Richard Brener, the New Line Cinema president and chief creative officer and the genre label’s longest-running employee, is expected to move to the new Paramount-Warner Bros studio led by Skydance while continuing to steer New Line, Deadline reports. Paramount did not respond to a request for comment.
The merger closes, the label stays
The transition comes as the Paramount-Warner Bros combination is expected to close early next week. Paramount production co-chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein will have all Warner Bros labels report into them. For New Line, that creates a specific question: does the label keep the creative continuity that has made it a reliable box-office engine?
The reported answer is Brener. He joined New Line in 1995 as a temp and rose through story editor, SVP and SVP-COO roles. That longevity matters because New Line’s business is built on repeatable franchises and filmmaker relationships, not one-off swings.
A pipeline of dated bets
Brener arrives with a full release calendar attached. Key titles named in the report include:
- The Hunt for Gollum, the next Lord of the Rings film, December 17, 2027
- Final Destination 7, May 12, 2028
- Evil Dead Wrath, August 7, 2028
- The Flood, the next Zach Cregger sci-fi title, August 11, 2028
- Gladys, a Weapons prequel, September 8, 2028
These are not just calendar placeholders. They are dated, franchise-linked inventory that media planners and exhibition partners can already build around. The horror and genre pipeline has been New Line’s most consistent profit center.
The numbers behind the move
Last year’s The Conjuring: Last Rites posted close to half a billion at the global box office, the highest grossing film in the series. Final Destination: Bloodlines delivered $317.8M, the biggest ever for that franchise, with young directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein. Brener’s track record also includes The Conjuring franchise, the It films, Final Destination, Weapons, plus comedy brands such as The Wedding Singer, Wedding Crashers, the Sex and the City films and Austin Powers.
For marketers, the signal is continuity of title-level expertise at a moment of corporate change. A merger typically pauses greenlights and resets reporting lines; keeping a label chief in place reduces one variable. The audience-facing title slate, release dates and franchise promise remain the asset.
What to watch next
The move follows DC Studios bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran making the same transition. Warner Bros Motion Picture chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are departing. No other anticipated executive changes at the Warner Bros labels were reported. The early test is whether the announced 2027-28 release dates hold, and whether marketing campaigns on those titles keep their planned windows rather than slipping while integration plays out.
Source: Deadline
