Hollywood Reporter: The Incredible Shrinking Studio Chief

Story from Hollywood Reporter:

While it seems unlikely that any corner of the entertainment industry will be spared from being skewered during the 10-episode run of Apple TV+’s new satirical comedy series The Studio, the primary vehicle by which its creators interrogate the current malaise afflicting Hollywood is through the eyes of a modern-day studio executive. Like any great satirist, Seth Rogen, who plays an angst-ridden studio chief, is dancing — at times hilariously — around an IRL question: Has there ever been a more challenging and unpleasant time to be a studio executive than today?

It’s undoubtedly a question that former Amazon MGM Studio chief Jen Salke was asking herself March 27 when she was pushed out after seven years on the job. It’s also likely one that Warner Bros. Pictures co-heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are mulling as they try to swat away rumors that they might be next. And it was on the minds of the dozen current and former executives who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter to vent about their profession.

Legendary — and legendarily busy — executives like Irving Thalberg, Robert Evans and Sherry Lansing are mythologized, but even on the best of days in the best of times, the life of an executive is grueling. There is endless incoming material to read and assess, and the job requires constantly finding new ways to say “no” gracefully to stay on the good side of vengeful agents and fragile talent. Execs are juggling those challenges while negotiating the internal cutthroat politics of their departments, all while trying to pick winning projects amid a sea of mediocrity. And that’s on a good day.

“It used to be a spectacular job — you could give a voice to people who deserved one, and you knew you were making something meaningful that would be seen and talked about,” says Adam Goodman, the former president of Paramount Motion Picture Group who got his start working as a production assistant on films produced by John Hughes. During his time at Paramount, Goodman oversaw a diverse slate of films including Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, World War Z and Paranormal Activity. “Now, it feels as if there’s no real reward for taking big bets or championing a favorite script or an unknown filmmaker,” he says. “You’re more of a brand manager than a creative advocate and playing it safe seems like the smarter career move.”

Pervasive risk aversion and an obsession with existing IP is just one of the complaints that emerged from interviews with executives who’ve seen their ranks gutted over the past five years. At the traditional studios, incessant demands from Wall Street to show growth, coupled with the demise of the traditional windowing model, has placed outsized expectations on every film, causing a flight to risk-averse conformism, according to multiple sources. “You’re going to either win big or lose big and there’s nothing in between,” says one source.

Streaming, meanwhile, has bifurcated the nature of the modern-day executive, creating a fundamentally different structure with its own unique rules and incentives that differ from those that apply to executives who work at a traditional studio or network. Executives at the deep-pocketed streamers have their own challenges: How does one make a film stand out on a platform bursting with content? What, exactly, constitutes success? And perhaps most importantly, after years of consolidation, who, if anyone, has any actual power at these places?

“I had more power as a junior a decade ago than I do now,” complains one exec. “There are so many layers of bureaucracy.”

De Luca and Abdy present arguably the most illustrative case study in the travails of the modern-day studio executive. The central criticism of their nearly three-year tenure is hardly new. De Luca has long embraced the role of the maverick. As a 27-year-old president of production at New Line Cinema, he championed Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher. While much of the town remains transfixed by existing IP, De Luca and Abdy have been hiring such filmmakers as Ryan Coogler (Sinners), Anderson (One Battle After Another) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Bride) to tell original stories, despite having a rich library from which to draw.

The knock against them at this moment of industry-wide austerity is that they’ve overspent to the point of being reckless. The creative bets that they’ve placed — big, high-profile and expensive bets — just haven’t paid off. Joker: Folie à Deux, which netted director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix $20 million paydays each, flopped so badly that it’s become a punchline. Over the past month, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 and The Alto Knights drastically underperformed and could cost the studio more than $110 million (to be fair, Alto Knights was a project championed by Zaslav).

Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal’s take on The Bride of Frankenstein starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, originally set up at Netflix before the streamer balked at the proposed budget, is costing somewhere in the $80 million to $100 million range. One Battle After Another, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, cost $160 million, according to sources, but industry insiders suggest that that figure could be low. Anderson’s highest-grossing film to date is the 2007 period drama There Will Be Blood, which earned $76 million worldwide. Coogler’s Sinners, a supernatural horror thriller, also blew past its initial budget of $80 million, according to two insiders.

At a Morgan Stanley event on March 4, Zaslav acknowledged the spending and defended the strategy. “In some cases, we may have overspent,” he said. “I don’t think we did, because we wanted to bring the best and the brightest people back to Warner Bros. It’s key for us at HBO and Max.”

It’s not hard to find supporters of De Luca and Abdy across the industry. “Going out and finding great scripts and empowering some of the world’s best directors to tell those stories seems like exactly what a studio chief is supposed to be doing,” said a top talent agent who was openly wondering what the point of an executive is if their mandate is to simply mine libraries for existing IP. “What value are you actually adding?” this agent asked. (Ironically, De Luca and Abdy’s fate might hinge on how Minecraft, with IP harvested from one of the best-selling video games of all time, performs during its opening April 4-6 weekend.)

There are more subtle ways in which the lives of your mid-level studio exec are impacted by today’s climate. With fewer projects being made, almost every studio and streamer is placing a greater emphasis on packaging, which also puts execs in a tricky spot. On one hand, a packaged project typically comes through the door with several desirable pieces of talent in place, whether it’s a director, actor or showrunner, and that provides a sense of security for the greenlight committee.

But for the executives assigned to oversee the project, there’s often less of an opportunity to creatively shape the project. Top-tier packaged projects often trigger bidding wars, prompting costs to soar, which puts more pressure on the now-sidelined executive to deliver a successful project. “You have less leverage to make adjustments, and so you have to be more wily and more strategic about how you can effect change,” said a film executive at one of the top streamers.

To be clear, we’re not talking about British coal miners here. there’s still an immense amount of privilege and creative opportunities that come with the job. “This will change. You don’t need to get suicidal. But it will take some time to cycle through,” says one veteran exec when asked about the current malaise of having to constantly chase IP at a moment of distress across the industry. “Even while being in an existential crisis, it’s still an awesome job. You still get to work on made-up stuff all day long.”

While it’s contemporary, The Studio paints today’s industry with a nostalgic brush. Whether it’s the score, the vintage cars or the lush offices and architecture, the show hearkens back in subtle ways to a bygone era. And who can blame Rogen and his co-creators for the indulgence? Watching executives’ queue at a Tesla charging station or file into their cramped, barren offices doesn’t suggest an industry that cares much about style and taste or that’s having much fun. This isn’t Severance, although some of the most disillusioned executives might opt for a consciousness splitting procedure that could ensure they retain no memories of how difficult their job has become.

With three episodes of the show now available, executives are already noticing eerie parallels to events that occurred in their own careers. In the opening episode, Rogen’s character is faced with a classic creative dilemma: put his chips behind a mass-market movie based on a corporate icon – in this case the Kool Aid man — or pursue a high-art Scorsese-directed passion project about the Jonestown massacre.

Seven years ago, in the wake of the animated film The Emoji Movie and a Smurfs film, a senior executive at Sony pitched an idea. It was at one of Tom Rothman’s weekly Big Idea meetings where execs were expected to come in with, well, a big idea. “Tom, I’ve got it!” said this executive, according to a source who was present. He pitched a movie based on M&Ms. A full-length feature built around colorful candied characters. For a beat, Rothman sized up the exec and then bluntly dismissed it as a terrible idea. “It was an idea that was laughed out of the room,” said this source.

As you take in The Studio, remember to breathe deeply and remind yourself: it’s just a show.

© 2025 The Hollywood Reporter.