As I’m sure you’re well aware by now, Hollywood has had a rough go of things these past few years. Covid radically altered the production schedules of most studios, and the SAG-AFTRA strike ground most film and television projects to a halt. While every studio has suffered to some extent as a result of these past four years, I want to highlight the very strange situation at one studio in particular, Warner Brothers. In addition to the same struggles other studios have encountered, WB had one more issue in 2021, a change of leadership. The studio was acquired by Discovery in May of 2021, leading to David Zaslav taking over as CEO. While this is not a comment on his leadership (I’m not exactly seeing it in person here), any major change in leadership is going to affect how a company functions, so it should be considered when viewing the decisions made by WB in the past three years. What decisions am I talking about? The tax write offs of course.

Shortly after the aforementioned acquisition, a number of shows were removed from HBOMax (the streaming service most WB content exists on) as tax write offs. While it primarily affected the animation department, since mostly cartoons were removed, the decision was made to simply stop hosting some shows for the sake of saving money. Obviously, a corporation is within its rights to stop offering a product or service if it proves to be unprofitable, but this was the first sign of something more to come.

As you may have heard, Warner Bros was working on a live-action Batgirl movie, which was finished but never released. The film was reportedly 95% complete, fully filmed and basically just needing some editing and special effects added, yet the decision was made to write it off and never release it, with the only existing copies kept in WB’s internal vault. Personally, I would have been skeptical of a Batgirl solo film, if only because she’s usually either a supporting character or a team leader in the comics, but what we know of the film was interesting enough that I wish we could see it. We know that it would have given prominence to D-list villain Firefly as the main antagonist, that Keaton’s Batman would have been brought back to serve as a mentor figure, and that Batgirl (played by Leslie Grace) would have been introduced working a murder case, thus putting the detective work back into a Batman property. We also know some fairly noteworthy actors were attached, such as J.K. Simmons and Brendan Fraser. The film was complete enough to have test screenings; these screenings weren’t especially hopeful, as the audience approval rating was in the low 60s. That said, other films get made with such ratings, many films go through a period of reshoots following their test screenings, and these screenings are performed before the final editing and VFX additions, so they are expected to rate lower than the final product. At $90 million, the film was comparatively cheap for the superhero genre, and was reportedly within budget, so the ultimate decision to can the film was baffling.

We would also see several more films nearly finished yet turned into tax write offs this way. Keeping with the previously mentioned trend of writing off animated works, three Scooby-Doo films (Scoob! Holiday Haunt, Scooby Doo and Krypto Too, and Haunted High-Rise) saw similar fates, though Scooby Doo and Krypto Too would eventually see a release after the film was leaked online. Obviously I don’t have access to WB’s financials, but the fact of the matter is that they are willingly choosing to can and write off finished products instead of releasing them for profit. These aren’t questionable franchises either; every Batman movie performs well financially, and Scooby Doo has been profitable enough that WB makes another film every ten months or so, so what’s going on here that tried and true franchises are having projects canceled? Some may suggest that Batgirl suffered from the DC reboot, but the presence of Keaton’s Batman places it in a different universe than the main series altogether, removing that possibility.

Most recently, WB announced a similar cancellation of another film from a time-tested franchise, Looney Tunes. Coyote vs ACME has been in production for years, and was supposed to release this past summer before being delayed to avoid seasonal competition with the Barbie film. The fact that it was intended for a release already suggests it is either done or nearly complete, which is why the announcement of its cancellation was utterly baffling. This film, unlike the others previously mentioned, is getting a second chance at life though, as the announcement resulted in severe public backlash, convincing Warner Brothers to rethink their decision; they announced that it was back in their release schedule a mere two days later. So what kind of backlash led to the change of heart?

Simple. People in the industry threatened to stop working with Warner Brothers altogether after that one. A film might not see release once in a while; that’s fine, it happens; films get canceled before completion and sometimes die in development hell. But when several projects are basically ready to release and get canceled all in a short timeframe, it suggests that something is very wrong. It also signals to the rest of the industry that WB is a bad partner to work with, as your finished project might simply vanish into thin air as yet another tax write off.

While this really sounds like it should never have become a problem in the first place, the whole thing goes to show that companies cannot just make decisions for short-term financial reasons. WB’s decisions with these films annihilated enough of their good will in the industry that people were threatening to stop working with them in the future, for fear of their own projects suffering the same fate and their work being rendered meaningless. Given that all of this happened about a week ago, we’ll have to wait and see if the decision to backpedal and return to releasing Coyote vs ACME is going to fix the problem, or if this was simply too big a franchise with too many names attached for them to get away with it this time. As artists, we want our work to reach the masses; to put so much effort in, to finish the movie, to sign the deals saying a major studio will release it, and then to see it vanish altogether is our worst nightmare. I’m not sure how WB and its recent leadership intend to course correct, but we should all be keeping an eye on the situation and holding them to the standard this movie sets in the future.

Because at the end of the day, maybe Coyote vs ACME is a bad movie. It’s still one everybody signed off on and finished creating. It deserves to see the light of day, and the studio that already invested into a finished movie should be releasing it in an attempt to profit or at least break even. Clearly the situation is more complex than that, but if WB continues making these baffling decisions, they have no right to be surprised when more industry workers stop interacting with them.