Michael Kurinsky, the director of the abandoned #Scoob: Holiday Haunt, responds to Warner Bros boss David Zaslav’s claim that it took ‘courage’ to scrap his film. On 29th November 2023, a report popped up concerning the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, David Zaslav. Zaslav has been a contentious head of the company, overseeing cutbacks, and ... Scoob: Holiday Haunt director responds to David Zaslav saying it took ‘courage’ to delete his film
Michael Kurinsky, the director of the abandoned #Scoob: Holiday Haunt, responds to Warner Bros boss David Zaslav’s claim that it took ‘courage’ to scrap his film.
On 29th November 2023, a report popped up concerning the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, David Zaslav. Zaslav has been a contentious head of the company, overseeing cutbacks, and also – on his watch – opting to take tax write offs for pretty much completed films, rather than incur the cost of releasing them.
It means that two completed films – Batgirl and Scoob! (pictured) sequel Scoob: Holiday Haunt – remain unreleased, and Warner Bros can’t make a cent off them, else it’ll have to repay tens of millions of dollars in tax write offs.
That aforementioned report saw Zaslav defend the decision to delete the films. “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?”
His view? “We needed to make those decisions. And it took real courage.”
The ‘those decisions’ also covered a bunch of cost-cutting measures that Zaslav introduced, the highest profile of which was the effective deletion of the films.
The Variety report on his words can be found here.
Michael Kurinsky, the guest on the latest episode of the Film Stories podcast, hadn’t heard that quote before. He’s the director of Scoob: Holiday Haunt, his feature directorial debut that sits in seeming never-ending limbo. His wide-ranging career is covered in the aforementioned podcast chat, and he admits it was his life’s dream to direct a feature. Then, with just weeks to go until he’d locked the final cut, he got the news – via the Hollywood trade press – that the film would be completed, and never released.
I asked him about how he’d respond to Zaslav’s ‘courage’ quote. Once he’d got over the shock of it, he argued that “courage would have been sitting down in front of me as a person, and looking at me as a human being, and telling me this, so that I could at least respond back. And say, you know, you have killed my lifelong dream.
“I just want you to be aware of that.”
The full conversation with Michael can be found here.
