You may have heard that Warner Bros has, the company says, cancelled forever the release of Batgirl, starring Leslie Grace of In the Heights in the title role.
The film was reportedly so near completion that it had been shown to test audiences — even if the accounts of how those test audiences reacted vary dramatically depending on who is framing the story. Warner Bros. had already invested between $70M and $90M in the film that had been intended to stream on HBO Max. If anybody needed more proof that the streaming revolution promised by the pandemic was a failure, this would seem to be it.
Competing justifications for the cancellation have been offered, with commenters inevitably seizing on whichever argument validates the opinion they already hold. There have been various insinuations made about the movie’s quality. When challenged directly about the cancellation of Batgirl, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav simply stated, “We’re not going to put a movie out unless we believe in it.” Reports suggest test audiences compared it to “a bad TV show.”
In truth, it seems most likely that the movie was canceled for purely financial reasons. Zaslav could not justify sending a film with that budget to streaming and did not believe that it could survive in theaters. The merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery allowed the studio the opportunity to write the film off for tax purposes, a project funded by the old regime that didn’t fit the new company’s identity. The move allowed the studio to “save” between $15M and $20M at most on the project.
Is this the death of streaming? Is this the end of superhero movies? Is it just a glitch in the pop-culture Matrix? Will Batgirl ever see the light of day? And if so, how?
Glitch in the pop-culture Matrix: Sorta. Tax write-offs are designed, not glitches, and without them there'd be no film industry. "Hollywood accounting."
Will it ever see the light of day? If people get mad enough about it that they complain and / or threaten to boycott Warner/Discovery, plus if it grabs the attention of the SEC merely because of the merger = disappeared work story and raises questions about consolidation in the industry, they may decide to release it as loss leader to keep their business from political scrutiny. I have no over/under on that bet.
"Tax write-offs are designed, not glitches, and without them there'd be no film industry."
I'm not entirely sure there'd be no film industry without tax writeoffs, but it's definitely the case that it's almost unheard of for a *completed* film to be trashed simply for the writeoff.
That's if we take it at face value that the tax-writeoff explanation is accurate.
Death of streaming: Nope.
End of superhero movies? Nope.
Glitch in the pop-culture Matrix: Sorta. Tax write-offs are designed, not glitches, and without them there'd be no film industry. "Hollywood accounting."
Will it ever see the light of day? If people get mad enough about it that they complain and / or threaten to boycott Warner/Discovery, plus if it grabs the attention of the SEC merely because of the merger = disappeared work story and raises questions about consolidation in the industry, they may decide to release it as loss leader to keep their business from political scrutiny. I have no over/under on that bet.
"Tax write-offs are designed, not glitches, and without them there'd be no film industry."
I'm not entirely sure there'd be no film industry without tax writeoffs, but it's definitely the case that it's almost unheard of for a *completed* film to be trashed simply for the writeoff.
That's if we take it at face value that the tax-writeoff explanation is accurate.