While most of the recent focus regarding the big changes over at Warner Bros. and HBO Max have focused on the shelving of the Batgirl movie, it wasn’t the only significant project to get the ax from HBO Max. A follow up to 2020’s Scooby-Doo reboot Scoob!, called Scoob!: Holiday Haunt was also cancelled despite reportedly being nearly complete. In fact, it seems the movie was so close to being done that the filmmakers recently went ahead and recoded the score, because they’d already paid to have it done.
Tony Cervone, who directed 2020’s Scoob! And was a writer and producer on the now cancelled sequel, revealed on Instagram over the weekend that despite the fact that Holiday Haunt had already been cancelled, the film just went ahead and recorded the movie’s score, because the production had already paid for the studio space and the musicians.
It shows just how unexpected the cancellation of Batgirl and Scoob! really was, that the production had already spent the millions required to animate it, but had also spent, one assumes, a considerable amount of money to record the music, before the word came down that the project was being put on the shelf to collect dust alongside Batgirl. One assumes there would have been no refund had the scoring session not moved forward.
It also reveals just how close to being done Scoob!: Holiday Haunt was when this decision was handed down. Recording the score for a movie tends to happen very late in the process, usually after the final edit of the film is done or close to done. The score is recorded with the movie playing, as can be seen in Cervone’s image, so you need a final version to be sure you don’t end up with unscored scenes or have scenes cut, which result in the score no longer syncing with the film.
While certainly there was a decision made here by the new powers that be at Warner Bros. Discovery that it was better to just save whatever money had not been spent on both Scoob! and Batgirl, the big question is just how much money is the company really saving. While one might not expect the Scoob! sequel to sell a lot of HBO Max subscriptions, it feels like it still would have made more sense to just go ahead and finish it, even with whatever money WBD will save on its taxes.
And who knows, with the score now recorded, maybe there’s hope that Scoob!: Holiday Haunt could still see the light of day eventually. While it appears that, due to taking a tax write down on it, WB may never be able to release these movies, if there is any hope of seeing Scoob! 2, the fact that the score won’t need to be recorded later will only help. Batgirl would likely need to still pay for its scoring, making any eventual release for the Leslie Grace superhero movie much more difficult.
