The plan to quietly kill Coyote v. Acme blew up in David Zaslav’s face

ColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnEntertainmentCloseEntertainmentPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All EntertainmentReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ReportThe plan to quietly kill Coyote v. Acme blew up in David Zaslav’s faceSwift public outcry gave the movie a chance to speak for itself. by Charles Pulliam-MooreCloseCharles Pulliam-MooreFilm & TV ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Charles Pulliam-MooreApr 26, 2026, 12:00 PM UTCLinkShareGift Image: The Verge, Getty Images, Warner Bros. DiscoveryCharles Pulliam-MooreCloseCharles Pulliam-MoorePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Charles Pulliam-Moore is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on Hollywood trends and streaming culture, follow Charles Pulliam-Moore. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sundays at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedUnder David Zaslav’s leadership, WBD got very into the practice of shelving its own nearly completed projects in order to cash in on subsequent tax write-offs. To help deal with its looming debt and operating costs, the studio killed Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s live-action Batgirl feature and the Scoob! Holiday Haunt movie from Michael Kurinsky and Bill Haller. Though people weren’t exactly foaming at the mouth for a Christmas-themed Scooby-Doo prequel, Batgirl’s cancellation came as a surprise given how much the movie cost to produce (reportedly $90 million) and the fact that it was intended to be part of Warner Bros.’ last interconnected universe of movies based on DC’s comics. The DCEU was already plagued with problems long before the Batgirl situation, but it was still wild to see a studio chucking its movies into the garbage in order to make some guaranteed cash.Like Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, Coyote v. Acme was nearly finished when WBD first announced in 2023 that it had decided to put the film on ice. But by then, the public had become more aware of Zaslav’s — who said axing Batgirl took “courage” — willingness to throw his creative partners under the bus. As potential audience goers began lamenting the news online, filmmakers started instructing their representatives to cancel meetings with the studio for fear that their work, too, might be tossed into wood chipper. But rather than just chalking all of this up to be The Way Things Are Now™, people — who had already watched as HBO jettisoned Sesame Street and Westworld — saw this situation as being emblematic of the way that Zaslav has turned WBD into a company that prioritizes profits over the creation of art.The initial backlash to Cotoye v. Acme being shelved was clearly getting to WBD by November of 2023 when the studio began offering other production houses like Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount (more on this in a bit) the chance to buy the movie’s distribution rights. For some reason, WBD turned down multiple proposals…

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