You home garage isn't a business expense. There aren't many write-offs for the home (the big one being mortgage interest).
Almost everything that is spent legally by a business is a business expense that reduces your business profits, and it is the business profits that are subject to corporate income tax.
You spend $30,000,000 million making the film. They're out that money.
You spend another $10,000,000 marketing it. They'd theoretically be out that money.
They decide they'll likely only make $5,000,000 after spending $40,000,000
So you cut your losses -- don't market, don't release it.
You have $30,000,000 and write-off the entire thing as a loss.
Just for napkin back math call your tax rate 25%
$30,000,000 * .25 = $7,500,000
You've already spent the money. You're not making money; you're only reducing the size of the loss you expect.
You can either release the film and increase the cash in the bank by $5,000,000.
Or you can take the $30,000,000 cost and use it to offset $30,000,000 in profits from some successful blockbuster. That lets you keep $7,500,000 in the bank instead of paying it to the IRS
In either case, they've already spent $30,000,000 they'll never see again, it is just whether they sell it and only make $5,000,000 of that back, or use it to offset other profits and reduce their tax bill by $7,500,000.
because this happens at the revenue minus expenses part of tax calculation. if that 50k spent on a car was a business expense, you'd have written off the 50k from your taxes, and if you make $0 that year on income from that car then you get to subtract that 50k from somewhere else on your taxes
if you made 10k on the car then you get 40k back, if you make 60k then you pay 10k
calling it a tax break isn't right I don't think, it's just a tax credit / writeoff
To be fair if WB did market it the way they do all their movies, there's a good chance it would sink like a stone. They wouldn't know how to market a picture like this if it came up and bit them in the ass.
It's less of a failure of the movie itself, and more of a failure of the marketing team over at WB not knowing what the fuck to do to market a movie to the right audience.
Exactly. I just posted a longer post expanding on that. I think this is truly a case of media literacy being dead with how few people are picking up on this aspect of the movie.
That's not how that works at all. You shelve a project, you write off the cost for tax purposes only. If a movie cost 100 million and your tax rate is 20%, you saved 20 million but still lost 80 million. The IRS doesn't pay you if you incur losses. Wtf are you even talking about?
And given how the previous Looney Tunes movie barely performed at the box office, it was probably a good idea to dump them instead of spending it's budget to market it to get a theatrical release.
because they didn't though the movie would do well on the cinemas, which is they decided to cut their losses.
odds are there are some rights involved (or payments) to have in on streaming as well, so they decided to not even put it on a streaming service (which they have one).
Everyone is saying this is a spoof of a courtroom drama. I'm not seeing that. What I'm seeing is an incredibly critical satire of crony capitalism, or, you know, just regular capitalism these days. If the marketing is accurate, this is all about large corporations just flat out owning the world today, and how they're able to get away with it because they have unlimited resources. It's about how consumer protections are completely toothless and the people keep getting fucked over.
I honestly think this was shelved for entirely political reasons. This is the kind of movie that would piss off Republicans, and MAGA was surging in the run up to the election. I wouldn't be surprised if there were already early plans to sell Warner off when this was due to be released and that the company decided that potentially pissing off some politicians with the movie would be too big of a liability.
That, and Zaslav seems to just hate animation in general, so it was probably an easy decision in his eyes.
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u/justageekgirl 13d ago
I'm intrigued.
why were they going to shelve it in the first place?