“Let’s talk about Warners.” That’s how a top agent answered the phone when I called him Thursday. No hello—just straight to the topic that we both knew had been consuming the town for weeks and had built to a crescendo during the past few days. Mickey 17, a pricey sci-fi comedy from Parasite director Bong Joon Ho, was hitting theaters, the first in a series of risky and expensive—or bold and original—movies that film studio co-chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy had put into the pipeline. As debt-laden Warner Bros. Discovery has slashed costs seemingly everywhere, Hollywood has watched in fascination, curious when the famously tightfisted C.E.O. David Zaslav would pull the plug on the spending spree.