Another Scooby Doo Movie With Hex Girls Canceled by WB Despite Being Deep Into Production
Warner Bros. Discovery has reportedly cancelled Scooby-Doo and the Haunted High Rise, a planned animated film with an appearance (and three original songs) by the Hex Girls. That's according to animator Carolyn Gair, who says they had already recorded the movie's dialogue and the Hex Girls songs before the project was killed for a tax write-down. There is apparently no animation, which was the next stage in production, so it's unlikely anything meaningful will leak out from the movie, unless the Hex Girls songs get some kind of official release in the months to come.
Gair, who recently worked on Trick or Treat, Scooby-Doo!, broke the news during a conversation with the JayBee & Milly YouTube channel. She also shared links to some of her Trick or Treat work, and you can check out her social media profiles in the YouTube description for the podcast in case she shares more from The Haunted High Rise down the road.
"I think the Haunted High Rise was even funnier than the first, because we had the Hex Girls, and new songs, and we pulled out all the stops," Gair told the podcast. "We had motorcycle chases throughout the hallways. Joe called me and said, 'Has the studio been in touch with you?' And I said no. I think this was the beginning of October, and he said, 'Oh, well somebody should be reaching out to you, I'm afraid it got shelved and it's a financial decision and I think Warner Bros. is getting a tax credit for shelving it and canceling it, so it's dead dead dead, I think because of the merger with Discovery.' They just took a look at everything that was going to be going into streaming, everything that was going to be going into HBO Max, and just drew a red line through everything, figured out how much they spent. Do you know, the saddest part is it would've cost the same to shelve it as it would to make it, because it was already lock picture and in animation. That was another reason for them doing the two movies back-to-back because they had an animation studio they could be feeding work to. It seems so sad, since it's already so close, but I do not understand the politics or how financial decisions at Warner Bros. get made, but I don't think they're going to resuscitate this. My producer keeps saying he doesn't think it's going to come back to life. But, maybe, who knows? It was locked picture, all dialogue, songs were recorded, it was ready for animation."
You can see the full interview below.
The interview happened more than two months ago, but outside of the niche Scooby-Doo fan community, has just started to find mainstream coverage in the last few days.
Like the cancellations of Batgirl, Scoob!: Holiday Haunt, and other titles in recent months, the axing of Haunted High Rise was part of an overall attempt by WBD CEO David Zaslav to cut about $3 billion from Warner Bros.' debt right away -- a strategy that is particularly important to Warner Bros. Discovery, since the company is massively leveraged. In order to acquire the much-larger Warner Bros. from AT&T, Discovery had to take on debt that amounts to significantly more than Discovery was worth at the time. The result was a merged company with $55 billion in debt and very little liquidity -- so little that they reportedly cut back on theatrical releases in the fourth quarter of 2022 to save money on anything that wasn't considered a guaranteed hit.
The good news is that recently, WBD CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels claimed that they were past the point of cancelling projects in the name of restructuring and were getting back to the business of actually creating the content they have invested in.