Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav commented about shelving completed or nearly completed films like Coyote vs. Acme and Batgirl, saying the decisions “took real courage.”
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav commented about shelving completed or nearly completed films like Coyote vs. Acme and Batgirl, saying the decisions “took real courage.”
This is to be expected. When there was a ton of free money, studios could go nuts. They got greedy with the idea that every studio should have its own streaming service so they could earn more profits than by just licensing their content to Netflix. They also realized that they needed an exclusive collection to draw people in and keep them subscribed. In order to make that work, even in the free money environment, they grossly underpaid the talent and tech workers who were actually creating the content. By doing so, they could just throw it all against the wall to see what sticks. We did get some very good shows out of it, but also a lot of crap got made.
I think we’re going to see a lot of cancellations and a reduction in new shows, while the studios look to do spin offs or extended series. I also think that they’re going to re-evaluate the profitability of licensing versus owning the whole stack.
Yeah, but you usually see that for projects that aren’t near completion, since cancelling projects that are near completion just means all that money was wasted
Normally it would be projects not nearly as far along, or projects with troubled history where it’s better just to pull the plug than risk more money down the hole
I completely agree. I suspect that we’re seeing them trying to avoid the sunk cost fallacy, but there may be political decisions there, too. My partner was in the industry, and there’s a lot that goes on (literally in this case) behind the scenes.
I was more just observing that what we might be seeing (on a much smaller scale) is the .com collapse when the free money dried up. I don’t think it’s going to be as big a dislocation as that was, but I do think that studios will both increasingly look to either bundle with other services or license their content out to third parties (like Netflix), as well as draw down some of the more speculative investments.
Personally, I want to live in a world where Our Flag Means Death gets made and studios take chances on shows like Hello Tomorrow, but I do suspect that a new balance is going to have to be discovered.
It’s not money wasted. They get to claim the costs as a loss on their balance sheets and write it off against their taxes. It’s simply a tax advantaged move to increase perceived profitability.
Pretty sad that a project is worth more on paper as a tax write off than they expect it to make in reality.
Yeah make stuff to sell to a monopoly, genius move.