This whole thing slipped totally under my radar. Considering the wretched state of Warner Animation lately I haven’t kept up on what’s been happening since Sazlav took over Warner Bros - Discovery outside of the crash and burn of their DC based movies. After doing some clicking around yesterday I think there’s two possible things in play here: test screenings can be tricky for studios to use when deciding on how to distribute and market movies - was it a ‘blind” screening, a friends and family screening, an industry insider/genre fan screening? They can get wildly different results from test screenings depending on the audience and even with a score in the 90% range the “suits” could’ve decided the return on the movie’s cost wasn’t worth the risk so shelve it and take the tax write down. Hard to imagine that since PG/PG13 family flicks typically make a decent profit but this one could’ve been considered too adult for kids and to kiddy for adult animation fans. Or this could be a marketing ploy - generate some buzz by canning the movie (no such thing as negative publicity in Hollywood you know) then sell it off to another distributor for a sure profit (smaller) while relieving WB-D of the marketing costs. As counterintuitive as it feels, the marketing cost for a movie can go as high as 75% of its production cost!
Hopefully it gets a release of some kind and then hits home video - if Apple gets it I won’t be signing up for their streaming service, after a 6 month freebie there just wasn’t enough stuff I liked to justify paying. Same with the service formerly known as HBO.
