Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav has already been billed as "the most hated man in Hollywood" due to decisions like scrapping fully or nearly finished films, including Coyote vs. Acme and Batgirl. And as for how he's framing those much-derided decisions, well, it probably won't help his case.
The reasons for those shelvings, it's been reported, is so Warner Bros. can collect tax write-offs; according to Rolling Stone, it was set to collect a $30 million take write-off on Coyote vs. Acme.
“The accounting piece is really a misnomer,” Zaslav told Andrew Ross Sorkin during a recent Q&A at the New York Times’ DealBook conference, as reported by Deadline. “If we produce a show, a $100 million movie…We’ve spent the $100 million dollars and if we don’t release it. It’s gone. We don’t have any real benefit from it."
"The question is," he continued, "should we take certain of these movies and open them in the theater and spend another $30 or $40 million to promote them? And Warner Bros’ team and HBO made a number of decisions. They were hard. But when I look at the health of our company today, we needed to make those decisions. And it took real courage.”
The comment is a little baffling for a few reasons: while he’s right that films have advertising budgets, that’s a risk a studio knowingly takes when they decide to finance and/or distribute a film. It's especially odd, too, when Coyote vs. Acme was apparently, well, really good. It tested 14 points above the norm for a family film in early screenings, according to Rolling Stone, and filmmakers who had seen it were quick to praise it upon its shelving. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off co-creator and showrunner BenDavid Grabinski went so far as to call it "the best of its kind since Roger Rabbit."
The whole ordeal even led to U.S. congressman Joaquin Castro to call for the FTC to review WB's "predatory tactic" of scrapping movies for tax breaks.
The bright side is that Coyote vs. Acme, at least, will have a chance to see the light of day, with WB eventually allowing it to be shopped to other studios. Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, another movie that was scrapped entirely by WB, can't say the same (at least as of yet). And the distrust that's been harbored around Zaslav, from the fan side to the creative side, can't be undone.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
