Sorry, I must have missed the “no fun allowed” sign, but I’ll bite. WB has now shitcanned 3 fully completed or nearly completed films. Then they claim the films are literally worse than worthless, and report all expenses incurred as loss, which lowers their tax burden. This is obviously a system designed to protect business when struggling, but it’s a pretty clear example of abuse. The film/media industry in particular has a long and storied history of manipulative, abusive accounting, and there is essentially an entire cottage industry of legal experts who specialize in the art of bending the laws and threading the loopholes for maximum exploitation. There are enough legal smoke and mirrors that film productions can and do fudge absolutely everything remotely financial, often drastically inflating or deflating officially stated costs.

Another part of the problem is how damaging this kind of behavior is to the creators and production staff themselves. When a studio bins something like this everybody loses, except for the corpo leeches moving the beans around. Movie production can have a lot hanging on royalties. Imagine you do a job on a film for a token amount with a royalty component. Then a suit decides he can get a bigger bonus literally burning your movie instead, and suddenly you’re out all that time invested and never receive proper or fair compensation for your work. The accountants can say, “Oh, this movie needed effects work, we only paid them with a few pizzas and a promised 1% royalty, now let’s project ourselves some massive sales and extrapolate to claim 20 million spent on effects!” and suddenly it’s money for nothing (and the chicks for free?) when the taxman comes around and listens to the sob story of burdensome expenses. Again, this kind of shenaniganry has decades of experience weaseling out of nearly all significant oversight or regulation and the corruption is systemic.

This also really sucks for everyone involved, even if they actually do get fully paid, because even a single movie can be several years of work that suddenly became a worthless, unverifieable void on a resume. Truth is, it’s easy to rant for hours about the shady stuff going on.

Bringing it back around, the WB games arm hasn’t been very good for people either. They’ve been shoehorning in predatory microtransactions and forcing battlepass style games-as-a-service mechanics in numerous games lately. I realize the devs themselves have no control over these kinds of additions forced from above. However, the catch-22 is that success for these games would only reward and reinforce the MBAs interjecting buzzwords and pulling the strings. So either the devs lose, and their game gets tossed, or the players lose, since management smells blood in the water and doubles down on profiteering mechanics in the next game. Unfortunately, rather than apply critical thinking and conclude that these toxic elements relate to the game’s unpopularity, they took to the media playing the world’s tiniest violin, vaguely gesturing that the poor devs worked so hard to make good games but the consumers are bad for not supporting them.

This also sucks, which feels bad. Therefore, I leveraged a sarcastic inference relating two morally dubious, greed-driven examples of poor behavior by a wealthy international megacorp trying to paint itself as a victim. Such attempts at humor are sometimes used to make bad feelings turn into slightly less bad feelings, lightening a mood or delivering some modicum of mirth. In some cultures, it might be called a “joke”.