Yeah, that’s exactly it. The company is in a ton of debt (it’s why AT&T got rid of it) - also makes CNN+ even more of a ridiculous idea by WB previous management. He’s tasked with dealing with that issue.
The issue is not that he’s cutting costs, it’s that he’s doing it with a grating combination of clumsiness and unearned arrogance that will leave the company with no long-term prospects.
Update to the earlier note about market cap.
https://mobile.twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1562073791232196610
My Big Fat Incestuous RED Wedding
Here’s some outrage fodder for the creative types
Also, this
It’s really perplexing.
I can understand a decision to retrench. The expense of producing new material of quality standards to keep viewers signed for your service may make being a streamer a losing proposition going against Amazon, Netflix, and Disney. Go cheap instead and fewer subscribers keep you in the black.
But you paid for HBOMAX and then discard that which the subscribers sign up for?? (Not old Sesame Street, everything else)
The time to go small was before that.
Yes, and it would be trivial to use a video capture card and/or software like OBS to record video off of a streaming service, but the thing about any of of this is it violates 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1), enacted by the DMCA, which criminalizes circumventing technological access controls placed on copywritten work. You are not allowed to make your own recordings, because to do so would circumvent Netflix’s access controls.
There’s a lot of comic book films on this list that might have been better off never having been released. For all you know, we just avoided the next Catwoman or Green Lantern.
I’m willing to bet A MILLION DOLLARS confidently that the Batgirl movie wasn’t deleted permanently, the studio probably expected upon hearing the film was shelved for workers to immediately attempt to leak it, so we’ll before the announcement they probably took all the raw footage and moved it to a protected storage drive somewhere so they can still monetize it in the future. Considering the Directors first reaction was to try to record the footage on his phone to release it, they weren’t wrong.
Right. I assume the film and the raw footage still exist someplace.
Maybe this is an off-topic question, but I have an assumption that I’d be happy to see corrected if it’s wrong: isn’t most of the history of “TV” (or “film” . . . or “audio/visual storytelling”? . . . not sure what the right word is in 2022) littered with art that has “disappeared”?
Hasn’t it always been the case that, as someone who works on a TV series, the best you could expect was that you hit whatever number you needed for syndication, and then someone might or might not re-run your show at some point? Or maybe the show will get released on VHS or DVD or BlueRay . . . or streaming. Maybe.
I’m just not picking up where the big crisis is, as this is fundamentally how I’ve always experienced TV for the 40+ years of my life. Stuff runs. Then it disappears. Sometimes it pops up again, or doesn’t.
It seems to me that it must be a relatively new expectation that any show I work on must just kind of be accessible to the average consumer in perpetuity, and that something has been taken from me if it is not. Are “people in the industry” really that upset by a show or two or twenty dropping off of streaming? How is this more significant than the business decisions around providing public access to materials that has been going on forever?
In the past, the people who created those shows could have reasonably expected to get a personal physical copy and/or have access to production materials.
That’s no longer true and it is very upsetting to some of them that there is no longer any evidence of something they put a considerable amount of time and effort to make. With streaming, at least there was the expectation/hope that as long as they had an internet connection, it was accessible.
Forget consumers, they literally cannot see their own work for themselves. A lot of it is only on computers which have been made inaccessible to them or wiped.
I’ll be honest here and say how it was then, was not how I liked it. How it could be - new work is available in perpetuity (and heck, all that old work as well), is how it should be and what I want. Or in other words, the old days sucked ass.
Now maybe I’m being a bit “I want a pony AND an ice cream cone” and a little unreasonable in my desires. However the argument that that’s how it always has been doesn’t really work for me. Despite the pull of nostalgia, few things were genuinely better back in the day 
.
I think you are correct. In fact, some television from the 1960s has literally disappeared. The film stock was reused, or thrown away, or lost, and is gone forever.
The shows that HBO is pulling aren’t actually gone. I’m sure if the creators of Sesame Street, or anyone else, wrote a big enough check, HBO would happily turn over the old episodes, Because capitalism.
I’m not a betting person, and I agree that there’s probably a backup somewhere. But it’s also possible for it to have been deleted completely and deliberately, for legal or fiscal reasons, or just to make a point.
I thought I read somewhere that the Children’s Television Workshop was going to make the pulled episodes available on YouTube.
ETA
Yes, but much less so in the past 40 years or so.
Absolutely, a lot of old videotapes of old TV shows got re-used, because the networks and content owners didn’t see much value in keeping it (plus, videotape was expensive, and storage space was limited). Similarly, much of Hollywood’s output from the silent era is gone forever.
But, starting probably in the late '70s or '80s, the growth of both home video, and cable TV, meant that there was more of a market for tapes and films of old TV shows and old movies, and the studios and networks became far more vigilant about maintaining and curating their libraries. That doesn’t mean that every episode of every TV show made since then has been lovingly preserved, but it’s much less likely now that that older content will be willfully deleted.
Eh, WBD will be fine. They kept Bloys as head of HBO and put the Max stuff under him and gave him more money to do stuff. And there is a lot that is coming out (the sizzle reel before House of the Dragon showed a lot).
I remember when HBO Max started and people were pissed that AT&T was devaluing the HBO brand by sticking ‘inferior’ programming with it. I think Killar at one point said he wanted “quantity and quality” and everyone freaked the fuck out. It seems like Zaslav is trying to go back to the less output but high quality that HBO was known for before Max.
It’s likely not going to be great for a while, but in the end WBD will be ok. Especially as HBO continues to put out award winning stuff.
They are retrenching around HBO. They are discarding a lot of the Max stuff (and some of what they are keeping are going under the HBO department) aside from a smaller group of Max Originals. And seemingly giving HBO more money in programming as a result. It’s likely that the new app will have HBO as one of the Hubs.
The Hollywood Reporter has a story that private screenings of Batgirl are being held for cast, crew, representatives (I’m guessing agents) and executives. So the film was not erased.