Warner Bros. Discovery cancels DC FanDome

And the pivot continues. Since CEO David Zaslav has assumed command of the newly christened Warner Bros. Discovery, he’s been cutting back on pretty much everything in an attempt to save the company money, and to shift strategy in a way he thinks will be better for the studio long-term. He cancelled the Batgirl movie, he booted the upcoming Caped Crusader show off HBO Max, he junked a bunch of animated series, and he laid off a group of HBO Max employees.

And now he’s coming for events. ComicBook.com reports that Warner Bros. Discovery will not hold a DC FanDome event this year. “With the return of in person events, Warner Bros. Discovery is excited to be able to engage with our fans live at numerous comic-cons around the world and will not be scheduling DC FanDome for 2022,” the company said in a statement.

FanDome was begun in 2020 as a pandemic-era virtual event where stars from DC movies and TV shows would talk with fans and where the studio could show off trailers for stuff like The Batman. We won’t get anything like that this year, and I wouldn’t surprised if it’s gone forever.

Warner Bros. Discovery pulls back on all things DC, presumably according to some kind of plan

Like the statement says, Warner Bros. Discovery wants to focus on live events rather than virtual ones; they’ll be at the upcoming New York Comic Con in October, for example.

To be fair to Zaslav, it’s probably a bit of a reach for me to say that he’s the only one making these decisions — Warner Bros. Discovery is a big company, after all — but at the end of the day the buck stops with the guy in charge.

And it’s true that he’s not cancelling everything just for the hell of it; the HBO Max series Harley Quinn just got an order for a fourth season, for instance. We have yet to see where this new strategy will lead, but at the moment it’s not to look at what’s happening at Warner Bros. Discovery and wonder if the plan isn’t to burn down the whole thing for the insurance money.

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