David Zaslav Says It Took ‘Courage’ to Cancel All Those Completed Movies

Brian Welk
·3 min read
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It took real “courage” for Warner Bros. Discovery to cancel completed movies like “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs. Acme,” CEO David Zaslav said at a conference today.

Speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit on November 29, the executive defended the company’s moves to shelve films for tax write-downs, despite the outcry from the creative community back the first time they did it with “Batgirl” and again last month with the Looney Tunes hybrid animated feature “Coyote vs. Acme.” “We decided that we had to have courage,” Zaslav told the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin.

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Both “Coyote vs. Acme” and “Batgirl,” along with “Scoob! Holiday Haunt,” were completed films that had been shown to audiences in test screenings. “Coyote vs. Acme” had a budget in the $70 million range, and “Batgirl” cost about $90 million. Each were originally intended for streaming and were greenlit by the prior regime before Zaslav took over. Rather than spend the additional cost it would take to make the films theatrical ready with marketing and distribution costs, the studio decided to shelve each and take a loss, offsetting gains and paying less in taxes. After the more recent creative outcry over “Coyote vs. Acme,” the studio is now screening the film for potential buyers.

Zaslav first addressed the notion of taking tax write-downs, calling it a “misnomer” that they get a benefit or money back from permanently shelving a film.

“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.”

While we’re talking about being courageous, Zaslav said that such moves, including a series of layoffs and restructuring upon the merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery last year, were all hard decisions made with the idea that “there are no sacred cows.” So far the company has managed to reduce $12 billion in debt but still has $45.3 billion as of last quarter.

“Let’s start today,” he said. “What does this business look like if we were going to start today?”

Zaslav in his conversation also addressed the firing of CNN chief Chris Licht, a close friend of Zaslav’s, and whether the company is for sale, joking that “technically” every public company is for sale. He also said of the recently-concluded SAG-AFTRA strike that “I’m glad it’s behind us” but acknowledged the “existential moment” the industry still faces from the use of AI.

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