The entertainment industry has a long history of making successful movies appear unprofitable on paper to avoid paying royalties.
The entertainment industry has a long history of making successful movies appear unprofitable on paper to avoid paying royalties.
From the movie "Bowfinger" [0]
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131325/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_acc...The massive battle Peter Jackson had with the studio after none of the LoTR movies made a "profit" was very telling.
Oh, and it's even an example in that Wiki article you linked lol
My favorite example of this is when Warner Brothers said that Malibu’s Most Wanted wasn’t profitable because they spent so much money marketing Harry Potter that year.
That’s not how things work as far par as participating on the back end of a specific project (which is contractual, not entity based). Thats a profit /loss sharing entity setup for legal accounting reasons (the entity files taxes). Generally not even required since the studio does this at their corp level. Even LLCs will pass these through. This would likely be do some partner/investor.
The contracts that celebrities get on adjusted gross (adjusted is doing 100x the work of the word gross in this context) have no specific entity revenue in mind. If costs show up later after some cash has been distributed, people absolutely freak out to give money back, so you need an arrangement that works such that that doesn’t happen.
Plenty of agents over the years sold celebrities the idea of gross on first dollar and couldn’t be bothered to read the proposed contract which led to many publicized lawsuits.