Completed movies that were entirely wiped out of existence

What do those movies have to do with my point?

That this isn’t a new phenomenon?

The only difference is these films weren’t destroyed, so much as shelved, due to censorship in their respective countries.
Eisenstein’s Ivan The Terrible part 3 is a better example tho, as the footage was completely destroyed.

This is an incredibly disturbing trend. If I were a director, I'd have it written into my contract that they have to release any finished movie in some form. All that work for cast and crew and the movie goes in the trash? Oh no! Of course, for popular, well known directors, they'd never dare not release a film, no matter how bad it was, of course. Or else Warners would never have, you know, released movies like Clint Eastwood's 15:17 to Paris

Geez, I can think of a load of movies so far in this century that ought to have been wiped out-- many of them Oscar nominees...

Wrong, the examples you gave have absolutely nothing to do with the point I made in that particular post.

You're giving examples of movies that were held back temporarily, or censored for some time due to political considerations. All of those movies eventually got released and are easily available today, I believe.

That has absolutely nothing to do with what I had just said.

The fact that their destruction wasn't mandated by a tyrannical government, and is being done voluntarily, is a difference. And that it is presumably being done for taxation purposes is different as well.


Who is destroying them and why isn't irrelevant. It's what points us towards the stink that is movie studio exec bullshittery.

YeH, I get the point I concede to it

Yeah, I gotcha

Just to put things in perspective, the combined total budget of the movies that WBD has shelved/deleted since Zaslav became CEO is a staggering $200 million.

I don't know about you guys, but I think is a mind-boggling proposition that the studio stood to be in better shape financially by wiping the movies from existence and taking a tax write-off. Something in the tax code definitely deserves to be re-examined in light of all this, imho.

I think a good start would be to put Zaslav to work at the bottom of a coal mine. Then make an intimate and affordably budgeted documentary about his experiences getting bitten by rats and developing black lung disease, plus all the other valuable life lessons he learned along the way.


Then they can destroy that documentary.

I'm pro James Cameron, even if he's almost certainly an ******* and Avatar is awful.


Most big budget filmmakers do absolutely nothing worth talking about, but Cameron at least puts all that money towards a very specific vision he has. Now, it's often not the kind of thing I most want from movies, but it's something....and simply offering something these days is a rarity amongst blockbuster filmmakers.

Or just bury it deep inside said coal mine

Do you have any reliable citations on this? (trying to wipe the movie's existence from hard drives)

It seems odd they'd care that much to keep them from existing for a tax write-off. I'd assume tax write-offs are based on losing money, so as long as they don't release or promote it, I'd assume they're in the clear. Like, I don't think they'd manage to gain money it the movie somehow leaked out. But admittedly I don't know anything about tax law.

Re: citations, this has been reported extensively in the trades.

This is an amusing comment. I think this is a relevant consideration when deciding whether to make a movie, whether the ingredients are really there to make a quality film. This should probably be thought of more than it is. But, I genuinely think it's morally wrong to agree to finance a movie, produce the movie, and then decide to not release it because it's financially better off for you to take a tax write off on it.

I was thinking that maybe he's an ******* because what he does attracts some of the worst people youd never want to meet or know, thus slowly over time his attitude towards people has degraded. And what he really wants to do on film is probably far removed from what he's creating for money. But of course theres no way to know for sure.

I got curious and there's a list of "Lost Movies" on Wikipedia. It seems that some were lost due to nitrate film rot, fires and general neglect, some were completely or partly deliberately destroyed for a variety of reasons. It's not a new thing. Whether it's OK seems to be something that would be a legal issue that's way beyond my competence, what's in contracts, etc. As I said earlier, most of my work products belonged to my employer and most of them also had a sort of statute of limitations. After 5 years, they were beyond litigation, I was not supposed to take copies off work premises and I knew that they were physically destroyed. That's what mean when I think ownership is embedded in employment contracts. Mine had a clause that said, "all completed or incomplete work products are the property of the _____". I got a paycheck for producing things that my employer owned and could do with what he wished. In my case, I knew that and did NOT want those work products; I wanted the paycheck. It would be interesting to see an opinion from someone who really is up on the legalities of the movie industry since there must be a lot of verbiage in those contracts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...lly_lost_films

It's an interesting hypothetical question.....if someone offered you 20 million in return for making a great movie that they would claim, make money from and put their name on, would you do it? What would be your price?

It seems some folks still don't see the difference between what's going on today and the lost films of decades past.

Probably one of the most famous and earliest films that was deliberately destroyed by a studio was the pre-code film Convention City (1933).

From Wiki, and the entire page is a fascinating read, link