David Zaslav Continues To Be The Worst

'Looney Tunes' has been pulled from Max.

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The Assassination of Bugs Bunny by the Coward David Zaslav

Photo by Portuguese Gravity on Unsplash

Being the father of a young child has a unique way of embittering one towards streaming services, even more so than one was already inclined to be. Kids want to watch the same things over and over again, and on-demand streaming has given them the expectation that this can be done basically at any time. Of course, it’s not as easy as just popping in one of your VHS tapes in the VCR, because we don’t own anything nowadays. We only rent. Ownership of your kid’s favorite show or movie seems to get traded back and forth between the major conglomerates, sometimes available for free, sometimes not, sometimes available for purchase, sometimes not, and so you mostly play this never-ending game of whack-a-mole trying to figure out who to give more of your money to.

Meanwhile, the home screen of half of these streaming services is constantly advertising eye-catching stills for shows I will never, ever let my kid watch. I’m looking at you, Ryan’s Toy Reviews and associated spinoffs. I would rather die. (If we can’t get the political capital to outlaw child actors outright, outlawing child influencers seems like a reasonable first step).

One notable bright spot in all this has been the ability to watch genuinely great old cartoons like Looney Tunes. I loved them as a kid, and my kids like them too. They might be almost 100 years old in some cases, but you can sense the care and passion that went into them. Mel Blanc and Chuck Jones belong on Mount Rushmore.

Where was I going with this? Oh right, Looney Tunes has been pulled from Max, the only streaming service where it still existed.

The original Looney Tunes animated shorts, which ran during the golden age of animation from 1930 through 1969, have been scrubbed by Warner Bros. Discovery-owned Max.

Deadline confirmed with a representative that the original shorts are no longer on Max. This is part of a new plan whereby the streamer will prioritize adult and family programming. Children’s programming, such as Looney Tunes and Sesame Street before it, doesn’t fare as well and is no longer viewed as a priority.

Other spinoff versions of Looney Tunes remain on the service, including six seasons of 2020’s Looney Tunes Cartoons, two seasons of 2015’s New Looney Tunes (the third season and some episodes from Season 1 are not available), two seasons of 2002’s Baby Looney Tunes, 2021’s four-episode scripted podcast Looney Tunes Presents: Bugs and Daffy’s Thanksgiving Road Trip, two seasons of 2023’s Tiny Toons Looniversity and its corresponding 42-minute Tiny Toons Looniversity: Spring Break special (though its winter spinoff is not streaming), five seasons of 1995’s The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries and two seasons of 2022’s Bugs Bunny Builders. [Deadline]

In other words, basically nothing created after the year 2000 and only one show created since 1990. Mel Blanc died in 1989.

The CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, in case you didn’t already know his name, is David Zaslav. Zaslav earned $246.6 million, $39.3 million, and $49.7 million in 2021, 2022, 2023, respectively. He sold $30 million worth of stock in 2024. It seems to me like having that much money should make one inclined to do more obviously-good things, regardless of their market utility (not that I’m convinced this was even a good decision strictly from a business standpoint).

Anyway, that’s where we’re at: the insanely wealthy CEO of a media company can essentially hold America’s cultural heritage for ransom or disappear it at will, despite not having any role in producing it. Even if David Zaslav himself wasn’t so notably malevolent and bad at his job that even normal people know his name, why should we allow these people this kind of power?

Donald Trump Still Lying About Golf

Donald Trump has claimed, on Truth Social, to have won the Club Championship at his own golf course in Palm Beach.

"I just won the Golf Club Championship, probably my last, at Trump International Golf Club, in Palm Beach County, Florida. Such a great honor! The Awards dinner is tonight, at the Club. I want to thank the wonderful Golf Staff, and all of the many fantastic golfers, that participated in the event. Such fun!"

It almost goes without saying that Trump lies about his golf game. Rick Reilly wrote an entire book about it.

In 2023, he claimed to have won the Senior Club Championship at West Palm Beach, despite DailyMail.com revealing that he had not even playing in the first round of the tournament.

Insiders told us that competitors arriving for day two of the contest on Sunday morning were surprised (although not exactly shocked) to see his name at the top of the leaderboard with a five-point lead over the overnight leader.

He apparently told members that he had played an excellent round on Thursday and that would count as his first day's score.

In August of the same year, he claimed to have picked up the winner's trophy for the Senior Club Championship at his course in Bedminster, New Jersey by shooting a 67. [DailyMail]

Personally, I think it’s less worrisome that he’s a pathological reverse-sandbagger than the fact that any foreign dignitary or business person could just go to any one of the 16 golf courses he owns and buy up huge blocks of memberships or tee times as de facto bribes. I thought we had a whole clause in the constitution outlawing stuff like that. Wasn’t that at least a debate last time around? No one seems to even bring it up anymore. I guess none of that matters when the opposition party is so weak and useless that they can’t even denounce extra-judicial deportations.

For what it’s worth, you can see the results of the last golf tournament Trump played in that wasn’t at his home course, The American Century Championship at Edgewood in Tahoe in 2006. He finished 62nd out of 78 and got smoked by Ben Roethlisberger, Dan Quayle, and “Soul Man” C. Thomas Howell, among others. He did, to be fair, beat Charles Barkley and Kevin Nealon.

Donald Trump, golf me, you coward.

Box Office Still Sucking

This past weekend’s total box office was even worse than Super Bowl Weekend. Novocaine took the top spot with a not-great $8.7 million domestic gross. That one is looking profitable based on a lower budget, whereas Black Bag, which finished two places behind with $7.5 million, cost $50 million to make. Shame, because the movie was pretty good, I thought. Last Breath, starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu, was also solid. Sorry I never got around to reviewing that one, but it was a nice little exciting popcorn movie.

According to The Wrap, part of the trouble is that people don’t know how to advertise movies anymore, especially now that people don’t see ads on TV and don’t go to enough movies to see trailers for future movies. (If any movie industry people are reading this, you could always give the money to me).

For “Black Bag,” there’s an additional challenge that makes building pre-release buzz more difficult: how does one advertise to an older core audience when the tried-and-true method of doing so, linear TV, is in decline?

Trailers remain the most effective way to raise a film’s awareness for all ages, but that’s predicated on momentum in the theatrical market. When moviegoing is as slow as it has been for the past several weeks, that takes away the effectiveness of trailers, forcing studios to turn to other forms of marketing.

For a film like “Novocaine,” which will primarily appeal to men under 35, a digital-first marketing campaign on platforms like YouTube and Twitch is the obvious and cheaper way to go. Paramount also spent big on a pregame Super Bowl ad for the film and sent stars Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder to an LA Clippers game for a humorous advertising stunt.

It’s true, everything seems to fly under the radar nowadays. It’s also hard to advertise when you break the entire model of ad-supported media. Every day it’s seeming more and more like it was a bad idea that we did that.

The theatrical business started a downward spiral during the years when studios mostly stopped spending much money on anything that wasn’t a big expanded-universe-style blockbuster. They chased short-term, comic book-piggy profits at the expense of making the other stuff, getting the rest of the populace out of the habit of going to movies in the process. We may one day look back on the 2010s as the decade when we empowered nerds and let them ruin everything.

That being said, it doesn’t seem like Black Bag not making $20 million is some major development.

To some degree, this sort of opening is par for the course for Soderbergh in the post-“Ocean’s” trilogy stage of his career. Not adjusted for inflation, this $7.5 million start from 2,705 theaters is consistent with the $7.6 million opening earned from 3,031 theaters by the director’s 2017 redneck heist film “Logan Lucky,” which starred Channing Tatum, Adam Driver and an against-type Daniel Craig. More recently, his 2023 film “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” opened to $8.3 million from 1,496 theaters. [Wrap]

Both of those movies were bad and this one was pretty good, but Soderbergh’s output may have hurt him in trying to make a case for that. Your movies tend to seem less like huge events when you make one every year.

Still, I have to imagine that Steven Soderbergh will figure out how to get a movie made next year and year after that the same way he figured out how to get movies made basically every year since 2017. That’s the good thing about being a movie fan instead of a media executive. The other good thing is not being a huge piece of shit.