When the first trailer for the Scooby Doo CGI movie Scoob! hit the internet, fans assumed that the movie would spawn sequels. Outside of the dominant superhero genre, one of the other sectors of Hollywood that's almost always profitable are those family-friendly computer-animated flicks. The upcoming Super Mario Bros movie from Illumination stands as evidence of how keen most companies are to find ingress into the intensely lucrative genre. Similar to Super Mario, Scooby-Doo has remained a massive pop culture figure with children despite being several decades old. As a result, everyone expected Scoob! to dominate the box office.
However, Covid-19 dampened the movie's debut, as it was one of the first films to hit HBO Max due to the first leg of quarantine. Even though the film had a turbulent debut, a Scoob! sequel was quickly greenlit. And now, thanks to the continued volatility at Warner Brothers, the completed Scoob! sequel will never see the light of day. The story is even more confusing because WB knew the film would never screen but demanded the creators to finish it anyway.
The creators of Warner Bros. Discovery's shelved Scoob! sequel, Holiday Haunt, were reportedly told to go ahead and finish the animated movie—after they'd been told that the film would never be released, and would instead be treated as a tax write-off by the studio.
This is per a recent Variety interview with co-director Michael Kurinsky, who reveals that Holiday Haunt was 95 percent completed when the verdict came down (along with one axing Leslie Grace's Batgirl movie) that the film would not be getting an anticipated HBO Max release, and would instead be shelved so that the newly merged studio could instead write the film's costs off on its taxes. That (awful) part has been known for a few months now. But in the interview this weekend, Kurinsky revealed that Warner Bros. Discovery then gave the go-ahead to finish the movie, which it had already told him it wouldn't be releasing, anyway. Kurinsky, co-director Bill Haller, and their team apparently wrapped up post-production on Friday, at which point the completed movie was presumably locked away in some vault, because if WBD does anything to monetize it, they lose their tax candy.