As part of a recent profile piece with The New York Times, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president David Zaslav has spoken about the WGA strike in the wake of both it and the actor’s strike coming to an end.
In an interesting admission, Zaslav acknowledges that the writers were right in many of their demands and has no regrets about the deal struck between studios and the WGA. However, he still seems to think his studio is overpaying them:
“They are right about almost everything. So what if we overpay? I’ve never regretted overpaying for great talent or a great asset”
Zaslav’s comments are likely to cause a bit of rankling. It comes in the wake of a week where the studio was under fire from many corners for its shelving of the completed film “Coyote vs. Acme” for a tax write-down.
The company has subsequently reversed course on that and is allowing the movie to be shopped around for another distributor.
Multiple filmmakers from “The LEGO Movie” and ‘Spider-Verse’ duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller along with “Everything Everywhere All At Once” co-director Daniel Scheinert among others have praised the film on social media in the past few days after seeing it early.
Lord says on X: “Coyote Vs Acme is wonderful. @dgreenmachine nails it. Hilarious smart existential and moving and makes this all-time character more relevant than ever.” Miller added on X: “I saw COYOTE VS ACME and it’s delightful. Funny, charming, good physical comedy timing, with a surprising amount of heart. I hope several studios go after it so the world can see all the good work people did.”
In addition, Texas congressman Joaquin Castro has slammed Warner Bros Discovery on X for axing the film and others like “Batgirl,” saying: “scrapping fully made films for tax breaks is predatory and anti-competitive.” He adds in his post that the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should “review this conduct”.
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