Being a comic nerd from way back (started reading DC before the original Crisis) I keep watching the DCEU movies thinking "this one can't be worse than the last one."
I am always wrong.
The weird thing is that they show a ginormous wall appear in the desert as a consequence of a wish, so we know the magic can just make things out of thin air. They really didn't have to do the weird body takeover thing according to the internal logic of the movie.
It would have taken zero effort, that's why it was so perplexing. Elsewhere in the movie, some guy in Egypt wishes for his land to be returned and Max Lord makes walls pop out of the ground. Diane's wish for Steve could have simply popped him into existence from nothing.
The mcguffin that brought him back is later shown to be able to create things from nothing, so yes, they could have. Also, parts feel so disjointed to the point that it's super obvious that there were rewrites and reshoots galore.
Or the part where you have to touch the stone, then Pedro is like "seeing me on tv is a type of touching."
And 100% of people have to renounce their wish? What about the guy out there who wished to die? Can't renounce that wish. I'm sure there's other absurd wishes or crazy people who are fine with everything going to hell to keep their wish.
I think it would be more like a giant human condom. He is inside him and wearing him. The possessed chap is gonna catch any stds on behalf of the ghost as well.
I think the most insane part of all that is there was the most obvious way in the movie to have nothing else change, but have it not be rapey at all:
There was no reason the guy had to possess another man's body. There was no preexisting lore that said that, they made all this shit up for the movie. They could have just as easily had him come back.
Wasn't it the opposite, the original writer really loved bondage so that's why original WW lost her powers and became submissive when she got tied up by a man
He’s life is a wonderful rabbit hole to dive into. Wonder Woman is all about bondage.everyone keeps getting tied up.
He also had a housekeeper, that probably was he’s second wife. She lived in the house and they had a kid if I recall correctly.
If you read into the life story of her creator, William Moulton Marston, the dude himself was a bit of an odd duck, especially for someone in 1941. He was a famous psychologist who was in a thruple living together with his wife and mistress both of whom he had children with, claimed to have been inspired by women's suffrage, while making a very sexualized comic super hero who's weakness is bondage (which also happened to be his fetish he was apparently a little obsessed with). Lol
She doesn't have a whip, she has a lasso. And consenting to being tied up by a woman is not the same as rape, because of the consent part. Also, remember that originally she lost her powers by being tied up, which is the opposite of femdom. The creator definitely had a BDSM kink, but again, very different from "digging rapey women." And doesn't really justify a scene in a movie that came out 70 years after his death and is rapey without having anything to do with BDSM.
Don't forget the Hannibal Lecter-esque ending where she sees the guy who she kinda raped and went, "mmm, let me get some more of that victim" and turns to go after him as the movie is ending.
As one does......sure, sure........
*nods along as if I fully understand the core concept, and didn't just hear the most absurd idea to be plugged into a wonder woman movie*
Spoilers for WW84 >!You know how Chris Pine's character comes back through the wish of Diana? Well the wish's magic makes Chris' soul possess a random dude. When the film ends and the wishes are restored, Chris' soul goes away, leaving the random dude in a new city with a few days / weeks of blackouts. That random dude was raped by Diana, from a certain point of view.!<
It's a magic wish, they could have just made Chris Pine's character physically come back! Or they could have made the fact that he stole someone's body a consequence of the wish, and show how the wishes go wrong!
Instead, they just do the worst of both worlds!
The entire wishing thing in the movie is such a colossal can of worms you could make an entire movie length essay going into the issues with it. Reality wouldn’t last FIVE SECONDS if everyone’s wish was granted in a single moment.
Lol, right?
"Hey formerly poor person, I know you enjoy the money you have now but we need you to give it back so the world can go back to normal, okay?"
"Uhh...no?"
And that's how the movie would go in reality.
Diana’s wish that gets granted is for Steve to come back except he comes back in another guy’s body…like it’s just straight another dude’s body and not actually Steve because the wish’s are all basically the worst version of what you want soooo yea not great
Literally, as a big time Superman/Batman fan when I was younger, I went into Man of Steel and emailed some friends like "I know I've grown up, but I still think this is the chance to see the Superman film I always wanted!"
[2 hours later]
"Well shit."
Sad thing is I truly believe Henry Cavil could have been just as beloved as Christopher Reeve is, but had absolutely dogshit tier scripts to go with his movies
It is kinda hard to imagine him as a mild mannered reporter, the guy looks like he was marble statue that was dipped in distilled masculinity then magically animated.
To be fair, I've heard mixed reception on Batgirl.
The real reason it got cancelled wasn't quality, they've released worse since. Being direct to MAX was not a part of what the corporate overlords wanted for the DCEU. New management wanted big blockbusters that would make billions. Which is why Flash only made $271.3 million worldwide.
I doubt Batgirl would have been some massive hit, but it was easier to write it off, because it cost only around 90 million.
The short lived CGI cartoon series did a joke like that, Guy Garnder tells Hal Jordan that he's now an honor guard lantern and Earth is being protected by John Stewart and Hal responds "the fake new guy?"
Which is terrible since the comic, especially part 2 was some of the deepest stuff I've personally seen comic goes to. Questioning absolute power but balancing an older, wiser and weaker batman who might just be insane actually. But he's on his mission and convinced of his position and it's up to you to pick if you believe in his arguments about needing to kill superman.
He makes some good points. prep quite nicely. It's overall a very nice comic movie. Nice surprise when I really didn't expect much.
then went on the movie expecting as much as the comic and was met with vain, ridiculous bullshit.
The thing is, BvS actually has very very little in common with The Dark Knight Returns outside of the aesthetics and a few easter egg pieces of dialogue and whatnot. They're two completely different stories.
Snyder factually got things wrong about the comic. He said that Batman kills people in it(In an attempt to justify why his Batman kills), when TDKR Batman very very explicitly chooses not to. He *wants* to kill people, but he never does. That's why The Joker commits suicide and makes it look like Batman killed him, because Batman's reputation is as someone who doesn't kill.
The comic book is also specifically about the 1980s and how Reagan helped to create this dystopian world filled with drugs and crime and inequality that is so corrupt that it twisted two once good heroes into a maniac (Batman) and a government puppet (Superman). BvS has none of this.
TDKR is also actually very funny in a twisted way, and it spends a great deal of time showing random citizens in Gotham City and how Batman is impacting them. Like there's a scene with this rando incel based on Travis Bickle who is inspired by Batman to go into a porno theater and start shooting people. There's also a boxer who who is basically owned by the mob and, after being inspired by Batman, shoots the gangster he owes money to and gets shot himself. And these characters have nothing to do with the main story.
I would've loved to have seen someone make *that* movie.
BvS inverts the fundamental power dynamic that TDKR has at it's core, where Superman is a direct representative of the United States Government and a naive weapon of growing fascism, and Batman is directly captivating anarchist gangs to end crime domestically. The government orders superman directly to stop batman and there is nothing personal between them at that point.
BvS hinges almost entirely on the US government questioning Superman based on the whole zod situation, and Batman taking it into his own hands to topple the superhuman in a sort of human vs non human vibe.
BvS steals the language of a very specific story to do something meandering and nonsensical and unearned. Snyder has zero understanding of DC heroes.
Look, I don't want to get down on WB and DC Animation studios because all in all they have some of the best people in the industry working to tell some amazing stories. But if you just take a critical eye at their latest entry, Crisis on Infinite Earths Part One, its pretty evident that they're having to scrimp and use techniques to stretch every penny they have in order to ship the product. To their credit, without the depth of experience the staff working on the movie have it would not be possible, but execs have literally just set money on fire with the batgirl cancellation and the coyote vs acme cancellation. WB absolutely has some great people that work there, its just a damned shame that none of those great people are in charge.
I hope DC steps back, and picks a lesser known superhero, street level.
Introduce the universe in low stakes, and expand from there growing to the biggest stakes and heroes. Once you get to Superman, I feel you really have nowhere to go from a risk level without getting too ridiculous.
My pick would be Static Shock. He has 90s nostalgia going for him, a very different flavor than all the recent movies, and a good origin story.
The gods of DC should already exist, at this point no one needs another origin story to introduce the main characters.
Static Shock Universe grows Into Teen Titan Universe, which grows into Justice League, which grows into the multiverse.
They just need to sit down and focus on telling a solid and unique superhero story to kick it off.
How bad that movie must have been to cancel it at that time. Like the DCEU is terrible as it is so this movie must have been worse than Madame Webb and Morbius put together.
I remember watching Morbius when it came out and thinking 'Eh, it was fun.' I just rewatched it on Disney+ and I must have been on some really good weed to not see this thing as the complete garbage pile it is
Man I had people trying to convince me it was good, so I finally watched it and I didn’t even know what to say. Up there as one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen
I liked the Matt Smith dancing scene. If you listen very closely, the background music says "Have sex" while he's dancing. It was some really subtle subliminal messaging. Almost no one caught it.
You know I got truly worried when I saw that meme because my brain somehow gaslit itself into thinking Morbius actually said "It's Morbing time". Like I genuinely remember seeing/hearing him say that.
I think I’ve almost clicked on that image on Disney+ about a thousand times. I’ve figured it CANT be as bad as people say. But so far I haven’t taken the plunge lol
I would honestly recommend both Morbius and Madam Web for a bad movie night with friends. If you go into them expecting unintentional comedies that somehow take themselves seriously, then they're among the *best* I've ever seen. Just piles of non-sequiters and bizarre plot decisions. Lame super hero movies, but meme-tastic so-bad-they're-good movies.
[Matt Smith's dance scene](https://youtu.be/dL2FWc29fC0?si=5SvgRkjbzSujfcBn) is probably the perfect summary of the unintentional comedy. Like I'm sure Matt Smith himself was just having fun with it, but it definitely comes across like the filmmakers are thinking, "Hell yeah this is awesome!"
It's so weird that Matt Smith mean-mugging and dancing to a Xhosa rap song is the most iconic scene in Morbius.
That entire sentence sounds insane, but it's just true.
Oh man I totally forgot about that one. It feels a lot like they were trying to call back to [that scene from Spiderman 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVmXsBNfwHY). Rami showed everyone else reacting the way the audience would, but Matt Smith was clearly just rolling with it for funzies.
I watched it on a plane where my standards are at their lowest. It was good plane entertainment.
(A movie that wasn't even good enough for my low plane standards: The House with Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler)
It's as bad or good as the recent several X-Men movies. At least Morbius has a short runtime and it has very little padding. If only it came out in 2006ish when it was up against Fantastic 4 movies
Why they kept letting Simon Kinberg write X-MEN movies after the shit show that was Last Stand is beyond me, Days of Future Past is the only decent one he’s done.
Morbius was incredibly entertaining as a train wreck. Got drunk as shit with my buddies and had a great time yelling at the screen. My favourite part is when the crippled best friend says "its walking time" and walks all over the place.
I remember reading in the MST3K book their brilliant insight that the only irredeemable sin that makes a movie unwatchable is when it's boring. Morbius was a fast-paced, glitzy train wreck. It was stupid but you could keep watching to see what next stupid thing would happen. Rebel Moon was *boring*. Just way too much brooding and slo mo and bland characters.
The movie theater experience skews your perception sometimes. I've seen movies in the theater and thought they were okay at worst, and couldn't even finish watching them when they came on at home
Subconscious cost benefit analysis. Leaving the theater would likely mean you wasted money, so you sit through it and justify it to yourself by thinking its not *that* bad, but at home there's no loss for just changing the channel so you don't need to rationalize it anymore.
I had it on in the background while I did other things and I think there were like, 2 or 3 moments max where it was at least bad in a funny way as opposed to just meh
I don’t think quality had anything to do with the decision. They also shelved Coyote v. Acme and they never even saw that movie.
I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed the movie very much but I think it’s atrocious that a completed movie worked on by hundreds of people will never get seen by anyone.
Not DC... but try and go watch the filmed and released Willow series on Disney+.
It's gone. There aren't any DVDs, they released it - said "this is bad" and just pulled it from \[consumer\] existence. It's an interesting consequence of streaming-only releases (which Batgirl wouldn't have been) and I wonder how many cult classics (it's so bad it's good) we may lose out on as a result.
Keep in mind, they're not "lost." Piracy keeps stuff like this available, just with some extra steps to get it.
Just checked and dozens of Willow downloads are available.
It's nice to be in an age when it seems like more and more things are saved from consumerism than are lost.
Early Gen Xers and before only have their childhood memories of some media they loved but are now lost forever. Even the later generation's beloved physical objects often have designs and in-depth material and other manufacturing information immortalized online.
I was relieved when "Hey Dude" and "Salute Your Shorts" finally made it to digital. It's not *great*, but I have it, every episode.
They aren't even movies anymore. They're comic book characters processed through a corporate board, handed over to yes men directors and producers, filtered through a focus group and shit onto the big screen. They're the antithesis of art.
It doesn't help that Snyder established that they live in the Ayn Randian Asshole Universe. Everyone is self-centered, mildly sadistic, and even greedy. Superman was raised by a Ma and Pa Kent who warned him not to save people because it would expose his secret, and that he didn't owe people "a damned thing" because he had to look out for his own interests and needs. He became a Superman who smashes half of Metropolis without even trying to minimize collateral damage or drag the bad guys out of the city (or off the planet) to save lives, and he spent most of his time in the next movie having a completely unearned rivalry with Batman.
Oh, yeah, and this is a world where Jimmy Olsen was *shot in the face* before he ever got to be friends with Superman. FFS.
It's wild how the Dark Knight came out the same year as Iron Man. Both great movies but the DC universe kinda peaked with that film while Marvel peaked with End Game years later.
I'm betting it's the opposite. Warner probably thought it was trash because they have absolutely terrible taste and market instincts but years from now it's going to get leaked and turn out to be a masterpiece.
It can’t be leaked, it wasn’t finished.
Post production is all the editing, putting in FX, reshooting things that don’t work, and more. In the modern age it’s probably most of a movie.
Could be, but there are a lot of costs behind actually releasing a movie. If they were already down 90m and it was going to cost them 60m to finalize and release the movie but they were only planning to make 40m in revenue then they'd lose less by just shelving it even if the movie is 'done'
Especially considering that these days, the marketing budget for big film and game releases often eclipses the entire cost of actually making the damn thing.
That doesn't include the reputation damage to the brand either. I know DC doesn't have a stellar reputation, but a massive flop will likely Morb up the demand for future releases.
No, it was really just an issue of bad finances catching up with the company.
AT&T bought WB about twelve years back. They successfully turned one of the biggest entertainment companies on earth from a profitable enterprise to having $60bn in debt and a dozen sure-fire failures, high-budget bombs in the pipeline.
Come 2020, and AT&T was so desperate to unload WB’s debt that they were prepared to auction off the company and IPs piecemeal, just to work towards paying it all down.
Discovery swooped in and offered to take over WB in full, debt and all. So now Discovery has gone from a successful company to being a successful company attached to a black hole of money and 60bn of debt.
The new owners, Discovery, now have the problem of figuring out what to do with all these atrocious and over-budget projects the previous regime put into place. These movies are all so far into production that tens to hundreds of millions have been sunk, but still far enough from release that they’ll need to spend hundreds of millions more to get the films out still.
They’ve experimented with various ways of managing this debt, and pretty much every time they’ve tried to release the film, such as Shazam 2, Flash, Blue Beetle, etc, they would have been better off just canning the movie entirely, because the additional money put in more than offset the money made by releasing it.
I'm willing to bet it'd be a similar experience to Doom Patrol, where it's mostly ADR of him yelling behind a mask. Which isn't terrible, but probably isn't the Brendan Fraser going wild you are picturing.
Keep in mind that it was going to be a Max original, not a theatrical release, so unlike something like The Flash, it wouldn’t produce any box office revenue. Its only value was in appealing to Max subscribers, which they obviously did not think was worth more than just getting $30 million back and cutting their losses.
Look, you just don’t understand how this whole marketing thing *works*.
Of course, neither do I…and I strongly suspect they don’t either. I assume there’s some sort of grimoire out there which details the precise pacts with Satan involved, but that’s conjecture.
Oh no, marketing works like it is supposed to, the DCEU occult section just happened to call him at the same moment as the intern was shouting, "It's morbin time!" Seems he took it to heart and nobody was really in a position to argue the differences between Marvel and DC to the Lord of Darkness due to the representative for the Holy See being busy working on Godzilla vs Kong wrangling the stars, Kong gave way after they gave him Thor's hammer and Godzilla relented after Jesus admitted that technically Godzilla is the lizard-brain part of the Godhead, we do not know what this means and we do not care, we make movies not meaning.
Still, it fucked with Sony and if that is not worth a couple souls.. What is?
Not really, David Zazlov is known for cutting costs any and everywhere possible so to make the stock price artificially go up. He straight up canned the fully finished, well reviewed John Cena led Wily Coyote movie for a 30 million dollar tax break. He's turned HBO Max into Max which is pretty much just a slop trough of reality TV show garbage along with HBOs past glory. Why? Because it's cheaper to shit out and it'll still retain like 80 to 90% of the audience that prestige TV would.
Dude doesn't care about quality, he just wants to see the line go up no matter what so his own networth is also artificially boosted.
Zazlov is the devil. HBO is hands down, not even close, the greatest channel ever in terms of producing quality, ground breaking shows. They put the prestige in prestige TV. No one has ever come close to their record of quality TV. The Sopranos, the Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Chernobyl, the Outsider, the Last of Us, True Detective, Westworld, you name it.
Having someone like Zazlov in charge of a company that controls HBO is literally the worst thing to happen to a great brand that I can remember.
As someone in the industry, this is kinda global. Creativity is being completely destroyed. Everything is getting squeezed for a little bit more profit on the top. It's horrible right now.
Nah, it's still insanely popular.
>[Parrot Analytics has found that the audience demand for Game Of Thrones is 72.1 times the demand of the average TV series in the United States in the last 30 days. 0.2% of all shows in this market have this level of demand.](https://tv.parrotanalytics.com/US/game-of-thrones-hbo)
There's a reason why HBO is planning so many spin offs, it's one of their crown jewels.
A 30 million dollar tax break against a 70 million dollar budget. This means they got 40 cents per dollar they spent, WB likely did not axe this money just for a 30 million dollar tax break, stop repeating this garbage info. This means WB expected to make less than 30 million at the box office for whatever reason.
It wasn’t going to the box office; it was intended to be a Max Original. The thinking was that, in light of how terrible it was, its value in adding or maintaining subscribers would be less than the value of saving $30 million plus whatever they would have spent on marketing it.
What makes the Coyote vs. Acme story even worse was that it was radio silence on the movie for a year and a half after they took it off the calendar and put Barbie in its place, until the announcement in November last year that they were gonna can it for a tax write-off for half the cost of the movie. After a whole year of news en masse of every streamer and their mother cutting costs and canning/removing content that started with Zaslav canning not only Batgirl but also the likewise near complete HBO Max movie Scoob: Holiday Haunt, the backlash was equally en masse.
Though it's a little different from Batgirl, since test screenings were said to be abysmal, the movie looked cheap as sin, and was unreleasable. Coyote vs. Acme, on the other hand, had exceptionally good test screenings. Zaslav apparently hadn't even seen the movie himself. 4 days later, they aborted it, and said they'd shop it around to others... where it's now been in limbo for 4 goddamn months.
A lot of people label movies disasters, but I might still have fun watching it. Cutthroat Island was a famous disaster I watched as a kid, I loved it. I mean, it's not a great movie, but watching it now, it's still not really deserving of the title 'disaster', it's decent.
I hope someone out there in like 7 years , has a finished video file of Batgirl and randomly uploads to the internet before deleting with just enough time for people to download it.
I was going to say...
Someone *has to* have a copy somewhere, right?
At this point, just release it. Let us laugh at it.
I honestly think it'd be a pretty solid PR move.
I have no opinion one way or the other when it comes to WB, but I'd definitely think a bit more positively about them if they released this alleged "disaster" of a film.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were contract negotiations with actors and such that make this completely impossible for them. I wouldn't cry if it were leaked, but even if they don't make money off of it letting it get out in public might have legal implications.
i stopped watching prime because they added commercials. the fuck i would pay for max and get them (on what was a station that you paid for specifically because there were no commercials. and soft core porn
Westworld was just cancelled after s4 and didn't get an ending? Season 3 and 4 were written so extremely poorly that they should've just ended after season 1.
There is a magic eight ball that has the final ruling in all the decisions made by Warner Bros and decided that this movie was not going to be released but shit like Black Adam or Wonder Woman 84 where ok.
Black Adam had The Rock so it made sense
There was a lot of hype behind it too since so many fans for so many years wanted it to happen.
WW84 also was a sequel to a hugely successful movie
But yes both movies in hindsight sucked but lots of bad movies do good with viewers
For people who think that taxes drove the decision to shut down the film:
Your average corporation has a blended federal+state income tax rate of 26% or so. Assuming Warner was in a taxable income position at the time of the abandonment, the cash savings of the write-off was $23m.
That means that, when Warner looked at Batgirl, they determined that the total value of the finished movie (after subtracting additional costs required to finish and market the film) was less than $23m. But that number, of course, could be lower. It could be negative. They could have projected that the value of the film, once complete, was worth less than the cost of completion / marketing.
So abandoning Batgirl wasn't the result of some tricky / savvy tax move by beancounters. It was simply the product of Warner looking at that movie and believing it was an absolute disaster. The abandonment and subsequent write-off simply followed that conclusion.
Na, it's obvious that the corporate bigwigs, with their tax accountants just hate the DCEU so much they wanted to destroy it. They obviously also used voodoo accounting to make money off of this over the amount they spent. Don't you know how Hollywood works man?!? /s
It amazes me that so many people know about *The Producers,* and yet so few of them realize that in order to actually make a profit on these kinds of productions in a nontraditional way, you need to run an *insurance scam.*
Only in the most utterly corrupt and asinine situations would a government give somebody a tax credit so big, and of the correct type, to turn a canned dud into a moneymaker. It's not impossible, but as far as I know, it isn't happening with all of these movies.
And if you actually watched The Producers, its not them making money from a tax break, so the movie has literally nothing to do with this situation, but people lack basic understandings.
don't you know all these celebrities only donate for the tax write off? the government is giving them more money than they donated. it's free and infinite money!
Your reasoning is flawed because it assumes that only by abandoning the movie could they get the write off. The math is more like they estimated it would cost another $x to actually release the movie and that they'd make $y in revenue. They guessed $x to be greater than $y. Now that simplicity holds even when you bring in the idea that the movie might be so bad that it harms any other DC movie they might also want to release. In that case it just means $y can be negative.
> That means that, when Warner looked at Batgirl, they determined that the total value of the finished movie (after subtracting additional costs required to finish and market the film) was less than $23m. But that number, of course, could be lower. It could be negative. They could have projected that the value of the film, once complete, was worth less than the cost of completion / marketing.
So what's their excuse for canning Coyote vs Acme when it got rave reviews from test audiences? Its writeoff value was much bigger (30 mil) but it has blockbuster written all over it
good reviews and testing don't translate to guaranteed box office sales. marketing and distribution are heavy tolls. movies need to make 2.5x their production budget just to *break even.*
wb has been losing money on every film, revenue generation is paper thin.
you can get 30M of revenue without spending on dist and marketing. so add those savings altogether. 60M? 70M? company operating costs and damage control as we roll toward the end of the quarter
So let me begin by saying that I think deleting either movie is categorically wrong and both this and Batgirl absolutely should be released to stand on their own merits. That said,
Coyote *allegedly* got strong reactions from *certain* test audiences (so did The Flash by the way--that's actually why they didn't write it off too). It may have got negative reactions from other audiences. Who knows. The point is, it's entirely possible it could have been awful. If I'm being honest very little I hear about the movie really makes it sound funny.
Like:
>it has blockbuster written all over it
*does it though*? Or are we just talking about it because its at the center of a scandal? Looney Tunes Back In Action and the last Space Jam movie were flops by the way.
If they thought it would be a blockbuster they would pay the additional costs to release it. WBD is a shareholder owned corporation, all they want to do is make blockbusters and drive profits for their shareholders.
But...they don't think it will be. They could easily be wrong, WBD leadership has made tons of mistakes. But they paid to make the movie, it's their decision what to do with it, including nothing.
Matt Damon said that the cost to advertise a movie is often double the production cost. So if they didnt think it would clear the 90M in advertising and promotions then it was a smart call to cut their losses. it was likely a huge steamer and the writing was on the wall.
Supposedly the 4th season of Snowpiercer is completely finished as well. (Filmed, edited, post-processing and written to master.)
They literally just need to air it, but would rather take the tax break.
IMO if you finish a project, and decide to claim tax on it, (Thereby being compensated by the public,) you should have to release the product for free, into the public domain.
By contrast, Velma is getting a season 2. This was never about audience or money. This was to keep the current cast in Batgirl from asking why they weren’t included in future releases. Something in a contract somewhere triggered this.
Most expensive abandoned movie... so far!
And if Warner Bros hadn't tanked Batgirl, they might have had to end the DCEU forever! Wouldn't that just be awful?
Being a comic nerd from way back (started reading DC before the original Crisis) I keep watching the DCEU movies thinking "this one can't be worse than the last one." I am always wrong.
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Wait so I never saw the movie or heard about this. How is WW84, uh, “kinda rapey”?
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Lmao what.
Wonder Woman used a random dude as a cock ring for a ghost.
Wonder Woman is literally based around magic. They couldn't just magic up a way for Steve Trevor to come back?
The weird thing is that they show a ginormous wall appear in the desert as a consequence of a wish, so we know the magic can just make things out of thin air. They really didn't have to do the weird body takeover thing according to the internal logic of the movie.
they want to have lousy grey morality for WW
You see, that would take effort, something they didn't want to use
It would have taken zero effort, that's why it was so perplexing. Elsewhere in the movie, some guy in Egypt wishes for his land to be returned and Max Lord makes walls pop out of the ground. Diane's wish for Steve could have simply popped him into existence from nothing.
It would take less effort
The mcguffin that brought him back is later shown to be able to create things from nothing, so yes, they could have. Also, parts feel so disjointed to the point that it's super obvious that there were rewrites and reshoots galore.
Or the part where you have to touch the stone, then Pedro is like "seeing me on tv is a type of touching." And 100% of people have to renounce their wish? What about the guy out there who wished to die? Can't renounce that wish. I'm sure there's other absurd wishes or crazy people who are fine with everything going to hell to keep their wish.
The director from the first movie wrote the second and should not have.
I think you meant dildo instead of cock ring. At least that would make more sense to me.
I think it would be more like a giant human condom. He is inside him and wearing him. The possessed chap is gonna catch any stds on behalf of the ghost as well.
Technically a dildo, but I get your point.
I think the most insane part of all that is there was the most obvious way in the movie to have nothing else change, but have it not be rapey at all: There was no reason the guy had to possess another man's body. There was no preexisting lore that said that, they made all this shit up for the movie. They could have just as easily had him come back.
There's an even more lore-friendly path. Diana herself is _literally_ made from clay.
This kinda is literally just *basic* Wonder Woman lore. The writer really dug rapey women lol it's why she has a whip
Wasn't it the opposite, the original writer really loved bondage so that's why original WW lost her powers and became submissive when she got tied up by a man
what
Wonder Woman's original weakness was she was powerless if a man was able to bind her hands.
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He’s life is a wonderful rabbit hole to dive into. Wonder Woman is all about bondage.everyone keeps getting tied up. He also had a housekeeper, that probably was he’s second wife. She lived in the house and they had a kid if I recall correctly.
Her canonical weakness is bondage. She's kinda a bit odd all around.
I too am weaker when I have been tied up
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If you read into the life story of her creator, William Moulton Marston, the dude himself was a bit of an odd duck, especially for someone in 1941. He was a famous psychologist who was in a thruple living together with his wife and mistress both of whom he had children with, claimed to have been inspired by women's suffrage, while making a very sexualized comic super hero who's weakness is bondage (which also happened to be his fetish he was apparently a little obsessed with). Lol
There is a huge difference of being turned on by dominating women and portraying rape as an ok thing to do
She doesn't have a whip, she has a lasso. And consenting to being tied up by a woman is not the same as rape, because of the consent part. Also, remember that originally she lost her powers by being tied up, which is the opposite of femdom. The creator definitely had a BDSM kink, but again, very different from "digging rapey women." And doesn't really justify a scene in a movie that came out 70 years after his death and is rapey without having anything to do with BDSM.
Never forget, Patty Jenkins claimed Joss Whedon ruined the character. Then she turns her into a rapist at literally her next opportunity.
Don't forget the Hannibal Lecter-esque ending where she sees the guy who she kinda raped and went, "mmm, let me get some more of that victim" and turns to go after him as the movie is ending.
As one does......sure, sure........ *nods along as if I fully understand the core concept, and didn't just hear the most absurd idea to be plugged into a wonder woman movie*
Spoilers for WW84 >!You know how Chris Pine's character comes back through the wish of Diana? Well the wish's magic makes Chris' soul possess a random dude. When the film ends and the wishes are restored, Chris' soul goes away, leaving the random dude in a new city with a few days / weeks of blackouts. That random dude was raped by Diana, from a certain point of view.!<
It's a magic wish, they could have just made Chris Pine's character physically come back! Or they could have made the fact that he stole someone's body a consequence of the wish, and show how the wishes go wrong! Instead, they just do the worst of both worlds!
The entire wishing thing in the movie is such a colossal can of worms you could make an entire movie length essay going into the issues with it. Reality wouldn’t last FIVE SECONDS if everyone’s wish was granted in a single moment.
That's what the movie was about wasn't it? Everyone's wishes start getting granted and the world becomes complete chaos?
The real nonsense was that everyone gave up their wish at the end voluntarily. There is no way that happens.
Lol, right? "Hey formerly poor person, I know you enjoy the money you have now but we need you to give it back so the world can go back to normal, okay?" "Uhh...no?" And that's how the movie would go in reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw
Steve gets reborn in another guy's body. Wonder woman has sex with that body
Diana’s wish that gets granted is for Steve to come back except he comes back in another guy’s body…like it’s just straight another dude’s body and not actually Steve because the wish’s are all basically the worst version of what you want soooo yea not great
Literally, as a big time Superman/Batman fan when I was younger, I went into Man of Steel and emailed some friends like "I know I've grown up, but I still think this is the chance to see the Superman film I always wanted!" [2 hours later] "Well shit."
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Sad thing is I truly believe Henry Cavil could have been just as beloved as Christopher Reeve is, but had absolutely dogshit tier scripts to go with his movies
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He never got a chance to play a proper Clark Kent since the script only let Clark be “Superman in disguise”.
It is kinda hard to imagine him as a mild mannered reporter, the guy looks like he was marble statue that was dipped in distilled masculinity then magically animated.
To be fair, I've heard mixed reception on Batgirl. The real reason it got cancelled wasn't quality, they've released worse since. Being direct to MAX was not a part of what the corporate overlords wanted for the DCEU. New management wanted big blockbusters that would make billions. Which is why Flash only made $271.3 million worldwide. I doubt Batgirl would have been some massive hit, but it was easier to write it off, because it cost only around 90 million.
The (edit) Hal Jordan era of Green Lantern is my favorite super hero. *sobs* Maybe someday we'll get a worthy adaptation.
James Gunn is releasing a lanterns TV show(True Detective in space), with Hal Jordan & Jon Stewart.
First he comes back to the Daily Show and now this? He's having a great year!
The short lived CGI cartoon series did a joke like that, Guy Garnder tells Hal Jordan that he's now an honor guard lantern and Earth is being protected by John Stewart and Hal responds "the fake new guy?"
I liked Green Lantern 2011. Please don't hit me.
i liked it too. i thought the cgi suit was awesome and it was one of the biggest complaints for most people. i enjoyed all the cgi
The uncanny valley CGI suits always made perfect sense to me because they're made out of hard light energy. Like, why *wouldn't* they look weird?
As a fan of the comics, I love that you like something Green Lantern related, thats awesome.
As someone who liked the Spawn movie, we should start some sort of club.
That’s rough buddy
BvS is still one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It failed so hard in every way possible.
Which is terrible since the comic, especially part 2 was some of the deepest stuff I've personally seen comic goes to. Questioning absolute power but balancing an older, wiser and weaker batman who might just be insane actually. But he's on his mission and convinced of his position and it's up to you to pick if you believe in his arguments about needing to kill superman. He makes some good points. prep quite nicely. It's overall a very nice comic movie. Nice surprise when I really didn't expect much. then went on the movie expecting as much as the comic and was met with vain, ridiculous bullshit.
The thing is, BvS actually has very very little in common with The Dark Knight Returns outside of the aesthetics and a few easter egg pieces of dialogue and whatnot. They're two completely different stories. Snyder factually got things wrong about the comic. He said that Batman kills people in it(In an attempt to justify why his Batman kills), when TDKR Batman very very explicitly chooses not to. He *wants* to kill people, but he never does. That's why The Joker commits suicide and makes it look like Batman killed him, because Batman's reputation is as someone who doesn't kill. The comic book is also specifically about the 1980s and how Reagan helped to create this dystopian world filled with drugs and crime and inequality that is so corrupt that it twisted two once good heroes into a maniac (Batman) and a government puppet (Superman). BvS has none of this. TDKR is also actually very funny in a twisted way, and it spends a great deal of time showing random citizens in Gotham City and how Batman is impacting them. Like there's a scene with this rando incel based on Travis Bickle who is inspired by Batman to go into a porno theater and start shooting people. There's also a boxer who who is basically owned by the mob and, after being inspired by Batman, shoots the gangster he owes money to and gets shot himself. And these characters have nothing to do with the main story. I would've loved to have seen someone make *that* movie.
BvS inverts the fundamental power dynamic that TDKR has at it's core, where Superman is a direct representative of the United States Government and a naive weapon of growing fascism, and Batman is directly captivating anarchist gangs to end crime domestically. The government orders superman directly to stop batman and there is nothing personal between them at that point. BvS hinges almost entirely on the US government questioning Superman based on the whole zod situation, and Batman taking it into his own hands to topple the superhuman in a sort of human vs non human vibe. BvS steals the language of a very specific story to do something meandering and nonsensical and unearned. Snyder has zero understanding of DC heroes.
Look, I don't want to get down on WB and DC Animation studios because all in all they have some of the best people in the industry working to tell some amazing stories. But if you just take a critical eye at their latest entry, Crisis on Infinite Earths Part One, its pretty evident that they're having to scrimp and use techniques to stretch every penny they have in order to ship the product. To their credit, without the depth of experience the staff working on the movie have it would not be possible, but execs have literally just set money on fire with the batgirl cancellation and the coyote vs acme cancellation. WB absolutely has some great people that work there, its just a damned shame that none of those great people are in charge.
It sucks that they don’t own the IP, cause if they did and can just leave it’d be great.
I hope DC steps back, and picks a lesser known superhero, street level. Introduce the universe in low stakes, and expand from there growing to the biggest stakes and heroes. Once you get to Superman, I feel you really have nowhere to go from a risk level without getting too ridiculous. My pick would be Static Shock. He has 90s nostalgia going for him, a very different flavor than all the recent movies, and a good origin story. The gods of DC should already exist, at this point no one needs another origin story to introduce the main characters. Static Shock Universe grows Into Teen Titan Universe, which grows into Justice League, which grows into the multiverse. They just need to sit down and focus on telling a solid and unique superhero story to kick it off.
If DC ever gets bad enough, Marvel/Disney will just buy them and incorporate them into their multiverse lol
Amalgam universe
How bad that movie must have been to cancel it at that time. Like the DCEU is terrible as it is so this movie must have been worse than Madame Webb and Morbius put together.
I remember watching Morbius when it came out and thinking 'Eh, it was fun.' I just rewatched it on Disney+ and I must have been on some really good weed to not see this thing as the complete garbage pile it is
Man I had people trying to convince me it was good, so I finally watched it and I didn’t even know what to say. Up there as one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen
They must’ve had their opinions morbed by the media
It’s actually my favorite movie. I love it when Morbius saiid “it’s morbing time” then proceed to morb all over the floor
I liked the Matt Smith dancing scene. If you listen very closely, the background music says "Have sex" while he's dancing. It was some really subtle subliminal messaging. Almost no one caught it.
I morbed all over myself when that happened
Morbing in the Sheets, morbing in the streets was my favourite line
It’s just morbing all the way down
I felt it when he picked himself up and said "You can either get busy Morbin' or get busy dying"
😂
Un ironically, the movie would have been better if he said "let's Morb" instead and kicked some ass.
I like when the onlooking custodial worker notices Morbius morbed all over the floor and shouts "Hell no! Not again..."
You know I got truly worried when I saw that meme because my brain somehow gaslit itself into thinking Morbius actually said "It's Morbing time". Like I genuinely remember seeing/hearing him say that.
I think I’ve almost clicked on that image on Disney+ about a thousand times. I’ve figured it CANT be as bad as people say. But so far I haven’t taken the plunge lol
I would honestly recommend both Morbius and Madam Web for a bad movie night with friends. If you go into them expecting unintentional comedies that somehow take themselves seriously, then they're among the *best* I've ever seen. Just piles of non-sequiters and bizarre plot decisions. Lame super hero movies, but meme-tastic so-bad-they're-good movies.
[Matt Smith's dance scene](https://youtu.be/dL2FWc29fC0?si=5SvgRkjbzSujfcBn) is probably the perfect summary of the unintentional comedy. Like I'm sure Matt Smith himself was just having fun with it, but it definitely comes across like the filmmakers are thinking, "Hell yeah this is awesome!"
It's so weird that Matt Smith mean-mugging and dancing to a Xhosa rap song is the most iconic scene in Morbius. That entire sentence sounds insane, but it's just true.
Oh man I totally forgot about that one. It feels a lot like they were trying to call back to [that scene from Spiderman 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVmXsBNfwHY). Rami showed everyone else reacting the way the audience would, but Matt Smith was clearly just rolling with it for funzies.
No fuckin way that’s from Morbius 😂
It’s literally the best part of Morbius.
I watched it on a plane where my standards are at their lowest. It was good plane entertainment. (A movie that wasn't even good enough for my low plane standards: The House with Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler)
It’s a great movie I loved when he says “It’s morbin time” and then morbs all over them
They were meming on you, man. They memed so hard they put it back into theaters to fail *a second time*.
It's as bad or good as the recent several X-Men movies. At least Morbius has a short runtime and it has very little padding. If only it came out in 2006ish when it was up against Fantastic 4 movies
Why they kept letting Simon Kinberg write X-MEN movies after the shit show that was Last Stand is beyond me, Days of Future Past is the only decent one he’s done.
Why would you watch it multiple times?
You win some, you morb some.
I hate that I laughed at that.
Morbius was incredibly entertaining as a train wreck. Got drunk as shit with my buddies and had a great time yelling at the screen. My favourite part is when the crippled best friend says "its walking time" and walks all over the place.
I remember reading in the MST3K book their brilliant insight that the only irredeemable sin that makes a movie unwatchable is when it's boring. Morbius was a fast-paced, glitzy train wreck. It was stupid but you could keep watching to see what next stupid thing would happen. Rebel Moon was *boring*. Just way too much brooding and slo mo and bland characters.
The movie theater experience skews your perception sometimes. I've seen movies in the theater and thought they were okay at worst, and couldn't even finish watching them when they came on at home
Subconscious cost benefit analysis. Leaving the theater would likely mean you wasted money, so you sit through it and justify it to yourself by thinking its not *that* bad, but at home there's no loss for just changing the channel so you don't need to rationalize it anymore.
I had it on in the background while I did other things and I think there were like, 2 or 3 moments max where it was at least bad in a funny way as opposed to just meh
I don’t think quality had anything to do with the decision. They also shelved Coyote v. Acme and they never even saw that movie. I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed the movie very much but I think it’s atrocious that a completed movie worked on by hundreds of people will never get seen by anyone.
Not DC... but try and go watch the filmed and released Willow series on Disney+. It's gone. There aren't any DVDs, they released it - said "this is bad" and just pulled it from \[consumer\] existence. It's an interesting consequence of streaming-only releases (which Batgirl wouldn't have been) and I wonder how many cult classics (it's so bad it's good) we may lose out on as a result.
Keep in mind, they're not "lost." Piracy keeps stuff like this available, just with some extra steps to get it. Just checked and dozens of Willow downloads are available.
I tried so hard to like this show but it was unbearable. No way id even pirate it.
Sometimes it’s not about wanting to watch it, it’s about needing to have it. Shout out to r/datahoarder
It's nice to be in an age when it seems like more and more things are saved from consumerism than are lost. Early Gen Xers and before only have their childhood memories of some media they loved but are now lost forever. Even the later generation's beloved physical objects often have designs and in-depth material and other manufacturing information immortalized online. I was relieved when "Hey Dude" and "Salute Your Shorts" finally made it to digital. It's not *great*, but I have it, every episode.
It's incredible how bad the DCEU is. It was god awful in like 2017 yet here we are and after 6 years they still kept making worse and worse movies.
They aren't even movies anymore. They're comic book characters processed through a corporate board, handed over to yes men directors and producers, filtered through a focus group and shit onto the big screen. They're the antithesis of art.
It doesn't help that Snyder established that they live in the Ayn Randian Asshole Universe. Everyone is self-centered, mildly sadistic, and even greedy. Superman was raised by a Ma and Pa Kent who warned him not to save people because it would expose his secret, and that he didn't owe people "a damned thing" because he had to look out for his own interests and needs. He became a Superman who smashes half of Metropolis without even trying to minimize collateral damage or drag the bad guys out of the city (or off the planet) to save lives, and he spent most of his time in the next movie having a completely unearned rivalry with Batman. Oh, yeah, and this is a world where Jimmy Olsen was *shot in the face* before he ever got to be friends with Superman. FFS.
It's wild how the Dark Knight came out the same year as Iron Man. Both great movies but the DC universe kinda peaked with that film while Marvel peaked with End Game years later.
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I'm betting it's the opposite. Warner probably thought it was trash because they have absolutely terrible taste and market instincts but years from now it's going to get leaked and turn out to be a masterpiece.
It was filmed in line with the old DCU so my expectations are extremely low. Slightly higher than the last few Fox XMen movies.
It can’t be leaked, it wasn’t finished. Post production is all the editing, putting in FX, reshooting things that don’t work, and more. In the modern age it’s probably most of a movie.
There's no indication that quality has anything to do with the decisions Zaslav's butchers are making.
I just wanted to watch it to see Brendan Fraser steal the show as Firefly, because I just know he was going to be elite.
I think the whole thing was a scam for a handful of people to embezzle money.
Could be, but there are a lot of costs behind actually releasing a movie. If they were already down 90m and it was going to cost them 60m to finalize and release the movie but they were only planning to make 40m in revenue then they'd lose less by just shelving it even if the movie is 'done'
Especially considering that these days, the marketing budget for big film and game releases often eclipses the entire cost of actually making the damn thing.
That doesn't include the reputation damage to the brand either. I know DC doesn't have a stellar reputation, but a massive flop will likely Morb up the demand for future releases.
The Producers!
You can make more money with a flop than with a hit!
Can you explain the flow of money on this to help me understand why it's a compelling business model?
No, it was really just an issue of bad finances catching up with the company. AT&T bought WB about twelve years back. They successfully turned one of the biggest entertainment companies on earth from a profitable enterprise to having $60bn in debt and a dozen sure-fire failures, high-budget bombs in the pipeline. Come 2020, and AT&T was so desperate to unload WB’s debt that they were prepared to auction off the company and IPs piecemeal, just to work towards paying it all down. Discovery swooped in and offered to take over WB in full, debt and all. So now Discovery has gone from a successful company to being a successful company attached to a black hole of money and 60bn of debt. The new owners, Discovery, now have the problem of figuring out what to do with all these atrocious and over-budget projects the previous regime put into place. These movies are all so far into production that tens to hundreds of millions have been sunk, but still far enough from release that they’ll need to spend hundreds of millions more to get the films out still. They’ve experimented with various ways of managing this debt, and pretty much every time they’ve tried to release the film, such as Shazam 2, Flash, Blue Beetle, etc, they would have been better off just canning the movie entirely, because the additional money put in more than offset the money made by releasing it.
I'm willing to bet it'd be a similar experience to Doom Patrol, where it's mostly ADR of him yelling behind a mask. Which isn't terrible, but probably isn't the Brendan Fraser going wild you are picturing.
Everything I read about it said that it was a disaster, a truly terrible movie.
Dude so many other disasters already are release, how truly awful does a movie have to be to not even be released?
Keep in mind that it was going to be a Max original, not a theatrical release, so unlike something like The Flash, it wouldn’t produce any box office revenue. Its only value was in appealing to Max subscribers, which they obviously did not think was worth more than just getting $30 million back and cutting their losses.
Why do they get $30 mil back?
Not just taxes, but they also "save" $100 million or so in marketing money they don't have to spend on it, and can then spend on something else.
Couldn't they simply... Choose not to market it? Or least not in ways that cost millions of dollars?
Look, you just don’t understand how this whole marketing thing *works*. Of course, neither do I…and I strongly suspect they don’t either. I assume there’s some sort of grimoire out there which details the precise pacts with Satan involved, but that’s conjecture.
Oh no, marketing works like it is supposed to, the DCEU occult section just happened to call him at the same moment as the intern was shouting, "It's morbin time!" Seems he took it to heart and nobody was really in a position to argue the differences between Marvel and DC to the Lord of Darkness due to the representative for the Holy See being busy working on Godzilla vs Kong wrangling the stars, Kong gave way after they gave him Thor's hammer and Godzilla relented after Jesus admitted that technically Godzilla is the lizard-brain part of the Godhead, we do not know what this means and we do not care, we make movies not meaning. Still, it fucked with Sony and if that is not worth a couple souls.. What is?
It might be that they worried it would hurt the brand and ticket sales for future films.
and considering what they did release, that says a lot
Not really, David Zazlov is known for cutting costs any and everywhere possible so to make the stock price artificially go up. He straight up canned the fully finished, well reviewed John Cena led Wily Coyote movie for a 30 million dollar tax break. He's turned HBO Max into Max which is pretty much just a slop trough of reality TV show garbage along with HBOs past glory. Why? Because it's cheaper to shit out and it'll still retain like 80 to 90% of the audience that prestige TV would. Dude doesn't care about quality, he just wants to see the line go up no matter what so his own networth is also artificially boosted.
Zazlov is the devil. HBO is hands down, not even close, the greatest channel ever in terms of producing quality, ground breaking shows. They put the prestige in prestige TV. No one has ever come close to their record of quality TV. The Sopranos, the Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Chernobyl, the Outsider, the Last of Us, True Detective, Westworld, you name it. Having someone like Zazlov in charge of a company that controls HBO is literally the worst thing to happen to a great brand that I can remember.
As someone in the industry, this is kinda global. Creativity is being completely destroyed. Everything is getting squeezed for a little bit more profit on the top. It's horrible right now.
I have faith in two production companies. A24 and Blumhouse. Blum I know what I’m getting and A24 it will be artsy, but usually solid.
Lol I like the cheeky absence of game of thrones in your list. Almost like the ending sucked so bad the world forgot about it.
Pretty much anything post Pedro Pascal in GoT was ass. Some decent subplots but the overall died in quality drastically.
Nah, it's still insanely popular. >[Parrot Analytics has found that the audience demand for Game Of Thrones is 72.1 times the demand of the average TV series in the United States in the last 30 days. 0.2% of all shows in this market have this level of demand.](https://tv.parrotanalytics.com/US/game-of-thrones-hbo) There's a reason why HBO is planning so many spin offs, it's one of their crown jewels.
A 30 million dollar tax break against a 70 million dollar budget. This means they got 40 cents per dollar they spent, WB likely did not axe this money just for a 30 million dollar tax break, stop repeating this garbage info. This means WB expected to make less than 30 million at the box office for whatever reason.
It wasn’t going to the box office; it was intended to be a Max Original. The thinking was that, in light of how terrible it was, its value in adding or maintaining subscribers would be less than the value of saving $30 million plus whatever they would have spent on marketing it.
What makes the Coyote vs. Acme story even worse was that it was radio silence on the movie for a year and a half after they took it off the calendar and put Barbie in its place, until the announcement in November last year that they were gonna can it for a tax write-off for half the cost of the movie. After a whole year of news en masse of every streamer and their mother cutting costs and canning/removing content that started with Zaslav canning not only Batgirl but also the likewise near complete HBO Max movie Scoob: Holiday Haunt, the backlash was equally en masse. Though it's a little different from Batgirl, since test screenings were said to be abysmal, the movie looked cheap as sin, and was unreleasable. Coyote vs. Acme, on the other hand, had exceptionally good test screenings. Zaslav apparently hadn't even seen the movie himself. 4 days later, they aborted it, and said they'd shop it around to others... where it's now been in limbo for 4 goddamn months.
Meanwhile, Sony thinks people should pay actual American dollars to see Madame Web.
Imagine being so bad that even DC/WB won't release you.
A lot of people label movies disasters, but I might still have fun watching it. Cutthroat Island was a famous disaster I watched as a kid, I loved it. I mean, it's not a great movie, but watching it now, it's still not really deserving of the title 'disaster', it's decent.
I hope someone out there in like 7 years , has a finished video file of Batgirl and randomly uploads to the internet before deleting with just enough time for people to download it.
I was going to say... Someone *has to* have a copy somewhere, right? At this point, just release it. Let us laugh at it. I honestly think it'd be a pretty solid PR move. I have no opinion one way or the other when it comes to WB, but I'd definitely think a bit more positively about them if they released this alleged "disaster" of a film.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were contract negotiations with actors and such that make this completely impossible for them. I wouldn't cry if it were leaked, but even if they don't make money off of it letting it get out in public might have legal implications.
Probably find it on Limewire
Not particularly for this movie, but fuck ceo David Zaslav for axing so many other good and even finished movies.
The Looney Tunes Coyote vs ACME movie comes to mind
They just laid off 200 more today via a tweet, and shut down Rooster Teeth today (who also found out by tweet).
No more Red versus Blue?
Supposedly the final season will still be released.
Will never forgive Zaslav for cancelling Westworld. Last season wasn't the best, but it deserved to wrap everything up.
I'll never forgive him for putting commercials in my HBO.
i stopped watching prime because they added commercials. the fuck i would pay for max and get them (on what was a station that you paid for specifically because there were no commercials. and soft core porn
They could at least have kept it on the platform
Westworld was just cancelled after s4 and didn't get an ending? Season 3 and 4 were written so extremely poorly that they should've just ended after season 1.
There is a magic eight ball that has the final ruling in all the decisions made by Warner Bros and decided that this movie was not going to be released but shit like Black Adam or Wonder Woman 84 where ok.
Black Adam had The Rock so it made sense There was a lot of hype behind it too since so many fans for so many years wanted it to happen. WW84 also was a sequel to a hugely successful movie But yes both movies in hindsight sucked but lots of bad movies do good with viewers
Remember the part where Steve, the pilot from World War 1, flew an F-111 to Egypt from the Smithsonian? That really bothered me.
It randomly had enough fuel to make that trip and he instantly knew how to fly it perfectly as well.
Lowkey black Adam was hella funny
I refuse to believe Batgirl could have been worse than Black Adam.
They want to save money maybe stop paying JJ Abrams hundreds of millions of dollars to do nothing...
For people who think that taxes drove the decision to shut down the film: Your average corporation has a blended federal+state income tax rate of 26% or so. Assuming Warner was in a taxable income position at the time of the abandonment, the cash savings of the write-off was $23m. That means that, when Warner looked at Batgirl, they determined that the total value of the finished movie (after subtracting additional costs required to finish and market the film) was less than $23m. But that number, of course, could be lower. It could be negative. They could have projected that the value of the film, once complete, was worth less than the cost of completion / marketing. So abandoning Batgirl wasn't the result of some tricky / savvy tax move by beancounters. It was simply the product of Warner looking at that movie and believing it was an absolute disaster. The abandonment and subsequent write-off simply followed that conclusion.
Na, it's obvious that the corporate bigwigs, with their tax accountants just hate the DCEU so much they wanted to destroy it. They obviously also used voodoo accounting to make money off of this over the amount they spent. Don't you know how Hollywood works man?!? /s
It amazes me that so many people know about *The Producers,* and yet so few of them realize that in order to actually make a profit on these kinds of productions in a nontraditional way, you need to run an *insurance scam.* Only in the most utterly corrupt and asinine situations would a government give somebody a tax credit so big, and of the correct type, to turn a canned dud into a moneymaker. It's not impossible, but as far as I know, it isn't happening with all of these movies.
And if you actually watched The Producers, its not them making money from a tax break, so the movie has literally nothing to do with this situation, but people lack basic understandings.
don't you know all these celebrities only donate for the tax write off? the government is giving them more money than they donated. it's free and infinite money!
Your reasoning is flawed because it assumes that only by abandoning the movie could they get the write off. The math is more like they estimated it would cost another $x to actually release the movie and that they'd make $y in revenue. They guessed $x to be greater than $y. Now that simplicity holds even when you bring in the idea that the movie might be so bad that it harms any other DC movie they might also want to release. In that case it just means $y can be negative.
> That means that, when Warner looked at Batgirl, they determined that the total value of the finished movie (after subtracting additional costs required to finish and market the film) was less than $23m. But that number, of course, could be lower. It could be negative. They could have projected that the value of the film, once complete, was worth less than the cost of completion / marketing. So what's their excuse for canning Coyote vs Acme when it got rave reviews from test audiences? Its writeoff value was much bigger (30 mil) but it has blockbuster written all over it
good reviews and testing don't translate to guaranteed box office sales. marketing and distribution are heavy tolls. movies need to make 2.5x their production budget just to *break even.* wb has been losing money on every film, revenue generation is paper thin. you can get 30M of revenue without spending on dist and marketing. so add those savings altogether. 60M? 70M? company operating costs and damage control as we roll toward the end of the quarter
So let me begin by saying that I think deleting either movie is categorically wrong and both this and Batgirl absolutely should be released to stand on their own merits. That said, Coyote *allegedly* got strong reactions from *certain* test audiences (so did The Flash by the way--that's actually why they didn't write it off too). It may have got negative reactions from other audiences. Who knows. The point is, it's entirely possible it could have been awful. If I'm being honest very little I hear about the movie really makes it sound funny. Like: >it has blockbuster written all over it *does it though*? Or are we just talking about it because its at the center of a scandal? Looney Tunes Back In Action and the last Space Jam movie were flops by the way.
If they thought it would be a blockbuster they would pay the additional costs to release it. WBD is a shareholder owned corporation, all they want to do is make blockbusters and drive profits for their shareholders. But...they don't think it will be. They could easily be wrong, WBD leadership has made tons of mistakes. But they paid to make the movie, it's their decision what to do with it, including nothing.
If you look up scenes from the film her costume looks like something from Temu, glad this got axed because DC don’t need another L at this point.
Where I come from, a forfeit is an L
Remember that it wouldn’t have just been $90mm in sunk cost. The average Hollywood movie spends another 50% of its production cost on marketing.
Matt Damon said that the cost to advertise a movie is often double the production cost. So if they didnt think it would clear the 90M in advertising and promotions then it was a smart call to cut their losses. it was likely a huge steamer and the writing was on the wall.
The Wikipedia list linked above is interesting! Lots of other examples of abandoned projects inside.
Some are calling it the Russell Wilson of films, actually.
Supposedly the 4th season of Snowpiercer is completely finished as well. (Filmed, edited, post-processing and written to master.) They literally just need to air it, but would rather take the tax break. IMO if you finish a project, and decide to claim tax on it, (Thereby being compensated by the public,) you should have to release the product for free, into the public domain.
Except we get movies like madme webe
By contrast, Velma is getting a season 2. This was never about audience or money. This was to keep the current cast in Batgirl from asking why they weren’t included in future releases. Something in a contract somewhere triggered this.
Empires of the Deep actually had a larger budget, $130 Million. I'm not sure why it's not mentioned on this wiki page.