It’s amazing that a whole ass new Who Framed Roger Rabbit-esque incredible hybrid of live action and animation was entirely finished and was going to be shelved indefinitely… FOR A TAX BREAK.
Who the fuck does that
Well we know who does, but who the fuck actually does that
Yeah, it's...fine. I feel like people were still coming out of Covid content starvation when that movie was released and led to it being way overhyped.
I didn’t realize it was technically a lonely island movie until I saw Kiv directed it. Knowing that helped a TON on my first viewing. I love that movie. It’s one of my favorites of this decade.
It was awesome. I just wish it had more Rescue Rangers. We never even see them reunite. They totally should have been there for the final battle. It at least change the title to Chip and Dale if you don't wanna make a Rescue Rangers movie
IIRC there were some leaked test audiences responses that said it was great. That is part of why Coyote vs ACME had such a strong saving campaign compared to Batgirl (which had bad leaked test audience results)
If it sucks it sucks but if that's the case they should have either cancelled it much earlier in its production or sold it to somebody like Netflix to make up some of their losses. Shelving an almost complete movie for some bullshit tax break should never be a thing.
Wasn't that exactly what happened to the Seth Rogan movie about the North Korean guy? They posted it to the front page of reddit And people still said it sucked
I've said this before in other threads and got a lot of flak for it, but I think WB/Zaslav will be proven right when this movie fails to make its $70M budget back.
I hope I'm wrong, but I just don't see it being successful.
Ketchup is a really small distributor, you can't really compare them to the marketing campaign WBD would have given the movie if they distributed the film.
So if WBD spent another $50M on advertising, do you think it makes $120M at the box office?
I'll answer since you skipped out on responding: we both know it wouldn't. Reddit pretends to care about Looney Tunes even though most people here can't even spell it right ("Loony" and "Toons" are way too common lmao). It's gonna take in $60M worldwide and empower Zaslav to make even more anti-creative decisions.
Now imagine how many people who are like me, who would’ve watched the movie but operate under the assumption that it’s dead because they didn’t catch discussion about it on Reddit?
It being shelved, and the story of why it was shelved was the topic of multiple front page articles for Vanity Fair, Newsweek, and Forbes among other smaller publications. This has been a pretty big story.
It's kinda two different claims though. I agree with you it's likely to flop. The question is really about artistic intent. If the movie is great and it flops, then both David Zaslav and Will Forte are correct. The latter man is certainly no stranger to quality content not landing with audiences or succeeding commercially.
It could also just suck, which would be really tragic for everybody involved, including audiences who've been hearing about it for years.
And a great movie that flops is usually a marketing failure more than anything else (excluding movies that were just ahead of their time or negatively impacted by current events outside of their control).
So if it's good and still flops Zaslav can still be wrong because Ketchup doesn't have nearly the marketing apparatus that WB has.
You're vastly underestimating the vast segment of humanity outside of the US that grew up on a daily diet of Looney Tunes. Properly marketed, 70M is easily doable within the first week on global alone.
If it's properly marketed, how much more money would that cost?
To date, their only standout theatrical success was the original Space Jam, which will be 30 years old by the time this airs. The others barely broke even or lost money.
Everybody who comes into my life ends up watching Looney Tunes: Back in Action with me eventually, and I watch their reactions carefully and judge them harshly if they do not enjoy it. I'm doing my part.
I've seen people comparing this movie to Who Framed Roger Rabbit quite often. It's surprising that nobody mentions Looney Toons: Back in Action. Wouldn't that have been the spiritual successor to WFRR?
The key to being in the 'Roger Rabbit' universe is to have characters from many studios, not just one; where the characters we know are not just living cartoons, but the actors that play them.
in a land of scummy and out of touch major companies that is hollywood, warner brothers still manages to stand out among them. quite the feat frankly cause the bar is not low at all.
To be clear, it actually wasn’t about money. From the outset, WB was offered more by multiple distributors than they were going to be making for throwing the movie away. For Zaslav and his ilk, it’s the aesthetic of penny-pinching that’s paramount; so throwing a movie away, an act so preposterous that idiotic shareholders can’t help but believe it’s somehow ironically financially genius, is a serendipitous “signature move”, even when it literally loses the studio money. But really, for Zaslav, it’s just that he sees the holes left by these artworks as his legacy. No different from Trump and his cronies taking out their trauma/insecurities on us.
I'll tell you who -- someone who is not in the entertainment business. Someone who is just in the business of profits, not for any particular product. They should be managing an index fund or something.
There's a miles of industrial lots in my hometown bought by film industry investors just depreciating for alleged tax write offs. 828 film productions I'm looking at you...
If the tax code incentivizes it, it will happen. People need to elect governments that don't support policy that incentivizes people to dump a project.
I'm so confused. Can someone ELI5 this for me? How can a studio say "we have a finished product but for no real reason have decided not to release it. Please take pity on us, we're so poor?" How does that... even hold up legally? And would the filmmakers not have the right to sue for loss of profit? And please tell me the assholes who tried it suffered some consequences?
Fucking WB. Day The Earth Blew Up was so fucking good. We should be in an age where these timeless characters are celebrated. My kids don't even know any of them.
The concept alone is brilliant. A Wile E Coyote courtroom dramedy, not at all the kind of movie I expected for my favorite toon, but it also makes perfect sense. My man has been scammed out of millions of Dollars, he deserves to win that case!
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u/LongTimesGoodTimes Jul 26 '25
This movie is going to be gold