It’s clearer now than ever before that the streaming boom is on the verge of collapse. I suppose it could only ever persist so long before reaching its’ ceiling, but somehow I didn’t expect it would be this quick or calamitous. What’s happening right now is very alarming. Netflix has been desperate for months, making a string of bad decisions in light of an apparently poor financial quarter, smaller streamers are struggling if not shutting down entirely… But none of it compares to the sudden death of HBO Max in the wake of Warner’s assimilation by Discovery, coming with a whole host of other terrifying consequences and impulsive moves by out-of-touch execs that can’t help but look like the canary in the coal mine for the visceral end of the streaming model and with it an unparalleled loss of digital media.
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If you’re out of the loop, in April of this year, Warner Bros. formally merged with Discovery Inc, the media company best known for the Discovery Channel and other such ostensibly science-oriented non-fiction media ventures. It was a very unusual merging given the massive disparity in scale of the two companies (it seems to have been arranged by their mutual parent AT&T), but it went ahead leading to the birth of a new conglomerate now very creatively called Warner Bros. Discovery. As typical of mergers it very immediately forecast a lot of uncertainty and even more job loss, especially as the CEO of the smaller component, David Zaslav, was made the new head of the entire organization. He did the typical businessman things of promising growth while saving money, becoming more competitive, and not particularly caring much about the “content” itself that the company would produce.
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Anyway, skip ahead a few months and the unprecedented happens. Shortly after Comic Con and ahead of a major investors meeting for WBD, Zaslav pulled the plug on two movies that had been in development and in fact mostly completed: Batgirl, and Scoob! Holiday Haunt. The cancellation of Batgirl in particular sparked a massive reaction in the entertainment business, a $90 million dollar movie that had completed principal photography and was merely in the post-production phase before an expected release later this year. This was a movie that had a considerable degree of real anticipation around it, as most superhero projects do -but especially for such details as its’ Latina protagonist played by Leslie Grace, a long-awaited return to mainstream movie acting for Brendan Fraser, and the even longer-awaited return of Michael Keaton as Batman. And in one snap decision it is dead, never to see the light of day -one of the most extreme and expensive cancellations in movie history. The work of hundreds of artists, none of whom had been aware prior to the news dropping, gone to waste -and that applies to Scoob! Holiday Haunt as well, all those animators who were likely overworked on the project already. Both films are now mere tax write-offs for the company, and Zaslav has attempted to save face by citing quality control -and while that seems to be appeasing the Snyder Bros (who never got over the failure of Zack Snyder’s brand) and the terminally online trolls who had been hoping for this movie to fail, no intelligent, conscionable people are buying it. There is simply no way Batgirl was so bad as to inhibit a release on any platform -especially given some of the dreck Warners has dropped in even the recent past. The generally positive audience test result was comparable to Black Adam, which is still going forward (gee, I wonder why that is?). And further, they are hesitant to make any such change about upcoming Flash movie, a relic of a previous iteration of the DC brand and starring an actor who’s spent most of the last year on the run from the law on a wide array of assault and abduction charges -only recently have they been arrested. Batgirl’s quality had nothing to do with it getting axed, and most likely it was a perfectly fine movie. Why it was really selected over other projects is unfortunately not hard to figure out.
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But though the most dramatic, these cancellations are just the beginning. At the same time as this announcement, the company quietly removed from HBO Max several original movies that had been made for that platform, including ones I reviewed like An American Pickle and Locked Down. As these movies had been made directly for the streamer with no physical release, they now no longer exist in the United States outside of unreliable pirate sites. This as you can imagine, has a lot of people rightfully worried and up in arms -a drastic reminder that nothing in the streaming world is permanent, any show or movie made specifically for that format can vanish in an instant. The loss of movies is a big deal, something that the corporate executives can’t understand -who view everything through the lens of market value that can turn a profit or not. And there are worrying parallels to the early decades of cinema, where studios simply tossed and burned film reels uninterested in their preservation as art, resulting in near 90% of movies from the silent era being lost. The kind of careless disregard we’re seeing for these HBO Max titles is a disturbing precedent. It’s what happens when a corporate body can only view something as a product, and not a work with more intrinsic value. What could a Netflix or Amazon choose to get rid of?
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For HBO Max it seems HBO Max itself. Because a few days after this firestorm, Zaslav announced the folding of HBO Max into a new merged service with the far less lucrative and less popular Discovery+. In Canada, we can only tell from a distance, but HBO Max has in just a few years become one of the strongest streaming brands in the United States. It’s got a higher user approval rating than any of its’ competitors and has been praised across the board for its’ relative diversity in content. Sure, it pushes the DC superhero and HBO stuff more than anything else, but it’s also got notable libraries from TCM, the BBC and Sky (giving it a catalogue of British television), Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Crunchyroll and GKIDS (which combined give it a hefty anime selection), and even the Criterion Collection. That’s in addition to the ten decades worth of movies produced by the Warner Bros. studio -it’s an astonishing range, and it’s not likely to survive this drastic change in image. We already know what some of the consequences of this new direction are. Severe cuts are being made to children’s programming and animation, and the production of HBO Max original movies has been halted. At the same time, this new vision seems to disproportionately value Discovery and its’ non-narrative reality-based identity as an equal to Warners. The company outline presents them as two spheres with individual approaches that are comically condescending and sexist. Somehow scripted shows and the general lean towards fandoms are synonymous with male orientation, while unscripted programs and the meaningless denotation “comfort viewing” is inherently feminine. This of course despite HBO Max as is catering to an exceptionally wide range of subject matter and audience demographics, including several explicitly “female skewing” shows produced by the streamer in-house; and the fact that fandom, as currently infected by toxic male entitlement as it is, was built by women.
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But Zaslav doesn’t care about accuracy or honesty in this. He and his all white male board of directors only care about capital, faulty statistics, and out-of-date focus research. And they are completely insulated from how little anyone really cares about Discovery. The presentations given at that conference are indeed a feast of buzzword clichés, but backed up by the will to make sudden, drastic decisions out of really bad ideas. Zaslav has singled out DC as the highest priority for the studio going forward, ostensibly at the expense of anything else Warners would produce (although he has also stated an interest in reviving the Harry Potter franchise spearheaded by an “un-cancelled” Rowling -yuck). Batgirl apparently did not approximate this plan and so it was shelved. However, all that has been revealed about the new prerogative is that it aims to copy Marvel’s approach, which is nothing but bad given DC’s post-Snyder avoidance of shared-universe stories is what has set it apart and even made it at its’ best a glowing alternative to the MCU in terms of quality and artistry, without sacrificing much in the way of box office. But the new powers that be seem to want to do away with that in favour of dragging DC back into firm mediocrity -especially given recent conversations around bringing back Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill –a conscious step backward when the properties need to be moving forward. Folks like Matt Reeves and Todd Phillips would be right to be nervous about the security of their own DC projects (that The Batman sequel might never happen now) if Zaslav decides to just upend it all in favour of yet another attempt to make Snyder’s dour vision work.
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The implications stretch well beyond superhero movies though and Zaslav knows this, going to lengths to emphasize that HBO programming (though not HBO Max programming) was valued and safe. And yet it didn’t take long for folks to notice some HBO shows like Vinyl and Mrs. Fletcher had also been removed from HBO Max. This blatant dishonesty perhaps more than the drastic business decisions is going to have an adverse effect for the company, the future of which is in uncertain jeopardy like it has never seen. It’s these very impulsive acts that have sown distrust with people like Christopher Nolan, who notably abandoned the company in 2020, and he will not be the only one. Warner Bros. may well now be toxic to many filmmakers and artists who have no reason to trust that their work will be respected, no guarantee even that it will see the light of day under current management. This is embarrassing for a studio with such a long history and respectable reputation. Lost in all this is the sadness that Warner Bros. itself is now simply another subsidiary brand, like what Disney did to Fox. And the question is raised, what will it be allowed to produce going forward? Warners was already gradually becoming a shadow of its’ former self as it chased franchise I.P. like everyone else at the expense of more diverse creative endeavours. Even with Discovery attached, this isn’t an overwhelmingly homogeneous brand like Disney, but limits on expression are still inevitable. What is to become of New Line Cinema and Castle Rock? The CW seems poised to fold already –and there’s no indication the corporate powers care at all about any of the fallout in this. In fact they are completely ambivalent to the mass unemployment they’re about to create. Because the livelihoods of those working for them or any of their subsidiaries are not as important as those tax write-offs. I’ve been seeing reactions on Twitter from people who do work in those industries under the hand of Warner terrified for their job security.
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And it’s these sort of things that spoil even the thought that such moves are likely to blow up in WBD’s face –with the studio and the streaming service and the other assets. Because the men at the top are not the ones who are going to pay for it. Sure, it was entertaining to see Quibi fail so hard, but Jeffrey Katzenberg emerged from its’ ashes unscathed except for a bruised ego. So many others didn’t. That’s going to be just what happens here but on a much larger scale; and among all the devastating personal repercussions, the American movie industry will likely be a much poorer place in its’ wake. Sure, it’s good that WBD seems committed to the theatrical model, but that’s not going to mean much if there isn’t diversity in what is allowed to be put there. The new regime isn’t interested in HBO Max as a place for original movies, but nor does it appear all that invested in putting them in theatres unless they have that particular mass-market potential. To me it only seems like a sign they’re going to cut back significantly on original movies altogether -a choice made easier if they do indeed bleed artists from this move as predicted. But a film industry where less movies are coming out is a bad thing, and that once again seems to be where all this is headed. A smaller, more micro-managed, constrained American movie industry.
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Oh sorry, I should say “content industry”, because that’s what it really is and shows just how little the suits actually care. A creative motion picture by a visionary filmmaker and crew is the same as a vapid reality show geared towards gawking at idiots. Art does not exist to these drones and it stands to diminish the importance and understanding of culture. Obviously Zaslav is not unique, in fact figures like him are in no short supply at the executive levels across Hollywood. I can even see the precedent being set for other studios to follow suit that maybe just weren’t bold enough to sink their public approval first. And even that general consensus is starting to wane as less people even a week out are thinking about this and the ramifications. So Warner Bros. Discovery is going to go ahead with all this, not caring a smidge what people like me think. Almost certainly, more bad will come out of it than good, it leaves little to hope for.
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There are some things we can do though, starting with pressuring distributors to release physical media of streaming-exclusive shows and movies. It is more apparent than ever now that some will just vanish into the ether someday. Netflix is facing a lot of troubles right now, and neither The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance or most seasons of BoJack Horseman have the security of DVDs or Blu-rays should they be sacrificed. Another thing we can do is support those creators, crews, artists, and talent that are going to be leaving WBD either through principle or downsizing. Look to where they go next and follow them there -especially those coming from Batgirl and Scoob: Holiday Haunt who have had years of their lives now just taken away (amidst all of this I was glad to see sentiments of empathy come from Kevin Feige of all people, renewing support in Adil & Bilall -the directors of Batgirl who’d also helmed episodes of Ms. Marvel- subtly assuring them a place at his company). And we need to keep a close eye on WBD and be vocal in our displeasure and the reasons for it -that latter part is vital, because for them it’s easy to brush away concerns that they can colour a specific way; when confronted on what their choices actually mean, it would be more difficult to wiggle out of.
I’ve said it before, we live in bleak times for cinema. It can be hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel, but we have to believe it is there. To do so though we can’t ignore troublesome actions like what is being done at Warner Bros. It is a monumental shift that could burn the company to the ground or set off other fires across the industry. It is much more than a superhero movie being canned, and the more people that are aware of that the greater potential there is to mitigate the damage.
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