BATGIRL, WE HARDLY KNEW YE.

Warner not only had two disastrous messaging days, about the demise of Batgirl and the demise of their earnings, but apparently they contrived to have them happen back to back.

First came Batgirl. This IP is yet another prospect like Batman or Superman, a sure thing that Warner managed to wreck, even when they knew they were coming off a string of duds and needed a winner, just as a matter of corporate responsibility. Now their options are to go back to Batgirl again later, knowing it will be toxic if they blow it a second time, or else give up on a strong female character that everybody knows, based on IP they already paid for.

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They claim they killed Batgirl because it didn’t work, and they need to protect the DC brand. This is asinine on several levels.

Proclaiming publicly that the movie sucks is the work of morons. First, every failure must have a father, and the producer, the director, the star, or all three, will have clouds hovering over them. And if you want to put it out in the market later, it will be damn near impossible to sell, and if people see it and like it, you’ll look like idiots. You should have just pulled the release date and quietly shipped it off to turnaround limbo until things aligned better.

Marvel has managed to figure out how to make tons of money with weak movies, why couldn’t Warner give it a go with this one?

The Warner DC operation has made so many DC stinkers already, and culminating in Justice League, with three different toxic artists (Whedon, Heard, Miller) and a release effort that was so screwed up they had to release it twice, so was Batgirl really that much worse? You managed to make a DC blockbuster cheaply, couldn’t you simply choose to spin it as a win and take the guaranteed profit?

They’re proceeding with more toxic movies with the toxic Heard and the toxic Miller, but they’re afraid Batgirl will make them look bad?

Warner said they’re assembling a ten-year plan for DC, Kevin Feige-style, so why didn’t you do that ten years ago? Are you going to use the same team that has botched one movie after another, including Batgirl? Who is this mythical team, the Avengers? The team won’t include Walter Hamada, which is inconvenient since he’s your chief of DC films, now about to quit in disgust because he wasn’t even consulted about Batgirl.

How about protecting the historic Warner brand, which is now being tarnished with a series of executive blunders? If Disney blunders in the Marvel world, they still have Star Wars, their big animation pieces, their other franchises, television. But unless Warner can manage to find another rainmaker, such as a red-hot performance from the Thrones prequel, Warner needs DC to work. Maybe, you know, admit you were wrong about Depp and bring him back to Potter, since you’re also employing Heard?

You’re trying to show the Street that you’re smart with money, claiming you want to make sure the firm gets paid rather than chasing every subscriber, and yet you’re throwing almost $100 million away, which is inexcusable. Did you think about how bad it would look if the Batgirl announcement and the earning announcement both went badly back-to-back, they way they did? Did you really think that bragging about the tax write-off was going to impress investors just before that horrible earnings report? Was that going to persuade them it’s a good idea to throw away a $90 million movie you already paid for and shot?

Is it simply impossible to think of a comic-book movie as a $300 million movie rather than a billion? Does your entire universe boil down to tentpoles and chaff?

Do you not remember how your own company shocked the industry by switching all its features to the streamer, and then compounded the shock by not warning the big names first? Is that why you did the same with the artists who led the Batgirl effort? Weren’t they worth a couple of phone calls, so they wouldn’t learn that their dream project was in the trash from their barista? PS you know who did reach out to the Batgirl artists? Kevin Feige, the Marvel guy.

Don’t you think Batgirl would be a great way to attract a mob of people to the HBO streamer? Disney is doing that with the Star Wars and Marvel series, even though a number of those series are terrible.

The other movies you’re killing, would it cost so much to just let them keep streaming?

Do you think it looks smart to proclaim that you’re leaning hard into theatrical, right when everyone else is zagging the other way? Are you smarter than Disney?

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Warner already looked foolish for lashing up with ATT and then divorcing them to lash up with Discovery, a total inability to craft a foresighted strategy and stick to it. But shortly after the Batgirl bombshell, more bombs went off when the Warner boss briefed everyone on earnings. In the first quarter of life for Warner Discovery, they lost more than 3 billion. The loss was largely due to the cost of the merger, but streaming alone lost a billion and a half while the other businesses did okay. This means that streaming, which has got to be the future of the firm, will now be the sole reason for poor financials.

The announcement was a shock for Wall Street: actual loss-per-share was 50 times what the Street predicted and revenue was almost 2 billion short of the Street’s projections. The stock value dropped 12 percent when the real numbers came out, and fell further the following day. And one can only imagine how artists feel about Warner, coming on the heels of the Batgirl slaughter, and Warner’s all-streaming decision during COVID two years back. ?

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At the same time Warner’s top man was spinning madly, conveying the following messages.

They said the company overall won’t be profitable for two more years.

They are being dodgy on their current numbers for the HBO streamer. They said they have “92 million subscribers”, not mentioning that that was for HBO, Discovery, and the HBO streamer all together. They grandly promise 130 million subscribers by 2025, despite having no plan for how to get there, particularly if they keep saying they’re leaning into the theatrical releases. And presumably they mean 130 million for the three services together, whereas Netflix is over 200 million with a single site.

They are planning to combine HBOMax and Discovery into a single service, which will make it easier to brag that they’re trying to catch Netflix and Amazon in subscribers. Problem: they admit people hate the HBOMax interface, which is a stupid unforced error. Second problem: although their streamer is their one underperforming business, their planning is still foggy: they say the streaming strategy has changed and they’re reevaluating content deals, but they still sound like they’re bumbling around.

They said contradictory things about whether they’re spending less or more on content, right when Netflix is throwing billions of dollars into the market. New original IP is the one path toward future success.

Particularly when women are driving the market as much as they ever have, and people are thinking about diversity more than ever, now is the worst time to indulge in hamfisted, borderline-bigoted messaging. First, the optics of killing Batgirl, a movie with two Arab directors, an Afro-Latina star, and a transgender Asian actor. Second, their message to investors that the new HBO streamer will skew toward males, scripted content, appointment viewing, and fan-driven content, the cool stuff, while Discovery would be for the females, unscripted, “comfort viewing”, and genre content, the nerdy stuff. HBO is Thrones, tits and dragons, Discovery is turtles in the Galapagos! Not realizing how sexist it sounded.

Holy cow, fellas.