Completed movies that were entirely wiped out of existence

One of the most distressing new trends in the movie industry is taking a movie that is finished/nearly finished and, instead of just shelving it indefinitely like they used to do in the old days, wiping out the movie altogether.

That means, the studio or streamer which financed the film in the first place will just eliminate the movie altogether (reportedly wiping out every digital copy that exists in their film vaults) in order to get a tax write-off.

The trend started with WB's decision to permanently eliminate their new Batgirl movie.

And, for a while, that seemed like it would be a one-off kind of thing.

But more recently, Netflix announced it would do the same thing with the nearly-completed Halle Berry movie, The Mothership.

And WB is reportedly giving their new live-action/animation film Coyote vs. Acme movie the same treatment. This movie even reportedly tested extremely well with preview audiences - and industry trades have reported WB-D CEO David Zaslav didn't even bother watching it at all.

The studio pretended it would shop the film around, but the latest news reports seem to indicate it was never really very serious about letting a competitor buy the movie and release it to the public.

If this trend continues, perhaps it won't be long before dozens of movies get "Batgirled" out of existence.

And, oddly enough, there hasn't been the uproar from Hollywood giants that you might expect. Nobody like Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg is coming out and saying, "wait a minute, is there some other alternative to destroying movies that are almost finished?"

There are a few less-prominent directors speaking out, but they aren't famous enough to really make headlines.

Some pundits have even suggested that some kind of law ought to be passed to stop entertainment conglomerates from doing this kind of thing.

Do you think this is the kind of thing that will eventually lead to new movie protection laws being passed, or will people simply shrug and forget about it in a few months?

Not much else to add other than I hope this happens. When you consider that there are people who subscribed to Max, Netflix, etc. to watch these shelved movies, this practice might as well be fraud. It's reminiscent of the tax loophole Uwe Boll exploited to produce his guaranteed flops.

To be fair, this is not an entirely new practice. Charlie Chaplin (Chaplin!) destroyed a film he had produced for tax write-off purposes back in 1933.

The financial rationale is too headache-inducing to go into in detail, but the bottom line appears to be that the studio saves more in taxes if they don't release it ever. There's a little more detail, and a sympathetic (to art) point-of-view here if you really want to know (this is where the Chaplin example comes from, by the way).

One of the first examples was Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried. It's only been viewed by a handful of people and will likely never see an official release.

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Isn't that what happened for sony and the fantastic four ip. If memory serves they have to make a movie with those characters every so many years otherwise they lose the rights to the character and it reverts back to marvel. They financed a movie, hired actors and production staff etc but they weren't told that the film would never ever be distributed.

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Did you know that in the 1980s movie PREDATOR the titular character was not originally portrayed by Kevin Peter Hall. It was in fact Jean-Claude Van Damme donning a much more insect inspired full body suit before he left the production which then led to the recasting and redesigning of the famous hunter.

Some good examples being mentioned of individual instances where this has happened in the past.

However, we have now seen 3 fairly big-budget movies being shelved for tax reasons within just a couple of years or so.

So maybe it's fair to say that film execs are being more aggressive now than ever before?

Maybe! But there are variables at play other than the mercenary thinking of studio bosses (or, at least, let's say their mercenary thinking has some rationale behind it). For starters, there are simply a lot more movies being made today than ever before. I did some very (very) rough calculations of American films (via Wikipedia): approximately 337 films produced in 2023, compared with ~230 in 2003, and ~162 in 1983. So at least to some extent, you would expect to see the number of films buried go up.

Maybe more pertinently, streaming has overthrown the landscape of film economics. (Here's the mercenary part.) Batgirl and Coyote were both WB productions, and WB is of course the owner of Max (formerly HBO Max). Max, like a lot of streamers, is bleeding money, so there was some urgency to at least stanch the flow. (Take a look, for instance, at this report on Disney-plus: it lost $387 million in Q4 last year, which was a 74% improvement from the previous year's Q4 loss of $1.4 billion.) So it's not surprising that the execs would turn to whatever financial mechanisms they have at their disposal to limit their losses. I'm not approving or disapproving of this, mind you, I'm just saying it's not surprising.

(And it appears that Netflix's The Mothership had more traditional production issues behind its shelving, so I don't know if it necessarily belongs in the same conversation.)

Given the digital nature of storage now, are these movies actually gone? I can see in the past where an actual film would be destroyed, but given all of the possibilities of copies, backups, etc, it would be hard to establish that the movie is actually and really gone.

The second thing is that, given the money invested up front, why would anybody destroy a movie? A digital copy in the back of the basement or on a cloud server could emerge and, as long as it's not distributed or promoted, why NOT keep a copy? One of our contemporary quandaries IS that digital information is so hard to destroy fully if it's backed up, copied, distributed to other users, etc.

Well, from what I've read, it would appear that Zaslav is intent on completely eliminating those movies from existence, and making sure there are no digital copies left anywhere in the studio. The same sources suggest that it is always possible that someone involved in the making of the movie could have kept a copy of them in a private server somewhere, far from the reach of Zaslav's minions. Thus, it should not be surprising if the movies simply leaked at some unknown time and became distributed through, ahem, some less reputable channels.

Would WB be able to do anything about it once the movies leaked? I suspect it would be kind of like a whack-a-mole game, as long as a source exists somewhere, more copies might, theoretically, turn up somewhere.

But right now that's just idle speculation. Either those movies turn up at some point, or they will never be seen by anyone except those who worked in them (and even among the cast and crew of the movies, there may be quite a few who never got to see the final product, or even a rough work print).

So, time will tell.

If they were made traditionally on real cameras using real film then they would be a lot more hesitant about deleting them.

The Library of Congress has a few unfinished parts of the film which it's allowed to show to film scholars as of June this year - I'm hoping that those segments will be available to see online somehow in the near future. Hide something away for over 50 years and the curiosity starts to kill us - especially with a film that sounds so unusual.

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I think this would be an interesting legal question, like whether a corporation's ownership of the movie over rides anybody who works on it. That seems like something that would be in the details of the contract that the other workers have with the "owner". I have worked in places where it was stipulated that whatever I did for the employer belonged to the employer. I was an employee and I got a paycheck but workers like me did not own their products. I knew that and it was OK for me, but, in a creative business like movies, everybody involved would need to know what their relation is to their work product, something that's embedded in the legalities.

On the other hand, if they really DO want to destroy the movie, it's pretty easy with film (toss it in the furnace), probably much easier than it is with easily copied digital content where you don't even know how many copies there are.

Yeah, but say you had some music downloads of an album. You delete them and think nothing of it. But say you had that same album on vinyl, wouldn't you think twice once you picked it up and had it in your hands again?

All I know is that zero percent of the people who are the heads of studios these days, should have anything to do with film or filmmaking decisions


They are all soulless beancounters at this point, and maybe the quicker these dumb shits burn their corporations to the ground, the more open the movie world will become to smaller productions willing to make meagre to decent profits, instead of everything needing to make billions in order to be considered a success. It is an unsustainable model.


The less money involved in films the better. We only need so many James Cameron's.

It's not like shelving movies is a new phenomenon.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

In my opinion, we already have one too many James Camerons...

Shelving movies that already cost hundreds of millions of dollars definitely is, imho.

Not at all. Regimes and censorships shelved and/or heavily cut movies after they'd already been made.

Pretty much this. Just off the top of my head, The Ear, Soy Cuba (I think?), and The Color of Pomegranates were all shelved for over a decade due to censorship.