Director Michael Kurinsky talks exclusively to us about the day he discovered that Scoob: Holiday Haunt was going to be deleted by Warner Bros. A bit of background. As many of you know, in the summer of 2022, Warner Bros Discovery decided to effectively delete a pair of its unreleased films. The one that got ... How Scoob: Holiday Haunt’s director found out Warner Bros had deleted his film
Director Michael Kurinsky talks exclusively to us about the day he discovered that Scoob: Holiday Haunt was going to be deleted by Warner Bros.
A bit of background. As many of you know, in the summer of 2022, Warner Bros Discovery decided to effectively delete a pair of its unreleased films. The one that got lots of headlines was Batgirl, which was all but finished and had been tested positively. It cost $90m to make, with Leslie Grace, JK Simmons, Brendan Fraser and Michael Keaton in the cast.
The other film, which got slightly fewer headlines, was Scoob: Holiday Haunt, a seasonal Scooby Doo movie and sequel to the successful 2020 film, Scoob.
Scoob: Holiday Haunt was to be the directorial debut of Michael Kurinsky, a filmmaker with a career that had taken him across Disney, Sony Pictures Animation, Warner Bros, and even drawing gigantic pictures of The Beatles. It was his lifelong dream to direct a film, and he was all but finished with the movie when he discovered, via the Hollywood trade press, that it would never be released. That Warner Bros was going to take a tax write off instead, on the condition that it couldn’t ever make money from the movie.
Michael Kurinsky is the guest on the latest episode of the Film Stories podcast, where we go through his career and work. And we come to the point where he finally gets a phone call, four hours after the trade press article, from someone at Warner Bros confirming what he already knew.
“I was just a name on an agenda and a phone call they had to make,” he told me. “I found out officially on the telephone on the same day. About four hours later.”
“The call was horrible. It felt like somebody going through the motions, and were just like, ‘Yeah we’re not gonna put this out.’ And she was kind of condescending too, saying ‘I showed it to my child… they felt it’s very young. It skews real young, doesn’t it?’ It was a really, really awful thing to say.”
I clarified: in the middle of a call telling him that his film was being canned, the person at the end of the phone was also critiquing his movie?
“Yeah”, he confirmed.
