How bad is the new Paramount-Warner Bros. merger? So bad that I’d rather have WB CEO David Zaslav just stay put at the helm. And he’s been a dethpicable studio head!! My beef with Zaslav was his abominable mistreatment of our national treasures, the Looney Tunes. Zassy quietly disappeared half the catalog from HBO Max in early 2023 (and the better half, at that), then tried to disappear the rest later that year but we REVOLTED and saved the remaining cartoons!… for about a year until Zas went ahead and did the deed. Running adjacent to that mishegas was Zaslav canning the already-finished Coyote vs. Acme — twice! — without ever having seen the movie, all for a $30 million tax write-off. Like I said, dethpicable. Luckily, Zaslav eventually deigned to accept $50M from Ketchup Entertainment who will finally distribute the movie this August. A happy ending, but the bumpy road to get here put the filmmakers through an emotional rollercoaster over a movie they’re super proud of. Will Forte, who costars with Wile E. Coyote, just described to Entertainment Weekly the “white hot anger” he felt when the film was shelved:
“Extreme frustration, fiery frustration, a lot of anger, white hot anger,” he says of his immediate response to the movie being shelved. “But then ultimately, that’s mixed with pride in this movie we’ve done. And also, who knows? Everything happens for a reason, and it is certainly possible that the crazy journey that this movie is taking will help get more eyes on it, because it’s a story people know about a little bit. But I don’t think we needed this crazy journey.”
…Though Forte felt good about the work he’d done on the film, the MacGruber star says he initially wondered if Coyote vs. Acme was a disaster.
“I remember when I first heard that Warner Bros. was shelving it, I had not yet seen the movie,” he says. “I had been talking to people before and hearing about the test scores being really good, and then I was like, ‘Oh, maybe it’s not as good as they were telling me’ when it got shelved.”
But the actor knew WB had made a mistake once he viewed the final product. “I got to see it. I love it. I was so proud of it,” he says. “It was so maddening because it was this beautiful, special little movie that was something I would’ve been able to share with my kids.”
Forte laughs considering what other projects he might be able to show his children. “What have I done that I could share with my kids?” he says. “MacGruber and all these dirty little movies. So this was finally something I could share with my kids.”
The Four Seasons star felt a sense of doom after WB rejected the initial offers from other studios. “For a long time, it looked like it was not gonna come to be,” he said. “And then when Ketchup Entertainment came in and saved us, it was so exciting to hear that news. I’m so excited for people to get to see it.”
Forte has always been candid about his most extreme displeasure (well, his word was “bullsh-t”) with Coyote vs. Acme being shelved, both times. And I don’t blame him! I’ve felt white hot anger towards David Zaslav and I don’t even work with the man! So while we’re talking about Looney Tunes related indignation, I have a few words to say on the LT catalog being on TCM. Earlier this year we learned that TCM had signed a deal to be the home of the catalog for the next six years. Even better, the classic film network was making Bugs Bunny Star of the Month. I was thrilled! …Except “Star of the Month” ended up only being Star of the Week, what gives?! They used Bugs Bunny as filler until they started the annual 31 Days of Oscar, how dare they! Then to top it all off, the episodes that aired expired after a few days. So if you’re streaming like me, we’re back to zero Looney Tunes. What’s up, doc? My blood pressure!
Last note: part of Forte speaking to EW was to promote HonestlyHD, the “HD” being Huntington’s disease. Forte is doing a campaign for them with his brother-in-law Douglas, who received an HD diagnosis just as his father (Forte’s father-in-law) was dying of the disease. Turns out Forte can make us laugh and cry.
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- HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA – JUNE 12: American media executive/Chief Executive Officer and President of Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav arrives at the Los Angeles Premiere Of Warner Bros. ‘The Flash’ held at the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX on June 12, 2023 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, United States.,Image: 783130890, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Pictured: David Zaslav, Credit line: Image Press Agency/Image Press Agency/Avalon
Photos credit: Getty Images for Netflix
Zaslav and company should be investigated and incarcerated for deliberately destroying WB/HBO/et cetera as an excuse to sell the properties to the magat monsters. The tax code that allows this type of insane write-off while punishing working families needs completely overhauled. Americans no longer have any kind of reliable social safety net and our infrastructure has been gutted, but businesses can f#ck around like this and get massive write-offs? Eat the rich.
It’s absolutely wild to me how many cartoons and movies are just going to disappear. The majority of old films I ever saw was from just leaving TCM or some of the other cable stations on while trying to do HW at the same time. People really have to go out of their way now to see anything and you know what, the kids mostly ain’t doing that. I don’t know who owns and has rights to everything but someone should make short tik tok clips of old movies with a link to where to watch it the entire film. Maybe that could get some people watching. But then of course who owns it would be an issue but it could be a lucrative plan idk.