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Posted in: Movies, Warner Bros | Tagged: scoob! holiday haunt
Scoob! Holiday Haunt Director Has A Reminder For Ousted Warner Execs
Scoob! Holiday Haunt director Michael Kurinsky has some choice words for ousted Warner Film Chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy.
Article Summary
- Scoob! Holiday Haunt was canceled by Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022 as part of a $40 million tax write-off plan.
- The Scoob! sequel was nearly finished, making its shelving especially notable compared with other scrapped projects.
- After Scoob! performed well on PVOD in 2020, many questioned why Scoob! Holiday Haunt was not released similarly.
- Director Michael Kurinsky reignited attention on Scoob! Holiday Haunt by calling out former Warner film chiefs online.
Back in August 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery made the baffling decision to cancel several near-complete projects in exchange for a $40 million tax write-off. One of the projects that got caught up in that was Scoob! Holiday Haunt, a sequel to the 2020 film that was set to come out on HBO Max in December. The thing that makes the Scoob! Holiday Haunt cancellation, even more fascinating than the Batgirl cancellation, is the circumstances under which Scoob! itself was released. Following the successful release of Trolls World Tour for Universal as a pandemic PVOD offering, Warner Bros. took a similar risk and released Scoob! as a PVOD.
It didn't do as well as Trolls World Tour, but it was the top-rented film on Amazon Prime, Google Play, FandangoNow, Spectrum, and iTunes during its opening weekend. In October 2020, The Hollywood Reporter said Scoob! was the third most popular PVOD title of the pandemic behind Mulan and Trolls World Tour, and that it was the third-best PVOD offering of the pandemic, with a short PVOD window, May 15th to June 25th, was quite impressive. While not a critical smash, it did well enough that a sequel was confirmed in June of 2021. However, the team behind Scoob! Holiday Haunt found out on social media that the film got shelved, like the rest of us.
Since then, the team hasn't been quiet about how much this cancellation hurt, though it should be noted that none of the casts and crew behind the shelved films (Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, but we saw how that turned out) were ever quiet about the cancellations. The Scoob! cancellation had an added layer of stupidity because the first film had proved there was a (now established) PVOD audience, so why not do the same with the second? It was stupid because, unlike Batgirl, according to the Scoob! Holiday Haunt team, the film was basically finished, and any remaining work was minimal. However, Ketchup hadn't stepped in to save animated films from turning to dust in the Warner Bros. vault yet, so the fate of this film seems to be well and truly set in stone.
As Warner Bros. continues its very messy merging with Paramount, the axe is already starting to fall. Two of the big names that have gotten said metaphorical axe are (now former) Warner Film Chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, and it appears that the director behind Scoob! Holiday Haunt is still a wee bit bitter not only about the film's cancellation but also about how it was handled. Michael Kurinsky took to his official Instagram, where he posted the following response to a Hollywood Reporter headline about the "tense phone call" De Luca and Abdy had: "TENSE PHONE CALL, PAM? You mean like the one I got when you told me SCOOB Holiday Haunt was canceled? Hurts, doesn't it?" You know what? I don't want to speak for Kurinsky, but I imagine the way he found out about the cancellation is an even larger contributing factor to how mad he still is than the cancellation itself. The level of disrespect to find out on social media and online is staggering, so as the youths say, go off king.
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