Max Streaming ‘Enshittifies’ Further, Removes Classic Looney Tunes
from the enhittify-ALL-the-things! dept
Now that subscriber growth has slowed, streaming TV giants have taken the predictable turn of making their services shittier and more expensive to deliver Wall Street (impossibly) unlimited quarterly revenue growth.
That means higher prices, annoying new surcharges, greater restrictions, more layoffs, more cut corners, worse customer service, more limited catalogs, lower quality engagement-bait content, and a lot of pointless mergers designed specifically to goose stock valuations and provide big fat tax breaks.
The king of this enshittification era in streaming has been the AT&T–>Warner Brothers–>Discovery series of mergers, which resulted in no limit of brand degradation, layoffs, and absolute chaos in the empty pursuit of unlimited scale. The dumb merger already killed Mad Magazine, HBO, and countless television shows, driving millions of subscribers to the exits.
And the hits keep on coming. Last week users began grumbling after Max executives decided to delete the entire 1930-1969 run of classic Looney Tunes shorts from the streaming company’s catalog. Because kids’ programming doesn’t sell quite as well as homogenized reality TV dogshit, executives have decided that these old classics are no longer relevant to the public interest.
This is well in line with other similar decisions at other streaming giants, as we saw when Paramount (CBS) recently pulled decades of MTV music journalism, and years of Comedy Central comedy programming, out of circulation. They do this largely because they don’t want to continue paying royalties, and the men in charge have no respect for any sort of collective history. They’re purely extractive animals.
As Jeremy Smith at Slashfilm notes, it is technically an act of cultural vandalism:
“As it currently stands, if you want to watch classic Looney Tunes, your only option is physical media. Warner Bros. Discovery says this is because children’s entertainment doesn’t drive subscriptions (it gave the same excuse for nuking “Sesame Street”), which is obviously a lie given that a good chunk of the new Looney Tunes cartoons, much of which is explicitly aimed at children, is still streaming.”
It’s bad enough that guys like Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav are fixated on purposeless consolidation, impossible growth, and mindlessly cutting corners. But they’re not particularly competent, either. Their strategies aren’t working in any real sense. They’re not creating quality art, interesting content, longstanding businesses — and their customers are headed for the exists.
Companies like Warner Brothers Discovery have become weird caricatures of sensible business practices. Purely extractive, entirely incoherent, all led by men who aren’t particularly competent. If Zaslav was remotely clever and worth his outsized compensation, the company wouldn’t be desperately waiting to see whether this summer’s Superman retread stands between it and business oblivion.
Filed Under: cartoons, competition, enshittification, looney tunes, max, mergers, quality, streaming, tv, video
Companies: warner bros. discovery
Comments on “Max Streaming ‘Enshittifies’ Further, Removes Classic Looney Tunes”
Whoa boy
Imagine hoping that a Superman film, the most boring of all superheroes, was going to save your flailing business. Good riddance.
Zaslav is selling the floorboards out from underneath everyone at Warner brothers, knowing full well he’s got a golden parachute that will save him should he fall.
And driving people towards pirate sites.
I'm confused
Please help me understand. Is this content that they own? Or are they just licensing it from some other party that owns the copyrights and are they merely distributing it?
If the former, they could simply put the content in the public domain. No more distribution costs and a lot of goodwill in return. (We can dream, can’t we)
If the latter, well, … are there still other distributers willing to license it? Or are we as a public never going to see these shows again? (In which case no wonder if the rate at which these shows are going to be ‘shared’ is suddenly going to spike)
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It’s content that they license, and we don’t know if other distributors might be willing to pick it up.
Did you read what you wrote carefully? They don’t want to keep paying the royalties, but it’s cultural vandalism for them to drop service that aren’t profitable?
Can we stick to coherent arguments? I am in no ways defending “max”. I’ve never heard that they are NOT shit. But let us burn them for the actual stupid things they do. Dropping a service that isn’t making you money, and that you admit IS costing them (royalties) is NOT a slam dunk argument against them.
Should culture be accessible? Sure absolutely. But if they have to pay royalties… that means THEY are not actually the ones locking that bit of culture out. This bit of enshitification IS real, but it’s someone else’s fault.
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Except it is. They chose to destroy culture rather than pay a pittance to the people who deserve it. You think the royalty checks for classic Looney Tunes content is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars these days? At best, there might be some 90-year-old animator who gets a few cents every month because he worked on five seconds of a Daffy Duck cartoon some 60-plus years ago. I could all but guarantee that Zaslav and the C-suite fail-upwards brunchlords at WB make more than enough money in a single day than the royalty payments for old-school Looney Tunes content costs WB for a year. And rather than take a slightly smaller paycheck to pay the royalties, Zaslav axed content that remains a formative media experience for millions of children worldwide.
Never fault the working class for the decisions of the vulture class. To defend multi-millionaires and billionaires screwing over the working class is to defend vandalism of culture and society as if you are the fabled “temporarily embarassed millionaire”. As the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav has to take the blame for this act of cultural vandalism. He has the power to axe content; he must take the responsibility that goes with it.
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What? Let me get this straight. You are saying that: Maxs customers are entitled to Max paying for something Max doesn’t want to pay for? If your not saying that please rephrase it, because that’s what I see in that sentence.
According to the article (the only source I’m using on this mater, I don’t subscribe to Max), the content is dropped because they don’t want to pay the copyright holder. So my question is: What obligates them enter into further deals with the copyright holder?
Basically what I see is: “Company Y MUST pay a tax so that our culture can be maintained”. Which makes no sense at all.
To be clear loss of culture is insane. And the term of copyright on this content would have long sense expired in a reasonable world. But blaming a company for their unwillingness to pay for something they view as unprofitable is the height of insanity.
It would be like me saying: “It’s All Stephan T. Stones fault that much pre-1970’s is unavailable to people for free. They have flat out refused to pay the licensing fees that were asking to make the content available to everyone else.”
If it’s not blindingly obvious that’s an insane position to take.
So in summary: Do I think max’s choice to cut content that isn’t a direct money maker is a good one? No, I think it’s kind dumb. IMHO that would have set them apart from the competition. But I can’t see a sane way to blame them for exercising their right to chose how their business makes money (or does not, as the case may be).
What? When and where did I fault the working class for any of this? Unless you are imply the working class is the copyright holder (which would defy credibility). All I am saying is: Blame people for coherent reasons, and for things they actually did. An sure looks like the article is claiming to blame people for incoherent reasons.
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No, I’m not, and I’ll thank you not to put words in my mouth that didn’t first come from it.
I’m saying that customers who did watch Looney Tunes content on Max, including customers with children, expected that content to be there in perpetuity because why wouldn’t it be. That the content was axed as a cost-cutting measure—costs that could’ve been saved with an equally sized cut to some dipshit executive’s salary—speaks to the lack of care for, and a lack of caring about, culture and the arts among WBD executives (Zaslav in particular).
Nothing legally binds WBD to further deals. But morally, axing content of a pedigree associated with the Looney Tunes feels like the Louvre putting the Mona Lisa in a closet to save a few euros for whatever reason: It’s less about whether it can be done and more about whether it should be done.
If a company wants tax breaks in exchange for giving up culture, it should be ready to either pay taxes to upkeep culture or give that culture to the public domain. If a company wants the benefits of content rights without the drawbacks of maintaining the content itself, it should get out of the content business.
How much less money would David Zaslav have made this year if, rather than axe Looney Tunes content from Max, he gave up part of his salary to pay for the rights to keep that content on Max? I doubt it would be insignificant, but I also doubt it would be that big of a cut into his annual salary, and I doubt he would be any worse off in terms of lifestyle if he took that pay cut.
A corporation exists to make money, but whenever it comes to cutting costs, they never start at the top. That’s how I can blame WBD—and David Zaslav in particular—for this bullshit: Executives do the least amount of work for the most amount of pay, so their salaries should be the first and most important targets of any attempt to cut costs. They shouldn’t get golden parachutes if their company fails and they shouldn’t axe content when they can take a pay cut and still live a comfortable life.
Fun fact: When the Wii U became a financial disaster for Nintendo, Satoru Iwata (the company’s CEO at the time) slashed his salary in half for several months. He did this to keep Nintendo from needing to fire any of its workers.
I say this as a preface to the following: David Zaslav gave the go-ahead to axe Looney Tunes content from Max. He did it ostensibly to cut costs. He did it instead of asking his fellow executives to join him in giving up part of all their salaries to cover the costs of keeping that content on Max.
And I get how the two situations are different, but still, I’d love for you to tell me how Zaslav did the morally righteous thing compared to Iwata. So please, tell me how axing content instead of taking a pay cut to keep that content was the right thing to do. I’ll wait.
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I know a grocery store that’s the only place to buy food for miles. If the owner had her way, she would have turned it into a coffeehouse long ago, but her customers demand that she keep at least basic groceries on the shelves. Are you seriously arguing that the grocery store owner should be allowed to send all her customers a further twenty miles to the nearest Piggly Wiggly over and above their need to purchase bread and milk locally?
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Did you read the article carefully? Because as the quote points out, their claim is horseshit. If children’s content wasn’t profitable at all, they would have removed other shows(newer and likely more expensive shows) in that category, but they didn’t.
THEY are the ones who decided that having the content wasn’t making them the amount of money they prefer, so they dropped it. They’re very much the ones locking it out.
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So your augment means: if Max decided to shut down: they’ve had enough doing business and now they want to go elsewhere and do other things. That is also cultural vandalism?
The problem here definitely involves insane copyright terms (and “rights”). But saying “a company not wanting to do business with this product is cultural vandalism” seems like the height of insanity to me.
Since it’s a question of not wanting to pay royalties, I can’t see a coherent way that you can blame them, since it’s not “their” content.
My argument was never “it’s not profitable/viable for them to have the content”. I admit that my use of the word “profit” originally probably was triggering and a poor choice. My point has always been “Max doesn’t want to pay the amount they are required to, in order to provide this service… they absolutely should be entitled to make that choice”.
Them making that choice does seem rather shitty. And I can totally see how it would reduce the value of their services.
Three facts are self evident:
Parents prefer not to spend money on entertainment for children
Parents never want their children to enjoy the same things they enjoyed when they were young
Children do not like watching the same thing over and over
Therefore, as anyone can see, old children shows can never drive streaming subscriptions
What does this even accomplish? Even if it doesn’t “drive” signups (which, let’s be honest: it means “not enough” signups), it doesn’t cost anything to just leave it there. Sure, it’s some rows in a database and terabytes of hard drives, but those don’t cost anything to maintain (any more than normal shows/movies do).
Also, no one is going to go, “well, gosh darn. I can’t watch Loony Toons? Guess I’ll buy the physical copies!” No. They’ll either pirate it or watch something else.
They’ll be free to enshittify into infinity if they repeal section 230.
No more competition means nothing to prevent ALL media to become far-right propaganda, which means no consumer protection ever again!
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Please try to abstain from your 230 doomerism for one day.
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FYI, Section 230 is not pro-competition. It is pro-placing-the-blame-where-it-lies.
arrrggggghhhhh matey!
David Zaslav is an enemy of culture and the arts in general. But his disdain for animation is astounding in its own right. Even Disney, with all its desire to remake its classic animated films as live-action/CGI hybrids, doesn’t get rid of the original films after the remakes drop.
Small correction
“As it currently stands, if you want to watch classic Looney Tunes, your only option is physical media.”
Not quite. The entire collection is already a 50G torrent at low resolution and no doubt someone will put out a high resolution version shortly.
Well, on the plus side, 1930 enters the public domain next year.
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I’m fairly certain that won’t accomplish anything in this case. Looney Tunes is an active IP, and AFAIK there aren’t old versions of the characters like there was with Mickey Mouse. So we won’t see Looney Tunes characters enter the public domain any time soon.
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There are old versions of Bugs Bunny from the late 30s and the 40s. But we have to wait another decade for those. Then we’ll get a low budget poorly scripted horror movie using him as a character.
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Yeah, if you want to make new Bosko cartoons he’ll be in the public domain next year, but…if you want to make new Bosko cartoons then I’m going to have some followup questions.
Of the Looney Tunes characters people actually think of when they hear “Looney Tunes”, Porky Pig is the oldest; he first appeared in 1935. Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd followed in 1937, and the earliest version of Bugs Bunny appeared in 1938, though he didn’t really start looking like Bugs until 1940.
Tweety first appeared in 1942 but wasn’t yellow until 1944, Sylvester first appeared in 1945, Granny in 1950. Yosemite Sam and Pepe le Pew first appeared in ’45, Foghorn Leghorn in ’46, Marvin the Martian in ’48, Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner in ’49, early Speedy Gonzales in ’53 and the more familiar version with the sombrero in ’55, and the Tasmanian Devil in ’54.
So it’s gonna be awhile for some of them. And even for the early ones, their earliest appearances often aren’t much like their later ones.
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A small correction: the first Bosko cartoon was released in 1929, so Bosko is already public domain, just in case anyone wants him.
Killing MAD Magazine is probably the best decision to come out of the ongoing fiasco.
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Thank you for letting us all know you are a miserable fucker with no sense of humor.
Literally the biggest reason I signed up for Max a long time ago was to watch all the Looney Tunes and Adult Swim archives, and they’ve been allowed to vanish. There’s no point in the service now.
When you choose to give your money to shitty companies...
Streaming services always involved giving money to shitty companies, notably the film industry (MPAA/MPA), which had long since revealed itself as anti-consumer: the VCR lawsuit, of course, and all the anti-copying shit and region-coding of DVDs.
So, yeah, enshittification always sucks, but what can one really have expected here? If you’ve accepted their view that preserving our culture is akin to plundering ships at sea, and it’s all legitimately owned by companies to whom we should give money and maybe they’ll let us see it, according to their whims… you’re already in a no-win scenario.
+1 for the DVDs
I had the entire box set at one time. Australia ran a lot these without editing for a long time after the USA did. DVDs should be cheap to buy online.
Re: This is a solved problem - though Warner Discovery might not like the solution
Warner Brothers DVDs are currently involved in a feud over how many of their DVDs from the late 2000s are suffering disc rot – far more than usual have degraded beyond usability. And while physical media is less ephemeral than streaming content, DVD storage of media can encounter problems even when it’s NOT linked to specific manufacturing errors.
Backups are the way digital content is made eternal. If you want to preserve a collection, you need to have two or three full digital copies of the original, with one kept on a server on another continent and one kept in storage (like a Safety Deposit Box at a bank). Maybe have a friend in another state host a copy. Godzilla-proofing sounds funny up until it preserves your data. Just make sure that you keep your backups current, and that you occasionally check their integrity.
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But with DVDs, that generally means funding the anti-preservation efforts of the sellers (by buying the things), and then hoping they haven’t actually gotten good enough to block copying.
There’s also a lot of shitty mastering in DVDs, and rarely any good way to find out the quality before getting them. For example, do the Looney Tunes DVDs include any interlaced video or de-interlacing artifacts? De-interlacing (DEI) almost always sucks, especially for cartoons, to the point that I’ve yet to see anyone do a proper Simpsons or Futurama rip, including on the commercial streaming services. Some have done it pretty well, but combing and blending inevitably show up, because nobody has yet re-scanned the original drawings.
(Looney Tunes, at least the earlier works, were created for film, although most people know it from TV. While it would have been lazy to master DVDs from the TV versions, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.)
Weren’t they complaining just a few months ago that kids aren’t watching Max?
Oh, joy, we’re about to get Max here in Australia at the end of the month. All the same old shit programmes we already get on:
https://www.flicks.com.au/features/your-ultimate-guide-to-every-australian-streaming-platform/
Now that Max is about to join the list the cost of getting everything will be between, roughly speaking, $150.00 to $200.00 a month.
Story’s off the front page so nobody’s going to see this, but I remembered something:
I only used HBO Max briefly, did a free trial back during quarantine, but one of the first things I noticed was that it had a massive back catalog of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies, and the way they were sorted was completely deranged.
They’re sorted by season, like a TV series.
Who the fuck goes to watch Looney Tunes and starts at season 1 and watches them in release order?
If I want to watch, say, What’s Opera, Doc?, I don’t know what “season” that is, and I don’t remember there being any way to search by title. I also don’t remember there being any easy way to look specifically for Bugs Bunny shorts, or Daffy Duck, or whoever.
So I don’t know if the shorts were still arranged that way in 2025, but I’d suggest that if people aren’t watching Looney Tunes on Max, that might be because it’s impossible to navigate and it’s easier to just fucking search for bugs bunny on YouTube.