Posted on 11/14/2023 1:10:36 PM PST by nickcarraway
Texas congressman Joaquin Castro calls for the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to look into whether the studio violated antitrust guidelines in tax write-off plan: "It's predatory and anti-competitive."
A congressman is calling for a federal investigation of Warner Bros. for its handling of Coyote vs. Acme.
Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro took to X to blast the studio for its original plan to shelve the movie for a tax break.
“The WBD tactic of scrapping fully made films for tax breaks is predatory and anti-competitive,” the San Antonio Democrat wrote. “As the Justice Department and revise their antitrust guidelines they should review this conduct. As someone remarked, it’s like burning down a building for the insurance money.”
Warners has since reversed its decision amid industry backlash and decided to try and shop the film to other studios and streamers. But the studio previously went through with shelving movies for tax write-offs last year with the movies Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt.
Castro has been vocal on antitrust issues in media and entertainment. In April, he called on the competition enforcers to reassess Discovery’s merger with AT&T’s WarnerMedia. This followed 30 members of Congress warning that the resulting competition vacuum would harm workers and consumers, as well as reduce diverse programming — which became a common criticism after the company canned its $90 million HBO Max film Batgirl, the first DC movie led by a Latina, for the tax write-off.
In a letter to the Justice Department, Castro previously wrote that the deal enabled Warner Bros. Discovery to “adopt potentially anticompetitive practices,” including “product cancellations.”
“The damage to content creators whose projects are cancelled in deep development and post-production cannot be overstated,’ stated the April 7 letter. “Such cancellations stain these projects, making them less appealing and marketable to other buyers — consumers will likely never be able to watch shows purchased then cancelled by WBD. WBD’s conduct amounts to a de facto ‘catch and kill’ practice, vastly limiting consumer choice.”
Under current merger guidelines, a consideration of whether a deal is approved is if it will incentivize a company to “withdraw a product that a significant number of customers strongly prefer.” Castro, in his comments over the shelving of Coyote vs. Acme, could be alluding to the absence of competition in Hollywood that allows WBD to make unpopular moves without harm to its bottom line.
The call for an investigation is the latest twist in the almost cartoon-like saga of the live-action/animation hybrid Coyote vs. Acme, which went from just another title on Warners’ slate to the most talked-about movie in Hollywood thanks to the studio’s initial effort to scrap the project.
Unlike Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, however, Coyote vs. Acme is entirely finished, and had a successful audience screening where its test scores were in the 90s. Supporters of the project applied pressure to the studio to change last week’s decision, with some creatives even canceling meetings with the company in protest. “I don’t know how you see the movie and then go, ‘That couldn’t happen to me,’” No One Will Save You filmmaker Brian Duffield previously told THR.
Now the studio will now allow director Dave Green to shop the project, though it’s not yet clear what price Warner Bros. will set for the title given its potential value as a tax write off that would help offset the movie’s $70 million budget.
Coyote vs. Acme follows the speechless and hapless Wile E. Coyote as he teams up with a lawyer (Will Forte) to fight the ACME corporation. Just like in the cartoons, Coyote buys ACME devices to try and kill Road Runner, but they never work properly, causing him to embark on a quest to take down the company instead.
Batgirl was shelved because it was a garbage movie and fans were not going to see it so they would have lost money.
Hahahahaha that is great! Never seen it before...bookmarked!
I am so sick of the whining over Batgirl. If the star were white, you wouldn’t be hearing a peep about it. Disney should have been doing what WB did a long time ago and clamped down on Kathleen Kennedy’s woke machine factory before she destroyed Star Wars. We might have been spared Daisy Ridley’s ridiculous character who needed no training to use a lightsaber and the whole girl power thing of Episode 8. I have no idea what happened in Episode 9 because I cannot bring myself to watch it.
If I had a dollar for every time someone said “Congress has more important things to deal with than {insert silly waste of time or personal vendetta here}” then I could pay off the national debt.
Hello Mary Sue, good bye plot...
May I present evidence to the contrary?
The Day the Clown Cried is an unfinished and unreleased 1972 Swedish-French drama film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis. The film was met with controversy regarding its premise and content, which features a circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Lewis repeatedly insisted that The Day the Clown Cried would never be released, but later donated an incomplete copy of the film to the Library of Congress in 2015 under the stipulation that it was not to be screened before June 2024.
Fans and critics alike hope for the film's eventual release.
But yeah the movie sounded like something I would avoid. And my standards are not that high.
We go out once a month, no kids, no parents, no pets, no friends. Just us. And we used to just pick a random movie and watch it. Saw some things that were surprisingly good and some real stinkers but most time it was just "yep, that was a movie." Pleasantly bland escapism for an hour or so.
And that is what most movies should be. But now they can not even hit that high a mark. Feels like they are snarling at you all the time.
He doesn’t;t understand the economics of the situation. Batgirl was a $100 Million film, add in marketing for another $100 Million and you need to gross at least $400 Million to break even. They wrote off the $100 Million so that if it was a terrible dud then they might have to write off $200 Million or more.
Batgirl was still going to need some work done to it to make it releaseable but they could have they just choose not to.
If Disney had done this with The Marvels they were looking at a $350 Million write off. They overspent on the film just like they are doing with the new Snow White Picture, all told if they finally release it they will have about $400 Million in it before marketing costs and will need to gross about $1 Billion to break even.
I believe that film was finished pretty much. Lewis always said he would never release it but he did occasionally show it to a few friends. So he is now dead and if they can now screen it maybe we can see next year what this film really looks like.
Bookmark
The congresscritter does have something of a point about the tax writeoff. Maybe the studio should have to put the movie up for sale and see what distributors will pay for it.
I never thought about it that way, but it does make sense that it’s akin to building a house, then burining it down for the insurance money.
Castro has a point.
That was SOOOOO funny!
Thank you!!
The amount you get for the write off is not equal to the amount you spent.
It is more like you invested a whole bunch of money into developing a drug that turned out not to be 80% or better effective.
Because it is not commercially viable the drug is a loss.
I did not agree with Rep. Joaquin Castro nor did I give a flip for the movie until read that article. It’s Genius!
glad you like it
ps: from the amount of orders Acme gets (if only from Wile E.) they have the Deep Pockets necessary to pay off for their crappy merchandise
what Wile E should do is buy a case of Whole Foods avocados from Amazon. They are hard as nails, true artillery shells. Perfect for killing just about anything including some pesty noisy bird
come to think on it the IDF could buy a few cases, too
That is not the case.
At issue is writing off inventory that is deemed unsalable. The inventory happens to be a film cartoon rather that buggie whips
“Put a chick in it, and make her gay!”
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