In the midst of multiple strikes and so many show and movie cancellations, won’t anyone spare a thought for the poor studio heads who have to put up with it all? Thank goodness Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is finally speaking out on their behalf.
WBD’s decision to shelve the fully completed and screen-tested Batgirl last summer was a “traumatic experience” for its director Bilall Fallah, but it was nearly as hard for Zaslav, at least to hear the CEO tell it. “We decided that we had to have courage,” he said of canceling the film, along with 2022's Scoob! sequel and this month’s Coyote Vs. Acme, at the New York Times DealBook Summit today (per IndieWire).
Much to the ire of the creative community, it was reported that these cancellations were essentially nothing more than tax write-offs for the company. While WBD would take a loss on profits from actually releasing the films, they would also have to pay fewer taxes on that loss as well as save extra money from not having to promote the film in the first place. Still, Zaslav says it’s a “misnomer” that WBD gets any of these boosts.
“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,” he said. “The question is, should we take certain of these movies and open them in the theater and spend another $30 or $40 million to promote them? And [the] 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.”
By this reasoning, it seems like Zaslav could have saved a lot of that hard-to-muster bravery and just put the films up on Max with little-to-no promotion instead of canceling them altogether because, again, they were completely done. But we’re not the CEOs here. In that language, at least as taught to us by Succession, Zaslav continued (per The Verge): “What content is going to help us win? The content that wasn’t, we made a strategic decision on. It was difficult and it was painful. But I think it was the right decision for the company and it was necessary.”
He also said of the SAG-AFTRA strike that he’s “glad it’s behind us,” which we’re sure took a lot of bravery as well. And while we’re at it, let’s acknowledge that Zaslav was also very brave about only earning $39 million last year as opposed to 2021's $246.6 million. Good job, David!