In the Wake of BATGIRL and the Finished SCOOB! Sequel, HBO Max Has Purged Several Other WB Exclusive Streaming Titles
It’s been a weird week over at Warner Bros. and HBO. In the wake of the off-putting decision to pull the $90 million Batgirl movie that had fans anticipating the return of Michael Keaton’s Batman, as well as the animated Scoob! sequel that was finished and ready for a holiday release, movie consumers are wondering what is going through the minds of the studio heads who are making these movies, only to trash them in their final hours. Apparently it all boils down to the new President and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav, and his eye on the bottom line.
As reported by Variety, in the past few weeks, at least six Warner Bros. movies have been removed from HBO Max. They include Moonshot, a sci-fi rom-com starring Lana Condor and Cole Sprouse; artificial-intelligence dystopia comedy Superintelligence, starring Melissa McCarthy; Robert Zemeckis’ 2020 remake of The Witches, starring Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci and Chris Rock; comedy An American Pickle, starring Seth Rogen as an immigrant who wakes up after being pickled for 100 years; Doug Liman heist pic Locked Down with Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor; and drama Charm City Kings from director Angel Manuel Soto. All six of the films were labeled as “Max Originals.”
Meanwhile, the reboot of comedy classic House Party, from LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill, was previously slated to premiere July 28 on HBO Max but was scrubbed from the release calendar. Also, users on social media noticed that HBO original series Vinyl, which aired for one season on 2016, is no longer available on HBO Max, nor are limited series Mrs. Fletcher, Lena Dunham’s Camping or comedy-thriller Run starring Merritt Wever and Domhnall Gleeson.
It can be said that streaming platforms add and remove content pretty continuously, but the odd factor in all this is that these removals were done under the radar, unannounced. IndieWire did their own check into all this movement, and they noted that the main reason this is all probably going down is because “content costs can be amortized — or assigned a cost that gets recognized by an entity across multiple years — over the program or film’s expected lifetime. If years on that timeline remain, a company can remove that asset from distribution and use its remaining cost balance to offset taxable income elsewhere.”
So it’s not surprising that big money is the drive behind all of this, but it is a freaking bummer that movies are being made, and taken away from the consumers for some sort of payout. Why even make them in the first place? If this guy is more interested in money than in making movies for fans to enjoy, why is he even in the movie making business? It’s a mystery. But we have to keep talking about it, and calling them out on it, or we risk having more films pulled out from under us.