If you have a passing interest in film and animation, you’ve likely heard of Coyote Vs. Acme, a feature film in the Roger Rabbit tradition of blending 2D animation with live action focusing on characters from Warner Brothers’ Roadrunner cartoons. The film would have focused on Wile E. Coyote suing the ubiquitous Acme corporation after decades of selling him faulty products, and by all accounts appeared to be a passion project from everyone involved. The movie was, in fact, complete and ready for release- only for Warner Brothers to kill it at the last possible second in the name of a multi-million dollar tax writeoff.
Can anyone ELI5 how it’s preferable for these studios to write off finished productions like this vs. releasing them and making additional profits?
Make 10 things for $10.
Try to sell each for $100, say only one sells.
Rather than take a lower price, you write off the 9.
Your taxable income is now $10. And your average profit per thing is $90. Which is good for stock prices.
Mix in Hollywood accounting, and you might even still not have a taxable income. Plus, those other 9 aren’t competing against the 1 that made it. They’re concentrating all the profits in one thing, which makes marketing easier
But really, it all comes down to manipulating stock price.
But you didn’t try to sell the other 9? You made them for $10 each and then threw them straight in the trash.
That’s not what happens here…
They were trying to sell this for 80 million, no one want d to pay that.
It didn’t cost 80 million, they could have sold it for less.
But that would dilute the market and lower prices for other films.
It’s like luxury goods destroying their own product rather than lowering the price to move all their inventory. It’s not about selling as many as possible, it’s about having the highest profit margin.
Like, why are you trying to argue that this isn’t profitable? These studios spend millions on lawyers and accountants to ensure profits are maximized.
You think you know more than them?
The solution is legislation to prevent this bullshit from being more profitable than releasing them.
Woah calm down, I’m not trying to argue with you. I was just trying to wrap my head around your ELI5 explanation by asking a clarifying question.
Why the hostile tone? Sheesh
Resting A-hole Tone. It is a condition like RBF
It sounds more like frustration at the whole situation tone to me. I think we all want new content and we want creators to thrive. This situation sucks for many mnay people
there’s definitely some accounting shenanigans going on.
Do they write off the other nine things for $90 or $900 based on the value of the materials or the estimated value of the work. I assume if they say, “we earned $100 but it cost us $900 to do that,” on your taxes that you can get your taxes owed down to about zero.
I’ll admit I’m not an expert in the specific tax laws related to this industry, but as an accountant I’ve always suspected these narratives were a myth. The only way it makes sense to me is if the highest marginal tax rate these studios have exceeds 100%, or if they are somehow able to write off more costs than they actually spent somehow. If anyone knows of a specific tax law that makes this work I’d love to hear about it.
There are two other reasons I think are more likely, and the reality could be both.
First, there could be some timing difference where they had amortized some costs over a longer period initially, but are now moving them all to the present. So those expenses would reduce their tax burden this year, but no longer have any effect on future years. Sacrificing long-term benefits for short-term benefits, a common strategy today when corporations seem to be hyper fixated on the next quarter’s reports. The confusing part to me is that, as far as I know, this decision is independent of whether they release the movie or not. But I could be wrong there.
Second, this could save additional costs. I’m not an expert in this industry, but I imagine that even after the video itself is finalized and ready to go there are still more costs to be incurred in marketing and distributing it. The money they’ve spent to make the movie is already gone, so the question becomes do they think that they can earn more money in revenue than what it costs to do all that? Especially factoring in scaling costs. For example, some actors or other credited workers might get royalties in the form of a percentage of gross or net revenue (there are famous examples of accounting tricks being used by studios to screw actors out of royalties by showing negative net revenue for profitable films). It could be that something impacted another adjacent revenue stream like merchandising or a videogame tie-in, that further changes their original profitability calculation.
Hollywood accounting in a nutshell
Various examples can be found on Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
I totally agree that it is most likely a way to balance short - and long-term income, but I guess I’m not financially savvy enough to see how a well established studio would prefer the former.
To your second point, especially for an established IP with universal appeal like the movie in question, I just can’t understand how anyone thinks the return on marketing and distribution vs. potential income would be a net negative. Remember, they’ve already made the movie, so the productuon costs are sunk.
In any case, I appreciate the detailed response.
Netflix offered to buy it, which would’ve dropped WB’s marketing costs to zero. WB said no.
Yeah, I’d also like to understand this better.
There is no risk involved. It’s like building a house and burn it for more insurance money.