That’s all, folks–as parent company Warner Bros.’ valuation of animation continues to be in rapid descent, the company has decided that the same weekend the Looney Tunes light up the big screen in The Day the Earth Blew Up would be the perfect time to remove every original Looney Tunes short from its streamer, Max.
Deadline reports that the removal–which impacts almost 40 years’ worth of animated shorts from the 1930s all the way up to the late ’60s–is part of an ongoing reprioritization on Max to focus on adult and family content. While plenty of Looney Tunes series remain on the streamer for now such as The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries, parts of New Looney Tunes, and Tiny Toons Looniversity, the franchise’s classic legacy of short form animation has been scrubbed entirely, coming even after Warner Bros. previously clarified plans not to remove the original shorts from Max in late 2023.
It’s not the first time in recent memory that Warner Bros. has come under fire for how it’s treating the studio’s animated legacy. At the end of September 2024, Warner Bros. confirmed that it would shutter its classic-animation-focused streaming platform Boomerang entirely, and came under fire when it completely scrubbed the beloved Cartoon Network website of years of history to replace it with a landing page directing people to subscribe to Max–cutting off generations of flash games as well as free online access to a host of episodes from contemporary and recent series.
But the move is also just the latest in an oddball relationship Warner Bros. has had with the Looney Tunes franchise in particular. The timing of Looney Tunes‘ animated origins being dropped from Max comes right as the franchise makes its long-overdue fully animated theatrical debut in The Day the Earth Blew Up–a release itself that Warner Bros. distanced itself from, first ordering the film for Max as a streaming original, and then selling the film to Ketchup Entertainment outside the American theater market for release after priorities shifted again. It also, of course, comes after the debacle that was Warner’s handling of live-action hybrid Coyote vs. Acme, shelved for a $70 million tax write-off amid reports that the studio allegedly obfuscated attempts to get the movie sold to other distributors.
Time will tell just how things between Warner and one of its most legendary animated franchises continue to develop, especially while Day the Earth Blew Up remains in theaters. After that brief bright spot, who knows what’s next after this?
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