this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
137 points (96.0% liked)

News

23601 readers
3436 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav commented about shelving completed or nearly completed films like Coyote vs. Acme and Batgirl, saying the decisions "took real courage."

all 25 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] JJROKCZ 84 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Trust me, it took real courage to piss away millions of dollars and jobs while I took fat bonuses. Real tough work I tell ya

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Didn't the people working on it got paid either way?

[–] JJROKCZ 6 points 1 year ago

For the projects that completed yea they got their money during the production work. They won’t get their performance bonuses and residuals now though

[–] Moneo 1 points 1 year ago

No the CEO personally murdered them

[–] atp2112 50 points 1 year ago

Does Zaslav wake up every morning thinking "hmm, what's the most tone-deaf thing I could possibly say to piss off the largest amount of people?"

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What a maroon. What an ignoranimous.

[–] spittingimage 22 points 1 year ago

Don't bother, Dave. No-one is ever going to admire you for lying down and pissing in your own face.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Are we still pretending that Batgirl wasn't going to be another superhero movie dumpster fire?

[–] firewyre 10 points 1 year ago

lol, we barely go to the movies but I would have gotten off my ass for Wile E Coyote. They fucked up again 😂

[–] PrinceWith999Enemies 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is to be expected. When there was a ton of free money, studios could go nuts. They got greedy with the idea that every studio should have its own streaming service so they could earn more profits than by just licensing their content to Netflix. They also realized that they needed an exclusive collection to draw people in and keep them subscribed. In order to make that work, even in the free money environment, they grossly underpaid the talent and tech workers who were actually creating the content. By doing so, they could just throw it all against the wall to see what sticks. We did get some very good shows out of it, but also a lot of crap got made.

I think we’re going to see a lot of cancellations and a reduction in new shows, while the studios look to do spin offs or extended series. I also think that they’re going to re-evaluate the profitability of licensing versus owning the whole stack.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, but you usually see that for projects that aren't near completion, since cancelling projects that are near completion just means all that money was wasted

Normally it would be projects not nearly as far along, or projects with troubled history where it's better just to pull the plug than risk more money down the hole

[–] PrinceWith999Enemies 4 points 1 year ago

I completely agree. I suspect that we’re seeing them trying to avoid the sunk cost fallacy, but there may be political decisions there, too. My partner was in the industry, and there’s a lot that goes on (literally in this case) behind the scenes.

I was more just observing that what we might be seeing (on a much smaller scale) is the .com collapse when the free money dried up. I don’t think it’s going to be as big a dislocation as that was, but I do think that studios will both increasingly look to either bundle with other services or license their content out to third parties (like Netflix), as well as draw down some of the more speculative investments.

Personally, I want to live in a world where Our Flag Means Death gets made and studios take chances on shows like Hello Tomorrow, but I do suspect that a new balance is going to have to be discovered.

[–] Veedem 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s not money wasted. They get to claim the costs as a loss on their balance sheets and write it off against their taxes. It’s simply a tax advantaged move to increase perceived profitability.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Pretty sad that a project is worth more on paper as a tax write off than they expect it to make in reality.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah make stuff to sell to a monopoly, genius move.

[–] oDDmON 7 points 1 year ago
[–] Moof_Kenubi 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

in that he's planning to take Courage the Cowardly Dog off of [HBO] Max next

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Man, I remember HBO. They still exist?

[–] xkforce 6 points 1 year ago

Making dumb decisions isn't courageous.

[–] GrammatonCleric 5 points 1 year ago

Shelving movies is a marketing technique, ask Disney. This claim is more smokescreen bs to try to mask the fact that it was faked to gain attention on the movies.

adjusts tinfoil hat

[–] Jerkface -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Balls. The word you're looking for is Balls.

[–] Organichedgehog 2 points 1 year ago

Uh....pretty sure they used the word they were looking for