[HN Gopher] Deleting and destroying finished movies
___________________________________________________________________
Deleting and destroying finished movies
Author : cialowicz
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-02-11 21:35 UTC (1 hours ago)
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| delichon wrote:
| The contrary argument, that a creator has the right to destroy
| their creation, is made in the Gary Cooper movie "The
| Fountainhead" (1949).
| aquova wrote:
| Even then it's not quite an apples to apples comparison. From
| what I understand, everyone directly involved in the making of
| this film is proud of the work and wants it to be released,
| it's just the bean counters and executives (who I would not
| consider the "creators" of the film) who want to destroy the
| creation for ego and tax reasons.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Why bring ego into it? It's just bottom line thinking, that's
| all. Is there any good reason to think ego is a part of it?
| aquova wrote:
| The article itself puts it forward.
|
| > The offer to sell the film was, to put it mildly, not
| undertaken in good faith. It appears that the company would
| rather take less money by writing off the movie than sell
| it for even a few dollars more than that, because they
| might risk having a rival turn it into a success, which
| would further embarrass them for never even having tried to
| market it themselves
|
| If it was really bottom line thinking, they'd accept the
| $70M, more than double what they'd get in tax benefits, and
| have another distributor release the film. Instead, they'd
| rather trash the film than risk looking like fools if they
| allowed another company to reap the benefits for releasing
| a hit.
| feedforward wrote:
| You're right, it's just part of the absurdity of Rand's
| vision. In the real world people do work and create
| something, but some bean counters figure out the heirs who
| own the majority stake of a company can make a few more bucks
| by destroying the thing, so it is done.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yeah. The problem arises when there's many creators and they
| disagree. Or when a creation has already been duplicated and
| given to the world and they think they have any right to claw
| that back.
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| Sure, that sounds fine, but the taxpayer ought to not be
| responsible for footing the bill in any way. The studios do
| this for the tax writeoff, which is tantamount to robbing the
| people paying taxes (eg:us) blind.
| gruez wrote:
| It's not "robbing the people paying taxes" because the money
| was never theirs to begin with. Taxes are paid on profits,
| and if profits are not made they're not owed.
|
| Suppose I make a painting worth $1000. If I had sold that, I
| would have been required to pay taxes on that at the marginal
| rate, say 40% so $400 worth of taxes. Instead of doing that,
| I set it on fire. Does that mean I just robed taxpayers of
| $400?
| blowski wrote:
| I bet the owners of the film studio had a really hard
| Christmas that year, with no profits. The issue is that the
| studio takes the profit if it succeeds, the taxpayers take
| the losses if it doesn't.
| muricula wrote:
| It's not setting the fire which causes taxpayers to lose
| money, it's writing off the loss against taxes you would
| have otherwise paid on profits made from other movies.
| gruez wrote:
| Not an accountant, but tax write-offs aren't some sort of
| no tax glitch that you make them seem. You can only
| deduct losses that you've actually suffered, not
| imaginary losses. If you spent $10M into making a movie,
| you can't value the movie at $80M and then use that
| against all your other revenues to pay less taxes. If
| this were true every company would be making fake movies
| to destroy and pay less taxes, not destroy actual movies
| that they spent millions on.
| derivative7 wrote:
| Taxing people on income they didn't make but the
| government imagined they could have made in some
| situation that didn't happen sounds like a slippery slope
| to be standing on.
| isthatafact wrote:
| It feels like tax fraud. Given that it is apparently not
| possible to prove that they deleted the movie, it seems
| like the IRS should assume that they still have the movie.
|
| I bought a stock share for $1000. I wanted to sell it for
| $2000, but no one was willing to pay more than $400, so I
| decided to tell the IRS that it was worth zero and take the
| full tax write off (which was tax fraud).
|
| On top of that, refusing to release or sell the movie
| should have triggered a shareholder lawsuit.
| gruez wrote:
| > Given that it is apparently not possible to prove that
| they deleted the movie, it seems like the IRS should
| assume that they still have the movie.
|
| Even if they didn't delete the movie, the fact that they
| claimed to have deleted the movie and used it as a tax
| credit basically makes the value $0, because in the
| unlikely event they have a copy around, they wouldn't be
| able to sell it without having all of the profits seized
| from them.
| sib wrote:
| Many of the people on this site are involved in technology
| (software and/or hardware) product development. If they work
| for a company that spends $10M in development salaries &
| related costs to build a product, and then decides not to
| release that product, the company certainly deducts those
| development costs from its revenues when it files its taxes.
|
| This is true even if some third party had made an offer to
| acquire the product - there are many valid reasons why the
| first company may choose not to sell it.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Are any of the people responsible for this phenomenon actually
| creators? Isn't it usually investors and accountants doing it
| for a tax writeoff?
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Ah, the work of fiction based on an Ayn Rand novel?
|
| Considering I'm operating from a very different set of values
| than she was, I doubt I would find the movie particularly
| persuasive.
| kuratkull wrote:
| I'm of the opposite opinion... now what?
| bhickey wrote:
| Do they get to realize the entire loss in the year it occurs?
| cnees wrote:
| Destroying it should be legal. Writing that off as a loss should
| be considered fraud, especially when there's an offer for it.
| gruez wrote:
| >Writing that off as a loss should be considered fraud,
| especially when there's an offer for it.
|
| From wikipedia:
|
| >In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or
| unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right.
|
| Where's the deception here?
| dymk wrote:
| It's defrauding the taxpayer
| gruez wrote:
| "fraud" doesn't mean "losing money in a manner I don't
| like", so I ask again: where's the deception here?
| dymk wrote:
| That they actually incurred the losses they claim to have
| incurred, so they get a tax break. The taxpayer is
| defrauded.
|
| They would rather delete the movie to claim the tax break
| than sell it to another studio offering more than the tax
| break.
|
| If you think they actually lost that amount of money:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
| gruez wrote:
| > That they actually incurred the losses they claim to
| have incurred, so they get a tax break. The taxpayer is
| defrauded.
|
| Did they not incur such losses? Did they claim to delete
| the movie but actually kept a backup? Granted, the loss
| is self-inflicted, but that's not a relevant factor in
| the tax code.
| ok_dad wrote:
| If I burn down my house and claim insurance or tax
| losses, they'll laugh and send me to jail. Explain how a
| corporation doing the effectively the same thing should
| get a write off. It's a sham.
| gruez wrote:
| In your scenario the illegal parts would be:
|
| 1. claiming insurance on it. AFAIK this isn't applicable
| in the case of the movie
|
| 2. endangering other houses by doing it in a non-approved
| way
|
| Other than that setting houses that you own on fire isn't
| illegal.
| ok_dad wrote:
| And why should a studio be allowed to claim a movie they
| destroyed on taxes again? I'm not interested in the
| answer, "it's legal," because a lot of things are legal
| that should be illegal and vice versa, I'm looking for
| your moral reasoning here as to why this shouldn't be
| made illegal.
| gruez wrote:
| >I'm looking for your moral reasoning here as to why this
| shouldn't be made illegal.
|
| If you read the thread more carefully, you'll see I never
| made such a claim. The only claim I made is that it's not
| fraud. I thought this was pretty clear with my earlier
| comment:
|
| > "fraud" doesn't mean "losing money in a manner I don't
| like", so I ask again: where's the deception here?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| A company buys a balloon making machine for $100k. They
| use the machine and depreciate it over the years to $20k,
| getting $80k of deductions over the years. They decide to
| stop making these balloons. Someone offers them $1k but
| they decline. They destroy the machine, and have a $20k
| loss on their taxes.
|
| This is all above board, totally normal behavior. There
| are reasons to be against destroying these movies, but
| tax fraud really isn't one of them. They actually did
| take the loss of whatever was the remaining value of that
| asset.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| [delayed]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| We aren't arguing that it's tax fraud by definition, but
| that it _should_ be considered fraud. If the tax code
| incentivizes destroying something then that seems like a
| defect of the tax code.
| lisper wrote:
| Destroying a movie to claim the tax break is analogous to
| burning your house down for the insurance money or to
| claim a casualty loss. Yes, you really did lose your
| house. No, you are not entitled to claim it as a write-
| off.
| gruez wrote:
| >insurance money
|
| That's fraud because the insurance policy specifically
| says it won't pay out if you intentionally set it on
| fire. If you actually did set it on fire, then claimed
| that you didn't then that's the deception.
|
| >No, you are not entitled to claim it as a write-off.
|
| Can you point to the relevant tax law that prevents this?
| jrflowers wrote:
| You make a good point. When somebody says something
| _should_ be illegal, the clever route of discussion is to
| repeatedly point out that it is not currently illegal --
| a fact that both of you agree about, since that is the
| premise for making the statement that it should be
| illegal.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| The deductible losses are supposed to be incurred in
| pursuit of profit. Not every expense a business incurs is
| tax deductible. Not even trying to sell it calls into
| question whether it was in pursuit of profit. They're
| expecting the American tax payer to make up the shortfall
| and that's likely based on Hollywood's unique accounting
| practices, which has a tendency to inflate the claimed
| expense amount.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| the deception is assigning a zero value to the movie,
| when it's not zero.
| gruez wrote:
| It is zero when the hard drive holding the only copy is
| degaussed.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| no, if you had an offer for $30M, then that was the
| value.
| gruez wrote:
| And the value went to $0 after destroying it. I don't see
| what's the issue is here.
| glitchc wrote:
| How so if funded by private capital?
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| That they lost money on the film.
| gruez wrote:
| If you spent a bunch of time and resources making a movie,
| and then decide to shred it, did you not lose money?
| exe34 wrote:
| If I burn down my house, I lose money. Should I be able
| to claim insurance on that?
| gruez wrote:
| If your insurance policy covers that (unlikely because of
| this exact situation), then sure.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| _" One of WBD's most notorious post-merger decisions was deleting
| an entire finished feature, "Batgirl," that had an estimated
| budget of $90 million, to claim a tax write-off"_
|
| I feel like if someone reads that in a thousand years they're
| going to look at us the same way we look at some ancient tribe
| worshipping idols. Years of work and cultural artifacts destroyed
| for the accounting department, that's nuts.
| Andrex wrote:
| It's not destroyed, it exists somewhere. And IMO it's just as
| likely it sees release in the next 1000 years as it is
| accidentally destroyed or lost.
|
| Movie studio regimes change all the time, and it's possible to
| un-tax-write-off a work (it's just a giant pain in the ass).
|
| Adult Swim got Sym-Bionic Titan and IGPX back from the dead,
| and they're owned by the same parent company (Warner Bros.)
| chx wrote:
| I wonder, is it even possible to truly delete a movie?
|
| I am surprised Batgirl didn't leak. How do you even prevent that?
|
| It's just bits.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| The short version is that almost everyone with enough access to
| make a local copy of the movie is financially
| and/idealistically incentivized enough by future opportunity
| within the industry not to risk it.
|
| For everyone else, there's law enforcement supported by
| unlimited budget for prosecution from the industry.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Most studios moved to a high security environment a while back.
| Only Covid reopened things a bit, and not sure how long.
| fl7305 wrote:
| > How do you even prevent that?
|
| Keep the working copies on computers in a special lab with no
| external network access.
|
| Restrict access and physically search the people leaving the
| lab.
|
| Not fool proof, but it will reduce leaks by a lot.
|
| But yeah, once you send out thousands of review copies, there's
| no stopping the leaks.
| blincoln wrote:
| Seems like a less controversial solution would be to allow the
| same tax write-off if the studio releases the film for free
| distribution (e.g. via the Internet Archive), either into the
| public domain, or under a license like Creative Commons
| Noncommercial if there's concern about implicitly allowing
| derivative works by competitors or similar.
| TheCleric wrote:
| Exactly. You want the tax break? The work now belongs to the
| taxpayers. Seems fair to me.
| advael wrote:
| I think the tax writeoff should _only_ be available for doing
| something like that. It 's insane that corporations failing at
| ventures is so incentivised that they'll fail on purpose, and
| we shouldn't be offering tax breaks for behavior that serves no
| public good
|
| This kind of law is especially offensive in the context of
| rhetoric about social programs, wherein we create all sorts of
| onerous means-testing on the logic that someone, somewhere
| might actually be incentivized to use social services to
| ameliorate various forms of poverty and destitution
|
| In both cases, there is a balancing act wherein allowing too
| many false positives can create perverse incentives, and
| allowing too many false negatives fails to accomplish what the
| policy set out to do. I think a massive corporation taking a
| loss for making something unpopular is not an outcome we should
| be trying to prevent with government programs at all, but we
| are consistently prioritizing it over preventing outcomes like
| homelessness
| nerdponx wrote:
| I don't understand the move in the first place.
|
| Do tax write offs for corporations work differently than for
| people? What's the point of spending $90m just to reduce your
| taxable income by $90m? It's not like corporations have
| progressive tax brackets.
|
| Or did they acquire the movie as part of the acquisition, and
| are now somehow able to claim a write-off for something they
| didn't actually spend any money on?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| > It's insane that corporations failing at ventures is so
| incentivised that they'll fail on purpose, and we shouldn't
| be offering tax breaks for behavior that serves no public
| good
|
| I believe the argument is that businesses would take less
| risks without the security provided by those tax write-offs.
| Presumably the increased tax revenue from businesses taking
| risks and having success outweighs the tax losses from risks
| taken, failed, then written off.
| verisimi wrote:
| Why are movies given tax breaks at all, is the question.
| sib wrote:
| Since - as only one example of the complexity involved - the
| music used in the film is almost certainly licensed and must be
| paid for, and the studio does not "own" it, there's no way that
| they can simply release it for free distribution or put it into
| the public domain...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Where do you draw the line? If an artist pays a model and paints
| her, is the artist to be prohibited from destroying the painting
| because it sucks, and because the model wants credit? What about
| a music producer who pays a studio band to record a song that
| turns out to be terrible -- is the producer prohibited from
| deleting it?
|
| It's the tax write off for destruction that's fucked up, as
| @cnees says. Failures are part of the process of creation. If the
| producer says the market value of the work is zero, they've
| committed tax fraud if it's not.
|
| The solution to their "attribution" problem was found by
| directors a long time ago when they didn't want their names on a
| film: it's directed by "Alan Smithee."
|
| https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000647/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
| fl7305 wrote:
| > is the artist to be prohibited from destroying the painting
|
| Perhaps not prohibited. But we could make it so they lose all
| IP rights.
|
| Copyright is intended to promote the creation and distribution
| of new works. It is not a natural human right, like ownership
| of your physical things.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Perhaps not prohibited. But we could make it so they lose
| all IP rights.
|
| Suppose I make two draft comics of my original character
| ExampleMan.
|
| One features a dark brooding morally ambiguous anti-hero, and
| the other is a wholesome family character.
|
| Are you saying if I destroy one, the character comes
| partially or wholly into the public domain?
| gruez wrote:
| >But we could make it so they lose all IP rights.
|
| If they're actually destroying all copies as claimed, then IP
| rights is irrelevant.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't think they need to claim that "no one would pay even $1
| for the rights to the movie in its current state" but rather
| the lesser "in our judgment, the best thing for us as a profit-
| seeking studio is for us to not release this movie".
|
| Damage to the Batgirl franchise brand, damage to the studio
| reputation, damage to the relationship with the stars, legal
| fees, etc. could all be reasonably factored in to the studio's
| judgment to scrap the current WIP.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You are confusing "not releasing it" with "claiming a value
| of zero."
| Schnitz wrote:
| Where do you draw the line? If someone buys the Mona Lisa and
| burns it for the tax credit, is the owner to be prohibited from
| doing so based on the public interest?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Try being realistic. Is "cultural treasure" your line?
| Notatheist wrote:
| I feel the Mona Lisa's destruction would be more valuable to
| culture than its continued existence. Imagine the headlines,
| the people with stories of having seen it in person, the
| conspiracy theories...
| derivative7 wrote:
| If I pay 25% marginal income tax and I make a profit of 200
| million dollars, I get to keep 150 million. If instead I
| decide to buy the Mona Lisa for 200 million dollars, and burn
| it I walk away with nothing but the satisfaction of not have
| given one cent to the government. Please tell me how my evil
| mastermind plan to burn the Mona Lisa works anyway?
| lekangoo wrote:
| We can draw the line right here. We don't need spurious
| analogies when we have a clear case where a company is abusing
| the tax system.
| nerdponx wrote:
| [delayed]
| ysofunny wrote:
| where to draw the line?
|
| when other people get their hands on the files
|
| we must admit (and later on embrace) the digital possibilities
| we have. if the artist or model want it deleted they best make
| sure nobody copied it first else, in my opinion, they must
| convince every person holding a copy from voluntarily agreeing
| to destroy it.
|
| nobody should have a right to force other persons to act
| against their own will even if they created some artifact they
| no longer fully control
| simonw wrote:
| I wonder what would happen if a bunch of extremely bankable
| talent - the Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig, Tom Cruise crowd -
| quietly got in touch with Warner Bros and made it clear that they
| would avoid working with any studio that had a track record of
| cancelling completed projects for a tax write-off.
| lupusreal wrote:
| _" Why deleting finished programs should be a crime."_
|
| Be honest, at least some of you have finished a project before
| deciding to axe it instead of publishing it. It is any creators
| right to decide not to publish something.
|
| If the issue is the tax treatment of these circumstances, then
| fix that.
| loughnane wrote:
| Commenting before I've read the article:
|
| That's ridiculous. There's no obligation for anyone to bring
| something to market regardless of how far along it is.
|
| After I read the article:
|
| Still not persuaded. It reads like motivated reasoning, the
| person doesn't like things not getting released and says that
| governments should step in. There's some mention of taxes and
| lost work, but nothing tht holds water.
|
| As an example: if it cost you $100M to make a film and you write
| that off you could reduce your tax burden by as much, netting a
| $15M lower tax bill if your rate was 15%.
|
| By contrast if you release it you've no guarantee of that $15M,
| especially once promotion and other costs are factored in. If
| it's a trash movie that'll also damage the firm's reputation---
| something that's tough to quantify but no less real.
|
| That's not great, but its I wouldn't want to live in a society
| where that was criminal.
|
| Then there's this:
|
| > nobody who did any sort of work on a project that consumed
| years of their lives will ever be able to point to it as evidence
| of what sort of work they're capable of doing
|
| That's the status quo in most jobs. Things don't ship all the
| time.
|
| It's a bummer, yeah, but that's it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Honestly, if we want to disincentivize Hollywood from burning
| movies, that's the loophole to close. Stop letting them take a
| movie that generates a net loss as a write-off.
|
| This would have monumental consequences to the Hollywood
| business model.
| advael wrote:
| The argument isn't that WB shouldn't be able to scrap projects.
| The argument is that the tax break for doing this is bad and
| should not exist
| nerdponx wrote:
| [delayed]
| lbarrow wrote:
| Without commenting on the larger issue the article brings up,
| this specific point doesn't survive scrutiny to me:
| Some of the company's tactics post-merger were garden-variety
| ruthless, like eliminating 87 series from its streaming platform
| Max, so that they won't have to pay union-mandated residuals to
| the talent that created already-existing programs or pony up
| funds to produce more seasons of existing ones (such as "Our Flag
| Means Death," one of the company's most popular and critically
| acclaimed comedies--canceled after just two seasons).
|
| In the streaming era, it's very easy for the revenue created by
| hosting an older piece of content to be dwarfed by residuals.
| Streaming services get customers largely by releasing popular new
| titles; it's entirely predictable that pushing for higher
| residuals would drive services to sunset series faster, and it's
| entirely reasonable for services to stop hosting titles that lose
| them money.
| areoform wrote:
| There are three conversations currently being had here,
|
| One revolves around corporations deleting works that they've paid
| for.
|
| The second centers on the rights of artists (and is framed via
| first person, therefore it's at the human level).
|
| The third focuses on corporations, the government and society
| writ large.
|
| The offered prescriptions and takes on each differ by each
| scenario.
|
| It's important to recognize that it's, most likely, not possible
| to create a rule, or even a set of rules, that fits all scenarios
| for the above categories. But it is likely worth asking questions
| about the scenario at hand; an executive removed from the
| production & artistic creation process has decided to use
| deletion of art works as an accounting strategy to offset debt
| from a Leveraged Buy Out. A question worth asking is what other
| irregularities are going on, > Financial
| engineering has always been central to leveraged buyouts. In a
| typical deal, a private-equity firm buys a company, using some of
| its own money and some borrowed money. It then tries to improve
| the performance of the acquired company, with an eye toward
| cashing out by selling it or taking it public. The key to this
| strategy is debt: the model encourages firms to borrow as much as
| possible, since, just as with a mortgage, the less money you put
| down, the bigger your potential return on investment. The rewards
| can be extraordinary: when Romney was at Bain, it supposedly
| earned eighty-eight per cent a year for its investors. But piles
| of debt also increase the risk that companies will go bust.
| > > This approach has one obvious virtue: if a private-
| equity firm wants to make money, it has to improve the value of
| the companies it buys. Sometimes the improvement may be more
| cosmetic than real, but historically private-equity firms have in
| principle had a powerful incentive to make companies perform
| better. In the past decade, though, that calculus changed. Having
| already piled companies high with debt in order to buy them, many
| private-equity funds had their companies borrow even more, and
| then used that money to pay themselves huge "special dividends."
| This allowed them to recoup their initial investment while
| keeping the same ownership stake. Before 2000, big special
| dividends were not that common. But between 2003 and 2007
| private-equity funds took more than seventy billion dollars out
| of their companies. These dividends created no economic value--
| they just redistributed money from the company to the private-
| equity investors. > > As a result, private-equity
| firms are increasingly able to profit even if the companies they
| run go under--an outcome made much likelier by all the extra
| borrowing--and many companies have been getting picked clean. In
| 2004, for instance, Wasserstein & Company bought the thriving
| mail-order fruit retailer Harry and David. The following year,
| Wasserstein and other investors took out more than a hundred
| million in dividends, paid for with borrowed money--covering
| their original investment plus a twenty-three per cent profit--
| and charged Harry and David millions in "management fees." Last
| year, Harry and David defaulted on its debt and dumped its
| pension obligations. In other words, Wasserstein failed to
| improve the company's performance, failed to meet its obligations
| to creditors, screwed its workers, and still made a profit.
| That's not exactly how capitalism is supposed to work.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/private-inequi...
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Isn't Hollywood very well known money laundering machine?
| kuratkull wrote:
| Kinda weird to bring legislation into it. Should my employer not
| be allowed to delete my code because it's my special little
| snowflake?
| ecocentrik wrote:
| This argument reminds me Robert Rauschenberg's, Erased de Kooning
| https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.298/
| froh wrote:
| my saddest story there is "frank'n stein" a hilarious comedy
| movie and theatre play toying with the Frankenstein plot.
|
| I've seen the movie and it made ma watch a local play and I loved
| both.
|
| when I tried to get hold of the DVD years later I learned that
| the heirs to the author Ken Campbell had withdrawn all rights.
| this removed all prints from all libraries too. the thing is
| _gone_. because the heirs hated their gene provider so much.
|
| I was amazed this is possible... "freedom of speech"? nope.
| intellectual property.
| mdasen wrote:
| To me, the weird thing is that the tax write-off doesn't even
| seem to make sense.
|
| Let's say you spend $80M making a film and you write it off for a
| $30M benefit. You're still in the hole $50M. Let's say that you
| sell the film for $20M and write off the remaining $60M loss for
| a $23M benefit. In the latter case, you're only in the hole $37M
| instead of $50M. That's a lot better.
|
| Is there some weird accounting rule where you're allowed to write
| off full losses, but not partial losses? I understand writing off
| losses: if you make $100M on one project and lose $50M on another
| project, you pay taxes on the $50M you've made - but you're only
| getting a fraction of the money back. It's better to get 100% of
| $20M plus a fraction of $60M than getting a fraction of $80M.
|
| No one seems to be explaining how this is working in Warner Bros
| Discovery's favor. Sure, I get canceling popular shows where the
| actors might be looking for more expensive contracts. I might
| think it's short sighted given that you need popular shows to
| keep your subscribers, but I get what they're trying to do. I
| understand licensing content to a competitor for a quick pay day.
| Again, it seems short sighted, but I get what they're trying to
| do. What I don't get is why it's better for them to completely
| scrap content than to let it flop upon release. The only possible
| explanation I can see is that they'd be able to claim the tax
| relief earlier. If they released it in late 2023, they'd have to
| wait to claim any losses since they'd be making money off it into
| 2024. If they cancel it in 2023, they can take the write off for
| 2023. It must be something else, right?
| philsnow wrote:
| Criminal fraud issues aside, I would think that all of the
| artists had a reasonable expectation that the work they were
| doing would be released, and would then become part of their
| resume.
|
| Since it didn't get released, they collectively and/or
| individually might very well bring a civil suit against the
| company for lost compensation (where compensation is defined as
| some combination of cash and reputational gains, and this latter
| part became zero).
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