13 ms·

Deleting and destroying finished movies

• erik_seaberg 3y ago
  Does WB get the whole writeoff in one year, but only if they value the movie at zero and destroy it without ever releasing it? Otherwise I don’t see how doing this is better for them than recouping whatever they might.
• areoform 3y ago
  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-inequity https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/private-inequi...
• pk-protect-ai 3y ago
  Isn't Hollywood very well known money laundering machine?
• delichon 3y ago
  The contrary argument, that a creator has the right to destroy their creation, is made in the Gary Cooper movie "The Fountainhead" (1949).
  • aquova 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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 3y ago
      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.
    • 3y ago
• bhickey 3y ago
  Do they get to realize the entire loss in the year it occurs?
• cnees 3y ago
  Destroying it should be legal. Writing that off as a loss should be considered fraud, especially when there's an offer for it.
  • gruez 3y ago
    >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?
    • ClassyJacket 3y ago
      That they lost money on the film.
      • gruez 3y ago
        If you spent a bunch of time and resources making a movie, and then decide to shred it, did you not lose money?
        • exe34 3y ago
          If I burn down my house, I lose money. Should I be able to claim insurance on that?
          • gruez 3y ago
            If your insurance policy covers that (unlikely because of this exact situation), then sure.
            • aniforprez 3y ago
              No insurance company in the world will pay out insurance if you commit arson against your own house because that's stupid. Same thing should apply here. Destroying a film to get a tax break at the very least should incur penalties
• Barrin92 3y ago
  "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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    Most studios moved to a high security environment a while back. Only Covid reopened things a bit, and not sure how long.
  • fl7305 3y ago
    > 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.
    • chx 3y ago
      But usually a movie is worked on by multiple VFX companies and whatnot.
      • fbdab103 3y ago
        I would be shocked if copies shared with third parties did not contain obvious and hidden fingerprint watermarks through the film. If the leak can be traced back to a particular studio, they are going to be black balled forever.
• blincoln 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Exactly. You want the tax break? The work now belongs to the taxpayers. Seems fair to me.
  • advael 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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?
      • 3y ago
• jimjimjim 3y ago
  Legal or not, it still reeks of evil. But it seems quite a few people are OK with evil. Very disappointing.
• simonw 3y ago
  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.
  • mdasen 3y ago
    I'm sure this is happening already. People aren't going to want to bring projects to Warner Bros Discovery given all the crap they're pulling. WBD will be the option of last resort when someone else won't take your project - or the place you need to go when WBD owns the IP behind certain characters like Batman.
  • add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    Warner Brothers reportedly lost Nolan for pissing him off with their dumb straight to streaming strategy. And then he made Oppenheimer for another studio. And they still did this.
    • wmf 3y ago
      Nolan has talked about going back to WB in recent months.
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  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 https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000647/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
  • fl7305 3y ago
    > 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_ 3y ago
      > Perhaps not prohibited. But we could make it so they lose all IP rights. I'm not sure how that would work. 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 draft and publish the other, the character comes partially or wholly into the public domain? Or that I am prohibited from claiming the time and money used to make one of the drafts as the legitimate business expense? Would same logic also apply to a patents of a company that creates 10 different prototype engine designs, and decides to only bring one of them to market?
      • AlbertCory 3y ago
        Good points. Normally, your discarded drafts are just written off as the cost of creating the keeper. It's not worth anyone's time to put them all out for bid. However, for a really big project, there's a "salvage value" or "scrap value." It's not zero.
• lupusreal 3y ago
  "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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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
    • loughnane 3y ago
      If we're to do that are we going to force every company to release a product they've developed, or otherwise the code/blueprints for it? Aside from the reputation hit I mentioned, the unreleased film might have some neat ideas they want to recycle into another, better project. There's a case to be made that we should eliminate tax breaks for all "R&D" work, but this article doesn't persuade me. It reads like it was written by someone who'se unhappy that they're work won't see the light of day, which I get. I've developed several products that at the last minute the exec team decided wasn't worth the capex to tool up...it's just a part of the game.
• lbarrow 3y ago
  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.
  • wmf 3y ago
    Financially, HBO's decision makes perfect sense as you said but it still sucks, especially if those series had no physical release. If a book or DVD goes out of print you could at least track down a used copy but for streaming there's nothing.
  • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    Residuals feel analogous to copyright in some way.
• kuratkull 3y ago
  Kinda weird to bring legislation into it. Should my employer not be allowed to delete my code because it's my special little snowflake?
  • josephcsible 3y ago
    Your employer should be allowed to delete your code, but not be rewarded with tax savings for doing so.
  • jowea 3y ago
    I don't see how it is socially beneficial to incentivize wasting millions worth of human effort with taxation benefits. I don't think it is exactly the same thing with a more utilitarian thing like code. Even then, I'm not convinced outright tossing code out should be incentivized.
• ecocentrik 3y ago
  This argument reminds me Robert Rauschenberg's, Erased de Kooning https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.298/ https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.298/
• froh 3y ago
  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.
  • verve_rat 3y ago
    That seems... wrong? You can't unpublish a book by withdrawing the right and force the destruction of already sold copies. I believe DVDs fall under the same first sale doctrine, so this story seems to be missing some details.
    • froh 3y ago
      it's not a normal book, it's a theatre play, a script. and the license owner can restrict the rights for these to be useless unless relicensed. it was mind bending to me. and yes, it feels wrong.
      • verve_rat 3y ago
        Yes a play can no longer be performed, but a recording of a play is a different thing. A songwriter can stop anyone from making new covers of their song, but they can't order the destruction of your CDs.
• mdasen 3y ago
  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?
  • crooked-v 3y ago
    It doesn't work in their favor. It does, however, work in the favor of Zaslav's specific desires about slashing content that has to pay residuals in favor of residual-free reality shows and documentaries.
  • jowea 3y ago
    I'm also scratching my head at why this could make sense from a purely financial point of view, doubly so if the film is expected to be at least good. One of the paragraphs in TFA proposes it's some sort of company vision and trying to avoid embarrassing themselves. I would proposition that being known for scrubbing completely projects is rather embarrassing too specially in the view of contractors for future projects but what do I know. > To my knowledge, the company has never given anyone a justification beyond debt reduction and a bit of vague gesticulation toward a corporate vision that the film supposedly didn’t sync with. Public outcry caused the company to backpedal in November 2023 and say that they would sell the movie elsewhere, but Drew Taylor of The Wrap has reported that the company never entertained any negotiations about their asking price, demanding not a penny less than $70 to $80 million for the privilege of owning a project that they would only gain $30 million by scrubbing from their own ledgers. 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, even though it was built around “intellectual property” (i.e., adorable cartoon characters) that are as inextricably linked with Warner Bros. as Marianne is with the nation of France.
• philsnow 3y ago
  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).
  • bongodongobob 3y ago
    I worked for a month on a server migration project that ended up getting axed. I have 0 expectation of any sort of retribution because I don't get to put the migration on my resume. That's an insane expectation.
    • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
      Depends on expectations and contractual agreements on how someone gets paid for their work. Entertainment can be a wildly different beast to that which us regular paycheck folks deal with.
• s1artibartfast 3y ago
  the part that I dont understand is why the production costs aren't always deductible, no matter what happens to the movie. When I run my company, I can deduct labor and material costs. I dont have to resort to any special measured to qualify for them. Is this about some accelerated ammonization schedule?
• merrywhether 3y ago
  WBD is a public company, can the shareholders sue or otherwise punish the board/CEO? I'm not sure where those boundaries are, just top of mind because of the recent Musk action. That seems like the appropriate source of any enforcement on this angle, as shareholders are most affected by these decisions and have standing.
• LuciBb 3y ago
  [flagged]
• anon373839 3y ago
  Can anyone with an accounting background explain what is actually happening on the books to make this economically advantageous? By forfeiting any revenue on these films, the studio is reducing its tax burden but isn’t it increasing its overall economic loss?
• tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  So how do these tax write offs actually work? I'm assuming that when the film is produced, they spend money to receive an asset, no different than e.g. buying a machine. With a machine, they could write it off over time, or (I assume) they can delete the movie/scrap the machine to immediately book the remaining value as a loss? If they don't do that, I think a machine is valued according to the purchase price and written off over X years. How does a movie get valued and written off? There's a good argument for banning write-offs for salvageable assets that are scrapped (regardless of whether it's machines, inventory or movies) - I've heard the tax impact argument made for the destruction of still-usable assets too.
  • mindslight 3y ago
    Seriously! So many exasperated comments talking about unfair "tax breaks" and whatnot, and very little examination of the mechanics that actually would support this. It's like the Seinfeld "write off" scene. From the sec 174 discussions, I had thought that movie production didn't even have to be capitalized? Or maybe that's wrong? But even with capitalization, you'd think that selling the movie to someone else would accomplish the same thing - fast forwarding the depreciation - but with some additional immediate cashflow, part of which goes to taxes. Unless the goal is to float this narrative for a year or two. Call the movies worthless for now, but retain control. And then finally "relent", re-value them upwards, and monetize? This would skip the current depreciation period and push taxes into the future.
• ThinkBeat 3y ago
  Could we not just skip the 30 years of copy right protection or whatever it is now and just release it to the public domain? No money will be made, but if people should want to they can view it. I am sure Internet Archive or some organization would be willing to host such movies, and not make any attempt at making a profit from it. Even better would be to turn all the assets that went into the creating it into the public domain as well. They should be able to say "Well this movie is total sh*t and we want a tax write off, once it is all done and we have recovered that money we will make it available to the public (at no cost to us)) Is the problem that if anyone was allowed to watch it, they may conclude that the movie had potential and thus the tax write off is not made in good faith?
  • ronsor 3y ago
    You're off by almost an order of magnitude there. It's 95 years of copyright protection nonsense, not a mere 30. Edit: very few would complain if it were only 30
    • jb1991 3y ago
      That is much less than “almost an order of magnitude.“
      • resolutebat 3y ago
        Since we're being pedantic here, it's just over half an order of magnitude, and could be rounded up to 1. log(95)-log(30)=0.5006
        • eviks 3y ago
          Could be rounded, but couldn't be converted into "almost"
      • littlestymaar 3y ago
        Had it been 105 year it would have been an order of magnitude. Being only 5 years off an order of magnitude justified the “almost an order of magnitude”.
• compumike 3y ago
  If we eliminated the accounting fiction called "depreciation", and instead simply had all expenses deductible in the year they were incurred or paid on a cash basis (with net losses carrying-over to future years), this wouldn't have happened.
• bbor 3y ago
  IDK if meta comments are ever allowed but: it appears HN has changed this headline, dropping the imperative clause “…should be a crime”. Why? I get that they want polite conversation on here, but pretending that the whole thesis of this essay doesn’t exist seems like an ineffective and terribly obscurative way to do that. But I’m probably missing something?
• cryptonector 3y ago
  @dang: Actual title: Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  "... deeming it bad-to-the-point of un-releasability (how they could prove this when no one outside the production had seen it remains a mystery" Not a mystery at all, the name is enough.
• plastic3169 3y ago
  Isn’t this how game companies operate often? They guard their brand by not putting out mediocre products.
• AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  I think the issue here isn't that they are deleting the movie, it's that they're deleting other people's work. Remember, a corporation is a group of people joining together to create something they couldn't individually. Yes, there's a bunch of contract law we pile on top of that to make the concept borderline worthless, but bear with me. If the employees created the movie, and the broader corporation declares it a failure and attempts to write it off, the people who created it should then be given the copyright or the copyright should be revoked such that those individual artists can do with it as they please. Anything else is just someone coming over and stomping on your sandcastle because employee contract law is insane.
• pmontra 3y ago
  Companies invest money to create products. Some turn into a profit, some don't, some don't even make it to the market. At the end of the year they sum revenues and expenses and either a profit or a loss. If a movie makes zero money it's only an expense and that already reduces the taxes on the revenues. SO why do studios have that tax write-off on top of normal tax on the revenues - expenses figure?
• bradley13 3y ago
  This...doesn't make sense? The expenses of producing the movie can already be offset against their profits. That's how business works: you only pay taxes on money you earn after expenses. So how, exactly, do they get an additional write-off for destroying the film? If you deliberately destroy something of value, why should you get to write that off your taxes? Consider: They certainly own a lot of computers. If the CEO walks through the building smashing all the computers with a sledgehammer, the IRS is not going to let them write off the destruction. That would be stupid. So why can they do this with a movie?
  • bluesign 3y ago
    Probably there are some costs involved after publishing the movie. Some minimum guarantee royalty commitment to some people involved, like actors etc.
• kryptiskt 3y ago
  If they released the movie to the public domain and set up a torrent, wouldn't the value of it be zero to them? And that in an even more irrevocable manner than destroying the copies they have (since you can never be sure that anyone has squirreled it away). Then they would get literally all the critics off their back.
• refurb 3y ago
  This article screams a lack of understanding of finances. A finished movie doesn't cost $0 to release. There is considerable spend on promotion, distribution, etc. If you don't do it, then movie revenues would be much lower. It doesn't make sense to spend $10M to make say $30M, when just destroying the film gets you $30M in tax benefits.
  • darick 3y ago
    From my reading of the article they had offers to buy the film which were more than the $30M tax benefit, but they declined them. If they sell the rights they don't have to handle release.
• AndriyKunitsyn 3y ago
  Hey, it's just like in the plot of GTA V :D I thought it's something absurd Rockstar made just for the plot, but apparently it's a common thing.
• kingkawn 3y ago
  Jus change the law so total tax write offs put the film into public domain rather than destruction