‘Infinity Train’ Creator Rips ‘Slimy’ Discovery For HBO Max Mass Deletions

The WB/Discovery/HBO Max saga is one for the media history books, and it has had no weirder, more disturbing moment than the recent erasure of hundreds of hours of content, from movies to multiple seasons of TV shows off HBO Max.

What was originally predicted, the after the killing of Batgirl, the new WB/Discovery bosses would come in and cancel a whole bunch of DC and HBO Max projects, has not happened to a large extent. But what has unfolded instead is something no one saw coming, and one of the hardest hit areas was WB’s animation department, full of smaller, but still beloved series that have now been effectively erased from existence.

One of the highest profile shows to be deleted is Infinity Train, created by Owen Dennis, which ran for four seasons and forty episodes. It’s still available on a few platforms for purchase, but likely not for long.

In a Substack post, Dennis posted some extended thoughts on this whole process which is a fascinating unsettling read. It’s full of information as to how this unfolded, extremely quickly with essentially with no warning, and how Cartoon Network told them not to do this, as it would damage relationships with talent, but they went ahead and did it anyway.

The best summary of the situation and the chaos it’s created within WB is about midway through the piece:

“I think the way that Discovery went about this is incredibly unprofessional, rude, and just straight up slimy. I think most everyone who makes anything feels this way. Across the industry, talent is mad, agents are mad, lawyers and managers are mad, even execs at these companies are mad. I can’t think of a single person who works in animation and entertainment that, when you bring this all up, doesn’t say “What the f*** are they doing? How do they plan to have anyone ever want to work with them again?”

The “why” here, why WB/Discovery is making these cuts in the first place, is to save money, though Dennis estimates it’s supposed to save maybe tens of millions in residual payments and tax writedowns, a tiny sliver of the supposed $3 billion in cuts the execs are searching for. But the “cost” here is both relationships within the industry, and the outside perception that WB/Discovery took what most viewed as one of the best streaming services out there, HBO Max, and started gutting it for no reason. It’s created almost an existential crisis across all of streaming media, as people didn’t seem to realize that shows they like could simply…be deleted on a whim someday to save a few bucks. That’s not something that’s happened, but this has shown that’s something that can happen, and literally right now, many of these shows can only be viewed if you pirate them.

For Infinity Train specifically, Dennis believes that the show is not gone forever. He’s still not gotten full answers about whether the show may appear in one place or another within the WB umbrella, but if not, he and his team will search for a new home for it. But obviously all the erased shows won’t be able to do that.

This is a mess, top to bottom. Even if the idea of cost-cutting was a necessity for WB’s new team, the way they’ve gone about this has been horrific, and I’m not sure how they’ll ever repair some of these relationships, or make other creators trust them again.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.