I'm also scratching my head at why this could make sense from a purely financial point of view, doubly so if the film is expected to be at least good. One of th

I'm also scratching my head at why this could make sense from a purely financial point of view, doubly so if the film is expected to be at least good. One of the paragraphs in TFA proposes it's some sort of company vision and trying to avoid embarrassing themselves. I would proposition that being known for scrubbing completely projects is rather embarrassing too specially in the view of contractors for future projects but what do I know. > To my knowledge, the company has never given anyone a justification beyond debt reduction and a bit of vague gesticulation toward a corporate vision that the film supposedly didn’t sync with. Public outcry caused the company to backpedal in November 2023 and say that they would sell the movie elsewhere, but Drew Taylor of The Wrap has reported that the company never entertained any negotiations about their asking price, demanding not a penny less than $70 to $80 million for the privilege of owning a project that they would only gain $30 million by scrubbing from their own ledgers. The offer to sell the film was, to put it mildly, not undertaken in good faith. It appears that the company would rather take less money by writing off the movie than sell it for even a few dollars more than that, because they might risk having a rival turn it into a success, which would further embarrass them for never even having tried to market it themselves, even though it was built around “intellectual property” (i.e., adorable cartoon characters) that are as inextricably linked with Warner Bros. as Marianne is with the nation of France.