When Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav recently defended his decision to scrap nearly finished films like Batgirl and Scoob: Holiday Haunt, he claimed it took “real courage.” That word hit differently for Michael Kurinsky, the man who spent years of his life making his dream project, only to watch it vanish in a tax write-off.
Zaslav, speaking on November 29, 2023, brushed off the controversy with a simple question: “Should we take certain of these movies and open them in the theater and spend another $30 or $40 million to promote them?” His conclusion: shelving them was the brave choice. Kurinsky, who directed Scoob: Holiday Haunt, had another perspective.
“Courage would have been sitting down in front of me as a person, and looking at me as a human being, and telling me this,” he told Film Stories. “So that I could at least respond back. And say, you know, you have killed my lifelong dream. I just want you to be aware of that.”
Kurinsky’s frustration isn’t hard to understand. This was his feature directorial debut after years working at studios like Disney, Sony Pictures Animation, and Warner Bros. He even spent time drawing The Beatles for projects earlier in his career. When he finally got the chance to direct, it was Scoob: Holiday Haunt, a festive follow-up to the 2020 Scoob movie.
The film was nearly done (Kurinsky was weeks away from locking the final cut) when he learned through industry news outlets that Warner Bros had pulled the plug. He wasn’t even told directly. “I was just a name on an agenda and a phone call they had to make,” he said. That call came four hours after the trades had already broken the story.
The conversation itself only made the sting worse. “The call was horrible. It felt like somebody going through the motions, and were just like, ‘Yeah we’re not gonna put this out.’ And she was kind of condescending too, saying ‘I showed it to my child… they felt it’s very young. It skews real young, doesn’t it?’ It was a really, really awful thing to say.”
Of course, Scoob: Holiday Haunt wasn’t the only casualty. Batgirl, a $90 million film starring Leslie Grace, J.K. Simmons, Brendan Fraser, and Michael Keaton, met the same fate in 2022. Both were finished or close to finished, both tested positively, and both are now locked away because releasing them would undo the tax break Warner Bros pocketed.
When Zaslav calls that “courage,” you can understand why the director of Scoob: Holiday Haunt would disagree.
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