Work was wrapped up on Scoob! 2 last week – three months after Warner Bros Discovery announced it was abandoning the movie for a tax break.
The merged Warner Bros Discovery made not very favourable headlines over the summer, when – rather than take the risk and release the film it’d made and paid for – it abandoned the Batgirl movie. The company decided it was better all round to take the money for the project as a tax break, and promptly junked the whole thing. No matter that early test screenings had been going quite well, it simply took the money.
Thing is, Batgirl may have been the highest profile example, but it wasn’t the only film that Warner Bros Discovery swung the axe on at the same time. Edging towards completion too was Scoob! Holiday Haunt, a Christmas-themed follow-up to the successful Scoob! movie of a couple of years back.
Michael Kurinsky and Bill Haler were directing this one, with a streaming release date of December 22nd planned. The film was costing $40m, and the pair heard that it too was being cancelled when the news leaked via social media.
Thing is, it turns out that they’ve gone ahead and finished the film anyway, wrapping it all up last week. And in an interview with Variety, Kurinsky relaying the reasoning he was given for the film he’d been making getting the axe.
“In our phone calls that we had with people, they explained that this is what’s happening … and because we are taking this tax write-off, we can’t monetize it. That’s how it was explained to me”.
They finished the film, because it had already been paid for. But nobody is now allowed to watch it. “Warner Bros Discovery cannot monetize this movie now”, he added. “To get that $40 million tax write-off, they cannot make money from it. So, there is no scenario where they can sell it, stream it, anything. They just can’t because any move they would make would monetize it, and then they would lose their tax write-off”.
The only olive branch is if Discovery ceases to own Warner Bros. But given that it’s the first year of its ownership, that’s a very forlorn hope.
You can read more on Scoob! Holiday Haunt, the Scooby Doo movie you’re now allowed to watch, right here.
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