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Post by wileyk209 on Nov 9, 2023 19:27:28 GMT -5
Oh man, now the "Coyote vs. ACME" movie, planned for release in 2024, has been shelved as another tax write-off by that fiend David Zaslav! My artwork commission here featuring my private toon detective fursona Sam Valentino could not be more relevant! (It was also partly inspired by that "ACME Fools" bumper with the Looney Tunes parodying the Scooby-Doo unmaskings.)
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Post by mattpricetime on Nov 13, 2023 14:26:04 GMT -5
It looks like enough people kicked up dust that it is now being shopped around elsewhere. Probably because it also had live action in it, enough Hollywood cliques decided to stick their noses in to the situation. Which for the sake of us as fans getting to see the movie, is a good thing. If it was just the animation people pleading, we'd probably not have this second chance. Getting a dtv or a tv show undone is one thing, an 8-figure theatrical movie is another.
Love how the reporting narrative is now making out like the practice is something new. Where were all these people when the Turner establishment wrote off shows to oblivion for two decades? Oh right, they didn't care.
Personally Wile E Coyote is one of my two favorite Looney Tunes character, so i'd for sure like to see this movie. But i can understand why a solo movie of him could have some reservations. I mean after all the last Looney Tunes movie that had all the characters in it also had to get Lebron James and cameos of hundreds of other non-LT characters in it to get made.
The company as a whole just needs to get out of the red soon so we can stop worrying about stuff like this. Because as long as they are still in debt, this could totally happen again.
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Post by Doo on Nov 14, 2023 20:16:17 GMT -5
The Hollywood Reporter released an article today sharing that a congressman, Joaquin Castro, has called for a federal investigation of WB due to their many tax write-offs, citing that it is "predatory" to content creators for Zaslav to shelve completed projects for the sole reason of a tax break. Since it's just a single member of congress, I would take it with a grain of salt, but it will be interesting to see if this leads to something. www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/coyote-vs-acme-warners-investigation-1235647011/
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Post by Ark on Nov 20, 2023 9:38:20 GMT -5
To the content creators, it really is like burning down a building for the insurance money. The only thing potentially going for Zaslav's philosophy is that Warner really is still in major debt, though he has recently seen it reduced it down to $45 billion from the $49 billion when he became CEO. He's definitely penny-pinching, "removing [certain expensive] titles from the company's streaming platforms to avoid paying residuals". He's cost-cutting everywhere he can, without really looking into the future, past simply keeping Warner afloat. His most recent quote on the matter is that, "this is a generational disruption we’re going through. Going through that with a streaming service that’s losing billions of dollars, it’s really difficult to go on [the] offense". I believe a major factor in this is that viewership and advertising are moving over to platforms such as TikTok, where money can be made in mere seconds verses a multi-million-dollar production. The entertainment found on modern social media is cheap to produce, requires little investment, and viewers only need to spend mere seconds to consume it. Modern film is perhaps being slowly overtaken by micro-video-clip social media. As the Buggles sang, "video killed the radio star". www.cnbc.com/2023/11/08/warner-bros-discovery-wbd-q3-earnings.html
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Post by mattpricetime on Nov 22, 2023 20:27:59 GMT -5
It's a double edged sword. We can understand why he wants to cut things to get this company out of debt. But as people who want these movies, shows, cartoons, etc to continue to be available for future generations to see, this is pretty hard for us to support. The only good news is that we know (lazy internet journalism not-withstanding) you can pay it off sometime down the road to undo it.
The problem at large though is this practice has been being used by television executives for decades. You agree to not profit off the item so that you can receive the biggest tax break on it. It entered Turner Broadcasting after the Warner Bros merger and was in effect. Ever wonder why you never seen reruns of Baby Blues or the original IGPX? The practice kinda went away in the AT&T ownership period, and then came back under the Discovery ownership. So it is disingenuous to only care about it when it hit the theatrical market. But let's face facts not everyone in the television and Hollywood businesses are there for the art. Some are, and others are in it for the money and some of them are in it for the fame. Which really is true in every artform and sport.
If the practice went away that would be good for keeping things around and getting previous write-offs undone. My only devil's advocate point would be without that option, how else are they getting out of debt?
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Post by Ark on Nov 22, 2023 22:13:24 GMT -5
It's baffling to me how much they went into debt just during Covid. From around 12 billion to 50 billion in a couple years if I understand correctly. Some very poor choices were made to quickly please the shareholders with very little foresight. Unfortunately, that's why they brought Zaslav in. And he's even admitting that things are far worse than he'd imagined for standard television, and that's his area of expertise. Streaming is very new and there's not exactly anyone who is an expert in it. Netflix did great as a monopoly, but once companies pulled all their content for their own services, it quickly became apparent that even the pioneer in streaming doesn't quite have it figured out either.
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Post by mattpricetime on Nov 23, 2023 22:45:14 GMT -5
I'd put it down to three big mistakes. 1. AT&T just greenlit too many things (especially for streaming) in hopes they would pay off down the line. Sadly that just didn't happen. 2 .Not finishing the cable organization before HBO Max launched. They really should have supported each other better, but they didn't 3. The hiring of Jason Kilar was also something that seemed good on paper, but turned out pretty badly. To their credit they realized that not long after he got on the job. It will never not be funny he didn't even know the talks with Discovery were happening.
I think Zaslav's pretty fine at his job in general. The Discovery family of channels do pretty fine by modern cable channels. Most of the top ten viewership have been Discovery owned. But that's because they are run as binge channels for a specific subject. Hopefully Cartoon network becomes that for animation in the future under Discovery. At least the animation people want shows to continue airing, we just have to hope Zaslav doesn't try to add more to the need-to-be-rescued pile.
Unfortunately their underwhelming ad sales announcement wasn't that great for us. It doesn't really matter much for other channels as the branding on a lot of their channels has always been minimal that no one really wants it. Cartoon Network is one that definitely needs the extra to afford stuff like bumpers, contests and promotions. So the battle goes on.
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Post by wileyk209 on Nov 27, 2023 21:10:14 GMT -5
And NOW Max is planning to remove the remaining 1931-50 Looney Tunes shorts at the end of this year, along with "The Looney Tunes Show!" David Zaslav is destroying WB Animation's legacy! (It doesn't help that numerous Looney Tunes shorts and the second season of "The Looney Tunes Show" have not been released on disc yet.)
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Post by mattpricetime on Nov 27, 2023 21:23:57 GMT -5
That is unfortunate. It doesn't seem like animation is currently getting a lot of space in general. Personally i never really liked the concept of curated streaming services especially with things the company already owns. I preferred the vault model but it seems the corporate people didn't agree with people like me lol.
Meanwhile the Boomerang service just kind of sits there? I would assume your endgame of removing more animation on Max is to turn the Boomerang one into WBD's animation streamer, right? Put your WB Shows, HB shows, RS shows, MGM shows, CN shows, AS shows and whatever anime and third party shows you have on there while you got them, Heck, leave most of them on there in perpetuity and you could probably afford to jack up the price. If it had complete access to everything in just ONE of those libraries, people would pay. Plus it would help get people to accept we want unity, not division.
So what is the hold up? I know some shows are still under tax write off problems but there's plenty of animation in their library not on the service that could be. Ouweleen has said multiple times he watches streaming numbers too, so streaming is a part of their strategy. Why is that Boomerang service just sitting there? There's gotta be something i'm missing.
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Post by wileyk209 on Nov 27, 2023 22:51:14 GMT -5
FALSE ALARM! It was just a mistake in WB-Discovery's press release; "The Looney Tunes Show" and the 1931-50 LT shorts are going to stay. Now let's hope they can soon add back the 1951-2004 shorts...
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Post by wileyk209 on Feb 10, 2024 19:41:15 GMT -5
Now the whole "Coyote vs. ACME" debacle is getting worse. David Zaslav plans to DELETE the movie later this month if no further actions are taken! If he does this, not only will it be a big loss for the animation world, but Zaslav could be facing a HUGE lawsuit, as this is unethical business practice. And with it comes another Sam Valentino rant...
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Post by Ark on Feb 10, 2024 20:55:05 GMT -5
The Zas is trying to recoup 48 billion in losses. It's somewhat understandable why he's acting so desperately, but the shareholders should really better understand the situation and we as the consumers shouldn't be left out in the rain. Debt that big doesn't just go away, unfortunately. I suppose if the shareholders really did understand, the financial crisis they are in would be even worse unfortunately, with more people backing out left and right. It's a strange catch-22, but not unique to just WB. Hasbro is very much in a similar spot, but they don't even have 4 billion in debt. They can't be honest with their lenders and shareholders, and the problem just keeps getting worse. They do weird frugal moves that make the company lose more money than they actually would've saved. Testing out streaming during Covid permanently skewed their financial expectations and nearly killed physical film media (of course it did better when we were all at home). Warner Archive seems to have become aware of the fact that we do, in fact, want cartoons and old movies on Blu-ray, thank goodness. And we will pay a lot more than $10 a month if they give us good releases. The artists are learning this as well, recognizing that they get higher residuals from disc releases than streaming counts. Honestly, I have hope that things will get better and back to some kind of normalcy, but Warner has a very rough 48 billion patch to navigate through in the meantime. Zaslav would be wise to not push the boundaries too far, while still slowly finding ways to recoup the money and interest they owe. At the end of the day though, one does have to ask: why were they allowed this much debt to begin with? Again, honesty on all sides could've avoided this mess from the beginning. It feels almost nefarious that a bank or whoever would loan out 50 billion dollars to an industry that only makes 77 billion a year, spread across all the film companies around the world. It's downright odd.
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Post by Ark on Feb 17, 2024 19:28:53 GMT -5
Apparently Warner is in talks to buy Paramount. Because what they really need right now is more debt.
This confuses me to no end, and I have mixed feelings since Paramount owns a large amount of great animated content, yet are very protective about their properties. I believe it was them who sided with Article 13, illegal memes, and all that. This could get even more interesting.
Edit: From the article:
Apparently Barbie paid off big time, as that 48 billion is down to 43 billion. If Zaslav really did reduce the debt over five billion dollars recently, that's extremely notable. It's the only saving grace in this madness. Taking on 16 billion more seems like madness all over again, though.
Also:
So from this we may conclude that if nothing happens by early April, they won't go through with it after all.
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Post by wileyk209 on Feb 18, 2024 16:39:47 GMT -5
Apparently Warner is in talks to buy Paramount. Because what they really need right now is more debt. This confuses me to no end, and I have mixed feelings since Paramount owns a large amount of great animated content, yet are very protective about their properties. I believe it was them who sided with Article 13, illegal memes, and all that. This could get even more interesting.
Edit: From the article: Apparently Barbie paid off big time, as that 48 billion is down to 43 billion. If Zaslav really did reduce the debt over five billion dollars recently, that's extremely notable. It's the only saving grace in this madness. Taking on 16 billion more seems like madness all over again, though. Also:
So from this we may conclude that if nothing happens by early April, they won't go through with it after all.
It was a couple months ago when the announcement initially happened, and Paramount pretty much wasn't thrilled about Warner Bros. Discovery buying them out, so they refused. But I hope they don't change their mind, because then it will be a BIG problem...
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Post by Ark on Feb 18, 2024 16:53:49 GMT -5
Interesting. The article above is only three days old and it discusses the possibility like it has lost little traction. I suppose that's just to have something to write about. It doesn't seem like a good move for either of them and some of the other prospects would make more sense.
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