TNT will not air the completed fourth season of its last original scripted series, Snowpiercer, which has become the latest show to be buried by Warner Bros. Discovery for the purpose of generating tax write-offs and royalty savings.
The decision comes two weeks after WBD's CFO and proverbial man with the sharp hatchet, Gunnar Wiedenfels, declared that the company's corporate bloodletting was over.
"We can confirm that TNT will not air season four of Snowpiercer," the network said in a statement, confirming an initial report late last week by the Penske showbiz trade conglomerate. "This was a difficult decision, but our admiration for the talented writers, actors and crew who brought Snowpiercer’s extraordinary post-apocalyptic world to life remains strong. We have been working collaboratively with the producers since last year to help the series find a new home where fans can continue to enjoy the compelling story and exceptional visual experience. We look forward to working with them on future projects."
Tomorrow Studios, which produced the cable series adaptation of an eponymous 2013 post-apocalyptic Korean feature film, will now shop Snowpiercer to other distributors. (The original film version was directed by Bong Joon-ho, whose Parasite won a Best Picture Oscar in 2020.)
WBD, of course, has conducted a wide-ranging purge of the HBO and HBO Max catalogs, burying straight-to-streaming feature films, full seasons of classic cartoons and full series of Emmy-nominated original series. But HBO Max in particular is starting out with a fairly robust library.
With WBD CEO David Zaslav working hard these days to express a bull-market posture on an upcoming renewal of TNT's NBA contract, you've got to wonder what will soon be left of one of basic cable's top programming networks.
WBD is the highly leveraged corporate outcome of AT&T's decision in 2021 to spin off WarnerMedia and merge it with Discovery in a $43 billion deal.
Now around $50 billion in debt, WBD has pledged investors $3.5 billion in cuts.
