What Gets Written Off

I spent the last week writing about Westworld — three posts on its simulation architecture, its trauma loops, its undelivered endings. The show that kept pulling at me is one whose story will likely never be completed. Not because the creators ran out of ideas; Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have publicly said they still know how it ends and hope someday to tell it.¹ But because in November 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery decided it was more financially useful to cancel Season 5 and remove the existing four seasons from HBO Max than to let the story continue.²

A few months after cancellation, all four seasons disappeared from the platform.

This week, a Westworld film reboot was announced — written by David Koepp, potentially directed by Steven Spielberg, returning to the original 1973 Michael Crichton premise.³ Not a continuation of what Nolan and Joy built. A reset. The IP survives. The story doesn’t.

This is a specific thing that the streaming era made structurally possible, and it’s worth naming clearly.

The accounting move¶

When a studio produces a film or series, the production costs aren’t expensed immediately — they’re capitalized as an asset on the balance sheet, then written down over time as the content generates revenue. This is standard accounting treatment for long-lived assets.

An “impairment charge” or “content write-off” is what happens when the studio declares that asset worth less than its recorded value — or worth nothing. By removing content from a streaming service and declaring it will generate no future revenue, the studio can immediately convert the remaining unamortized production cost into a recognized loss. That loss offsets taxable income right now, rather than being recovered slowly through future streaming revenue.

The kicker: studios often collected substantial state and federal production incentives while making the content — Georgia offers up to 30% of production costs as transferable tax credits — and then wrote off the same production as a loss afterward.⁴ Bloomberg Tax summarized it plainly: the studios “received tax incentives for film production only to ultimately write down… the production takes public money from states and federal coffers to manufacture tax losses.”⁵

In Q3 2022 alone, Warner Bros. Discovery announced write-offs of $2 billion to $2.5 billion in content.⁶

The extreme case¶

Batgirl — a completed $90 million DC film that had received positive test screenings — was cancelled in August 2022 and will, in all likelihood, never be released.⁷

The reason it can never be released isn’t just a business decision that could be reversed. Under U.S. tax law, once a studio claims a total loss write-off on a completed work, releasing that work commercially would constitute tax fraud on the already-claimed deduction. The loss was real on paper; proving the asset has value would retroactively invalidate it.⁸ Warner Bros. Discovery reportedly even considered physically destroying all Batgirl footage to maximize the write-off and demonstrate to the IRS that no future revenue was possible.⁹

The film’s directors were left in a position where they couldn’t screen their own work. Actors couldn’t use clips. The film exists, and no one can legally show it.

The industry pattern¶

This is not a WBD anomaly. Disney wrote off approximately $1.5 billion in streaming content in 2023, removing dozens of originals from Disney+ and Hulu — Willow, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, Y: The Last Man, and more than 100 other titles.¹⁰ Paramount+ and Showtime (now merged) followed similar patterns. IndieWire documented 87 shows and films pulled from HBO Max alone by May 2023.¹¹

The WBD CFO promised in early 2023 that the write-off era was over: the company was “done with that chapter.”¹² A reassurance worth noting, and worth treating with exactly the skepticism it deserves given that WBD is now in merger discussions with Paramount that would create a combined entity with over $79 billion in debt — the same financial pressure that triggered the original write-offs.

This is a century old¶

Here is the part that should be more widely known.

In the 1930s, Charlie Chaplin deliberately destroyed the film reels of Her Friend the Bandit and A Woman of the Sea — the latter a collaboration with Josef von Sternberg — as tax write-offs. The films are now permanently lost.¹³

He was not alone. The studios of the early sound era believed silent films had no future commercial value after their theatrical runs. Many were burned for their silver content. Some were cut apart and sold as shorts or film stills. The result: an estimated 75% of all silent-era films are now lost or destroyed.¹⁴

We know this is a catastrophe. Film historians have spent decades mourning it. And the structural incentive that produced it — treating art as a depreciating asset with no residual worth — hasn’t been removed from the system. It’s simply migrated to a new medium where the destruction is cleaner: no reels to burn, just streaming licenses to let expire and servers to wipe.

What’s missing from the law¶

There is no legal requirement for a streaming service to archive its original content before removing it. There is no mandatory deposit system for streaming originals comparable to what exists for theatrical films through the Library of Congress. When a show leaves a streaming service, it can simply cease to be accessible — and creators have no enforceable right to access their own work.

Comedian Kristen Schaal, whose show Earth to Ned was removed from Disney+, publicly asked fans to help preserve it by ripping the files themselves — recognizing that the official archive was gone and she had no legal mechanism to recover her own work.¹⁵

The Conversation published an analysis in 2025 calling this a cultural heritage gap and noting that “there must be a plan associated with archiving it and allowing consumer access” — framing the absence of such a plan as an unaddressed policy failure.¹⁶

None of the major streaming platforms have announced mandatory archival commitments. Bloomberg Tax’s proposed remedies — reducing state incentives for studios that later write off content, requiring dollar-for-dollar federal credit reductions — remain proposals, not law.

What the Westworld case actually is¶

I want to be precise here. Westworld is not Batgirl. The existing four seasons can be rented or purchased digitally; they were available free on Tubi and The Roku Channel as of mid-2024. The show wasn’t deleted — it was removed from its original home and its continuation cancelled.

But that distinction, while real, doesn’t quite capture what happened. The IP was judged more valuable than the creative vision. The story Nolan and Joy spent four seasons building — the one they still know how to finish — was cancelled before its ending could be told, and the IP is now being rebooted by someone else entirely, starting from the beginning, without them.

The corporate asset outlived the art.

That’s the pattern at the heart of all of this. The write-off mechanism makes it economically rational to treat creative works as disposable — to build something, extract the value, eliminate the ongoing liability, and recycle the brand. The individual losses (Batgirl, the Westworld ending, Earth to Ned) are the visible surface of a structural incentive that has been generating losses for a century.

We lost 75% of the silent era. We are, right now, deciding how much of the streaming era we want to lose. So far the answer appears to be: whatever is financially convenient.