Just days after the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike, there’s another storm brewing in Hollywood over WB’s decision to scrap a fully completed movie for the sake of a tax write-off.
Warner Bros. Discovery, under the leadership of David Zaslav, has opted to axe Coyote vs. Acme, a $30 million movie produced by James Gunn and starring John Cena, utilizing the classic Looney Tunes character in a new kind of story.
This is more or less exactly what happened with Batgirl, the finished and then promptly killed DC film that will never see the light of day. In that case, there was some talk about how the film was bad and would “damage” the struggling DC brand even further, though it was still seen as unheard of at the time.
Now, it’s the same situation with Coyote vs. Acme with the difference being that by all accounts, the film is great. Many have already seen it and say it’s excellently done, comparing it to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and praising its animation and storyline. Test scores among audiences were reportedly extremely high.
Director David Green posted a message about how heartbroken he was that this had happened to his film, a move that is widely seen as impossibly cruel to shred months of hard work on a completely finished, well-received final product for the sake of balance sheet shuffling:
This increases already intense ire against David Zaslav, who runs WB Discovery and is responsible for moves like killing the HBO in HBO Max, and ripping old shows like Westworld and Raised by Wolves off the service to avoid paying residuals. Now, this is the second time he’s scrapped a fully completed movie for the sake of taxes.
The “Batgirl was bad” explanation was not exactly justifiable, but there’s not even a pretend excuse being given for Coyote vs. Acme, which presumably was viewed as not being able to make up its $30 million budget, hence the decision. And in the wake of both the Writers and Actors strike, there still does not seem to be a way to institute protections so things like this do not happen.
However, there may be real consequences for WB here. Now that this has happened twice, it seems like any writer, actor or director would be wary of working with Warner Bros. lest the same thing happen to them. But the problem is that this is not wholly unique to WB, as we’ve seen this happen a few other places like Disney Plus killing its show The Spiderwick Chronicles after it was completed but before it aired.
The streaming space is turning desperate as corporations are trying to reduce high costs and big debts, but they’re doing by sacrificing their creatives on the altar of tax write-downs. This is not sustainable and pretty soon there will need to be some forceful pushback on the practice, though it’s unclear at this point what the way forward may be.
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