now it's a mega hit, and they're putting out another one next year. And Speaker 2 (21:55) they signed Kirsten Dunst for number two. Huge. Speaker 1 (21:58) Huge for you. Huge for all of us. Distributed F1. They didn't pay for it, but they put it out in the world, and they made that movie a hit. Superman. I think Superman's a win. I think especially in the slow decay of new superhero content. They did pretty good business with that. It probably could have been bigger, but it definitely wasn't bad. Wuthering Heights did pretty good business as well, and that was another deal that they signed where they really went aggressively after that movie, and they won it over Netflix by giving it theatrical. And even though you and I were not really crazy about Wuthering Heights, I like that. I like the idea of Emerald Fennell getting a deal like that and putting a movie as big as that movie is out in the world. Speaker 2 (22:38) It's cool. It's doing cool things instead of Ebenezer. Speaker 1 (22:42) Yes. Beetlejuice 2. You didn't really like that one. Speaker 2 (22:44) It was okay. It felt a little reheated. I mean, it gave us one of the great jokes of this podcast, which was you texting us from Las Vegas in like 2020 being like, hey, word on the street, Beetlejuice 2, the new Citizen Kane. Speaker 1 (23:01) No, that is not what I said. It was going to be huge is what I said, which is what happened. Okay. Speaker 1 (23:07) New Line, the train was on the tracks. Conjuring 5 came out and crushed and Conjuring 4 and Final Destination 6 was a banger and all those movies seem to be doing just fine. And, you know, they marketed Wonka straight to success. How did Speaker 2 (23:25) your body feel as you were saying that out loud? Speaker 1 (23:28) Well, at least I said it. I tell the truth on this podcast. Speaker 1 (23:32) Okay, here are some misses. Okay. I mean, they almost got fired twice. Speaker 2 (23:36) Yeah. Speaker 1 (23:37) And then they did get fired. And then they did get fired. That's Speaker 2 (23:40) not Speaker 1 (23:40) ideal. Speaker 2 (23:41) It's funny how they would show up in Las Vegas every year to present their slate, and their presence was... One year, they were definitely about to get fired, except then they just presented a historic run of movies, so they were fine. And then the next year... They just tried