Filed under: Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Business, Communication Strategy, Complicity, Corporate Evil
So this is the last post of my first week of writing them in 2024.
And what a rollercoaster its been …
Loss.
Love.
Life.
Standards.
Mischief.
Well, I thought I’d top it off with a post about stupidity.
Corporate stupidity.
Last year, I read an article that said the movie company, Warner Bros, was reportedly shelving the completed John Cena film ‘Coyote vs Acme’ and would take an estimated $30m tax write-down from the $70m cost.
Or said another way, they had chosen to lose US$40 million dollars.
This was after they also cancelled the release of the $40m sequel ‘Scoob! Holiday Haunt’ film and announced they’d lost $417 million in the last quarter.
What makes this even more bizarre is that in testing the movie, Coyote vs Acme rated at a level that tends to suggest a strong level of success.
It’s so baffling … to the point that even the writer/director Brian Duffield – of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – tweeted:
“I have seen this movie and it is excellent. It also tested in the high 90s repeatedly. It also had interested buyers. The people working at Warner Bros are anti-art and I hope multiple anvils drop on their heads.”
Now I don’t know what the real reasons for this decision are.
Maybe there’s a whole of complications that – on disclosure – will make it make sense.
However – and it’s a big however – if a company loses a total of almost half a billion dollars IN A QUARTER … then their ability to be trusted to make smart decisions is pretty much over.
And here lies the ridiculousness of business …
Someone will get a bonus because of this.
It’s similar to the time Citibank fired 50,000 employees and their share price went up in value … despite the fact that [1] they no longer had the people to offer a satisfactory banking service to their customers and/or [2] if they could, then the people who fired them were also complicit in hiring that many in the first place.
Putting aside the fact defining ‘Coyote vs Acme’ as art is a bit of a stretch [though I appreciate it’s an art form] … I totally understand why director Brian Duffield claims Warner Bros are anti-art … even though I would suspect they’re even more guilty of being anti-common sense.
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PS: For those who haven’t got the faintest idea who the Thora Hird referred to in the title of this post is, you can check out the brilliant woman here. And just to be clear, her reference to ‘queer’ was about general human quirks … it was not a reference in any way to the LGBTQ+ community. Both because that was not a known terminology back in her day and she was not criticising it, just highlighting we’re all different and that’s what makes us, us.