Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

deadline.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 108 posts

Re: Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

#61

Post by afn »

I feel like I’m missing something, so perhaps there’s an aspect of corporate taxes here that I don’t understand. I would expect a write-off like this to reduce the assets of the firm on paper, perhaps having an impact on the market valuation, but don’t see how it would impact taxes.

Wouldn’t the actual expenses of production reduce tax liability immediately when they are incurred, regardless of whether or not the corporation later is able to make a profit off of the product? Or do they treat the production of a film as net-zero from a tax perspective because they had $X million in expenses and gained $X million in assets in the form of the finished film?

Re: Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

#62

Post by FFP999 »

rbanffy wrote: post #40

Wouldn’t the best solution to this to trigger the release into public domain, or a CC-NA licence, within a short “cooling off” period so they could try to release it the following year?

"The best solution" for who? The studio? They're not going to do that, because if they do, they lose the option to change their minds later and release the movie in the usual way.

Re: Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

#64

Post by rbanffy »

FFP999 wrote: post #62
rbanffy wrote: post #40

Wouldn’t the best solution to this to trigger the release into public domain, or a CC-NA licence, within a short “cooling off” period so they could try to release it the following year?

"The best solution" for who? The studio? They're not going to do that, because if they do, they lose the option to change their minds later and release the movie in the usual way.

The best for society. The studio is dodging taxes with it and, therefore, the public is financing the movie in part. Seems only fair.

But, obviously, they'd prefer to burn the originals to pay taxes on any profits.

Re: Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

#65

Post by unsupp0rted »

geraldwhen wrote: post #60
unsupp0rted wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t budget discipline that was the main problem. Indiana Jones 4 didn’t need budget discipline. The main problem was that Indiana Jones 5 was following 4, and both were laughably bad at being quality Indiana Jones-level movies. The general audience knew in advance what they were getting wasn’t going to be exciting and they didn’t want it. The hardcore fan audience also knew what they were getting: old-man Indie…

Given the plot, I’m surprised it made as much as it did. Who wants that?

Name recognition counts for a lot.

This movie would have been a no-brainer home run if it were simply an adventure film starring a crusty Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, set in more or less the “real world”.

Once you get Indie into space aliens or Representation social politics things dilute until the audience shrugs and stays home to stream The Office for the sixth run-through.

Sad, alienated, lonely, somewhat suicidal Dr. Jones doesn’t put butts in seats. Who could’ve guessed?

Re: Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

#66

Post by crazygringo »

Almondsetat wrote: post #25

I can only imagine how the people who made it feel knowing they basically worked for absolutely nothing

It's just part of any creative job.

And honestly there isn't much of a difference of working on something that gets shelved, vs. something that gets released and is a total flop -- something that doesn't even make back 20% of its costs, and gets 17% of Rotten Tomatoes.

Anyone who works in any artistic field knows that probably 80% of your total effort never sees the light of day -- whether you're a band trying to record songs, a novelist throwing away chapters and subplots and whole half-finished books, or yes -- scriptwriters and animators and actors.

(Just think about how the majority of filmed TV pilots are never shown, because the majority of them don't get picked up. If you're an actor/writer/crew hired for a TV pilot, you know going into it that there's a better than 50% chance nobody will ever see it.)

Re: Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

#67

Post by mjhay »

JCharante wrote: post #36
Almondsetat wrote: post #25

I can only imagine how the people who made it feel knowing they basically worked for absolutely nothing

Lucky. That’s the benefit of being the worker class and not the owners. You get paid whether it releases or not.

They'll be missing out on residuals they otherwise would have gotten.

Re: Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

#68

Post by FFP999 »

rbanffy wrote: post #64
FFP999 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best solution" for who? The studio? They're not going to do that, because if they do, they lose the option to change their minds later and release the movie in the usual way.

The best for society. The studio is dodging taxes with it and, therefore, the public is financing the movie in part. Seems only fair. But, obviously, they'd prefer to burn the originals to pay taxes on any profits.

Pretty much moot because "fair" is not a thing the studio is going to take into consideration.

Re: Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

#69

Post by tomohawk »

They actually put warning labels on the original Wile E Coyote v Roadrunner material.

In this day and age of political correctness it is probably not considered worth the risk to release a film that might be considered subversive in some sense.

Comedy is dead.

Re: Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off

#70

Post by crazygringo »

fzeroracer wrote: post #19

Frankly I'm of the increasing opinion that if you do a tax write off on a creative work that you should be required to put it into the public domain. You've already made it clear that you believe that the value you would gain from it is $0, ergo it doesn't make sense to let companies vault content forever once written off. For example, a bunch of TV series were written off last year, which means that content has been…

I understand where you're coming from, but it's just not tenable.

First of all, a lot of these creative works are ultimately unfinished. Are you really supposed to release the superhero movie without half the CGI, with some of the scenes in front of green screens? Without a soundtrack? What's the point?

And secondly, even when they are finished, what about when they're just bad? If something simply doesn't work creatively, despite everyone's best efforts, why force them to expose their failure to the world? There are well-known cases where directors and screenwriters have demanded that their names be taken off a finished movie because they don't want to be associated with the final product, because they think it's just bad.

The idea that bad work is forced to be released, if you want to count the effort on them as business expenses, seems like it would be a net negative for artists. Isn't part of artistic control deciding what you do and don't want the world to see?

Post reply on HN