Deleting and destroying finished movies

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.

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.

You are confusing "not releasing it" with "claiming a value of zero."

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

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...