Warner Bros.’ Jeff Goldstein on the Big Tom Cruise Bet: ‘We Landed the Plane’
‘Owners come and owners go,’ the president of global distribution tells me from CinemaCon
For Warner Bros.’ Jeff Goldstein, CinemaCon is his Super Bowl.
“This is a moment where I get to bond with 4,000 of my closest friends,” Goldstein, president of global distribution for the studio, tells me on this week’s Rushfield Lunch, live and in living color from Las Vegas.
Here’s an example: During Wednesday’s Warner Bros. presentation to the nation’s theater owners — where the studio executive and his team unveiled not just multiple intriguing 2026 projects (including Tom Cruise and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger; more on that shortly) but a slate of titles that expands into 2028 (including a Weapons prequel and Baz Luhrmann’s take on Joan of Arc) — Goldstein says he heard a cheer of support from the crowd.
“I looked over, and I knew who it was, so I said, ‘Well, thank you, Judy.’ And afterward, my wife even said to me, ‘Do you know everybody in the audience?’ And I said, ‘Well, if I don’t know them, they know me.’”
There are few, if any, at Warner Bros. who have been there as long as Goldstein. He started as an intern and has worked in Burbank for 40 years. That gives him quite a perspective on the industry. And although he can’t speak directly about the studio’s sale to Paramount — a topic that, well, dominated the conversation on the ground at CinemaCon this week — he’s seen this story before.
“This is my sixth transaction. But I say it the same way: Warners has been here for 103 years. Owners come, and owners go. I don’t look at a change in owner. I’m not focusing on that,” Goldstein tells me. “I’m focusing on the work. I’m focusing on the opportunity. I’m focusing on the consumer. I’m focusing on my clients, the exhibitors and owners.”
He adds, “We put on a great show here in Las Vegas, and what was just really exciting for everybody in that room — and certainly for those of us who love Warners and those of us who are working on these movies — is just seeing all of these movies that we had listed for 2026, 2027 and way beyond. We’re working with incredible filmmakers, and that is our focus.”
One of those movies is Digger, Cruise and Iñárritu’s absurdist comedy that had CinemaCon buzzing (it’s out in theaters in October). It’s yet another big swing from Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy — Cruise, wearing heavy prosthetics, plays a powerful oil man who tries to save the world — and I thought the clip showed in the room was something special.
“I’m a fairly Zen leader in showing optimism and inspiration to our teams,” Goldstein says about what he felt like unveiling Digger footage for the first time this week. “I do that purposefully. But deep down inside, my stomach is always in a knot until I hear an audience laugh. With film clips, almost from the very first beat, you know how it’s gonna play. And I would tell you that, in everything we showed yesterday, we landed the plane perfectly on every clip.”
Watch our incredibly thoughtful — if far too brief — conversation above to get more insight on the state of distribution from Goldstein, as well as his thoughts on the moviegoing experience and what audiences really want.