The recent cancellation of the well-tested, fully-completed Coyote vs. ACME to get a tax break has roiled the filmmaking community and triggered multiple filmmakers to cancel meetings with Warner Bros. that involved future films.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav quickly reversed the decision somewhat, allowing the producers of the animated/live-action Looney Tunes movie starring Will Forte and John Cena to be shopped around for a new home. That response was seemingly triggered in part by those cancellations as the people who make and star in movies start to lose faith in any support from the studio.
This obviously isn’t the first completed film to be shelved by Zaslav after his cost-cutting rampage once he took over the studio but it is the first one that was both testing really well (on par with the likes of Deadpool, Argo, and The Conjuring) and that couldn’t be excused away as a part of the pandemic era streaming insanity faux pas.
“I don’t know how you see the movie and then go, ‘That couldn’t happen to me,’” Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You) said to THR. Duffield is a friend of Coyote vs. ACME‘s director Dave Green and had seen the film and even given notes.
Clearly, a lot of Hollywood agrees with him if people are canceling meetings and taking their projects elsewhere. THR does report that many of those who canceled meetings are now taking a wait-and-see approach to the studio after Zaslav reversed his full shelving of the film but the reputational damage is already done. Plus, it’s made all the more confusing by the fact that another Looney Tunes movie was just greenlit. It’s all mixed messages and if you’re making a movie and two studios want you, you’re going to go with the one that isn’t canceling fully-completed, well-tested, established IP films.
