this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
125 points (95.6% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35937 readers
905 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Let's say that I have this one movie that is finished that I spent 80 million to make. I decided to "write it off". So when I get to pay my taxes, do I get a 80 million discount?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago

Entertainment often pays actors, writers and such royalties based on a proportion of profits. By manipulating which specific entity actually shows the profit, they can manipulate how much royalties they have to pay.

And it's probably closer to what's happening here. Probably something in their contracts state that certain financial obligations will be paid on the movie's release. But if the movie is never released they don't need to pay out.

But it sounds bad to come out and say "our contracts say we can get out of paying people if we don't release the movie so we aren't releasing the movie" rather than saying "we aren't releasing the movie because we can write it off on our taxes."

Sure in the past there were significant distribution costs in pressing out all those copies of a film and sending it out to theaters everywhere. Even direct to video has distribution costs. So "writing off" a movie to avoid paying those costs made sense when it was done in the past. But direct to streaming is basically just copying some files to a server, and a movie is basically guaranteed to recoup those costs. So the only reason to write off a movie and not release it is because of contract shenanigans.