Warner Bros. Loses Millions On Harry Potter 5, Ninth Biggest Grossing Movie Of All Time...Somehow
To the outside world, this is known as 'Hollywood Accounting', but when I was in LA in 2001 it was called FuckYou Accounting by independent producers. I'm guessing it still is :
According to the (Warner Bros. accounting) statement, the film shows a loss of $167+ million. Even with one of the top 10 worldwide grosses of all time, the film’s distribution, advertising, and print costs—which are listed as being the film’s greatest expenses—are apparently enough to negate every dollar of that achievement.
This means that cast, producers, writers and crew members who signed on for a chunk of the net profits, that is all the money left over from what the movie's made at cinemas, on cable and DVD after all the costs have been deducted, perhaps instead of higher upfront fees, now get sweet fuck all. The movie didn't make money, it lost more than $167 million. FuckYou accounting.
The WB statement :
That is a one page history of FuckYou/Hollywood acconting. Anything and everything gets charged to the movie's total "costs", until there is nothing left but a loss, which means nothing to share with "net profit" participants.
FuckYouAcounting has been part of the Hollywood system for all of its history. FuckYou accounting is Hollywood.
Warner Bros. can also lose money on mega-successful TV shows like Babylon 5, created, written and produced by J. Michael Straczynski :
Straczynski, who wrote 90% of the episodes in addition to producing the show, would receive a generous cut of profits if not for Hollywood accounting.
The series, which was profitable in each of its five seasons from 1993–1998, has garnered more than US$1 billion for Warner Bros., most recently US$500 million in DVD sales alone. But in the last profit statement given to Straczynski, Warner Bros. claimed the property was $80 million in debt.
"Basically", says Straczynski, "by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits."
Here's a good story on how Hollywood tried to fuck over Winston Groom, the author of the novel Forrest Gump, which became one of the biggest grossing movies of all time. Groom was in for a cut of the "net profits". Of course there were none to share with him.
The smart people, like Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, James Cameron, and the young casts of Harry Potter and the Twilight series, go for a cut of the box office gross, or First Dollar Gross, but even that can get very, very complicated.
Another good story here, with producer Don Murphy, takes you through some examples of Hollywood Accounting, but also shows the other side, an industry where the upfront costs can be huge and the money slow to trickle back in.
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Friday, June 24, 2011
The Tsunami Is Here, But Don't Forget To Close Your Car Door When You Run
What can you say while watching this video of the Japanese tsunami, shot from inside a car, except Holy Fucking Shit! Just extraordinary, in a world filled with cameras, we are seeing the reality of natural disasters like never before, and it's absolutely terrifying :
JK Rowling Will Be First Author To Earn $1 Billion From E-Books
* She won't be writing an eighth Harry Potter novel, saying, "I do have closure with Harry. I have no plans to write another novel. I'm pretty sure I'm done on the novel front."
* The 7 Harry Potter novels will be sold on PotterMore.com from October.
* PotterMore.com will create 'expanded universes' for the Harry Potter novels. Each novel in the series will get its own interactive, explorable "world" on the site, and items like wands and potions will be sold to allow fans to go deeper into these worlds. A paywall, of a kind, to extra content.
* Rowling said she has 18,000 words of extra material for the site, adding more detail to the history of the houses of Hogwarts and the personal histories of key characters.
* Rowling said the focus of PotterMore will be on "reading".
She has announced it won't be one of the massive corporate book publishers who releases all 7 Harry Potter novels as e-books, or digital books. It will be her.
JK Rowling is set to become the first billionaire self-publisher.
When JK Rowling first signed her Harry Potter book publishing deal (for an advance of a few thousand dollars), she did not sign away the "electronic book rights" as they were known in the 1990s. She retained those rights.
And now those Harry Potter digital book rights, which she would have been offered perhaps the equivalent of a few hundred dollars for in the original HP publishing deal, will make JK Rowling the first author to earn more than a billion dollars from ebook sales. I'll explain why below.
Here's how JK Rowling launched PotterMore, her Harry Potter digital publishing venture today :
Selling ebooks and audio books of already published Harry Potter novels will just be the start of what JK Rowling will do with Evermore. My guess is it will be the gateway to an expanding universe of Harry Potter, much like George Lucas has done with Star Wars. Unlike Lucas, Rowling will make some of the PotterMore content available for free, as enticement to buy some or all of the digital books she'll make available for sale.
To keep Harry Potter alive in the minds of her aging fans, and to ensure the passing on of the stories to a second generation of HP fans, JK Rowling knows she has to keep producing new content.
In the video above, Rowling admits she has been "hoarding" Harry Potter material, perhaps not another full novel, but presumably quite a few unpublished chapters, or longer versions of chapters already published, plus stories from the pasts of various characters fans already know and love. JK Rowling may never write a Harry Potter sequel, but there will undoubtably be prequels, some may not even be written by her, but instead guided by her and sold on PotterMore.
So why will JK Rowling be the first author to earn a billion from ebook sales?
Because JK Rowling owns the digital publishing rights to her creation. She didn't sign those rights away like so many other well known, and stunningly unsavvy, authors have done in the decade and a half since the first Harry Potter novel was published.
Some of the most successful authors in the world today are battling their publishers for a greater slice of the rapidly rising digital book take. And these authors are pissed off. Publishers are trying to please their mega-sellers by offering 20-35% of digital sales, a vast increase on the standard 10-15% authors get back from the cover price of hardback and paperback sales.
Authors argue, and rightly so, that whatever large expenses footed by the publishers in originally editing, designing, printing, publishing and distributing their paper and cardboard books are figured into the big fat chunk of every book sold that already goes back to the publishers.
Authors, and again rightly so, believe that for the publishing giants like Harper Collins their 60% or more slice of every digital book sold is pretty much all cream.
As JK Rowling becomes, effectively, her own digital publishing company, and as she owns the digital publishing rights to all her novels and characters, she will earn back 90% or more of the price of every digital book she sells at PotterMore. The other ten percent from each digibook sold be mostly soaked up by whoever processes the credit card sales for her (unless she's also planning her own PotterMore digital currency and banking system).
Right now, new digital books by well known authors can range in price from $3 to $15. The major publishers would like a world standard price for a digital novel to be in the $12 to $14.99 range. That's the absurd price they're pushing hard to be established at the moment.
JK Rowling will have no need to be so greedy.
If she charges $10 per Harry Potter digital book, and if she really has no legal obligation to give her print publishers a cut of any kind (which she appears not to have), Rowling will net around $9 for every digital book sold.
To earn $100 million from digital book sales, JK Rowling need only sell 11 milion Harry Potter digital books in a year.
But how many is she likely to sell?
If only 10 percent of all the people in the world who ever brought a Harry Potter novel in print, more than 300 million people, buy just one ebook from PotterMore in the first six months after they become available for sale in October, JK Rowling will earn more than $200 million by April 2012.
Even if she charged only $5 per book, she'll still make more than $100 million by mid-next year.
But JK Rowling could easily entice her fans to pay $10 for each digital book, particularly by including additional or alternate chapters, links to an encyclopedia and video and audio features, for example.
If she gets back $9 from every digibook sold, JK Rowling will reach $1 billion after selling 111,111,111 digibooks, a huge volume, but at 22 million a year over five years not an outrageous amount of digital book sales for the world's most popular novel series.
Will Rowling digitally release all seven already published Harry Potter novels at the same time? Or will she stagger the releases, say a new one every three months? Will Harry Potter addicts be able to one day buy all seven books, with extra stories and material, together, as something like The Complete Harry Potter?
Unknown at this time.
Nobody really knows what digital publishing holds in store next year. Or the year after. It was only three years ago that some of the most successful book publishers in the world sniffed at the coming reality of ebook sales outstripping print sales and laughed it all of never becoming anything of great consequence.
Now JK Rowling is digitally self-publishing, the biggest publishers in the world are in a panic. What if Stephen King decides to publish his new books himself? What if every author on the New York Times bestseller list decides to digitally self-publish? What if every new author who finds enough good reasons to even sign a deal with a major publisher demands a majority royalty deal from their digital books?
It's not an exaggeration to say that the 20th century model of mass market book publishing has been changed forever this year, not solely by JK Rowling of course, but primarily because she is going to show every writer just how valuable it is to hang onto the rights of the most likely highly profitable, long-term revenue stream generated from their stories and their characters : the self-published digital book.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Almost 1 million views on YouTube in a handful of days for a professor explaining in two minutes some of the biggest problems with the American economy? Who said there isn't an audience for the truth?
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Nice slideshow of 30 years of front covers from UK hard rock/metal magazine Kerrang! The early covers are better.
Just how convincing are CGHs (computer generated humans) becoming? This convicing :
This girl has never breathed, has never seen the sun, has no parents, no presence in our reality, except as a computer generated image.
Stunning. Just downright stunning.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
"Fear And Panic, Heroism And Cowardice, Sadism And Self-Sacrifice, Hysteria And Mass Emotion"
In this LA Times' Hero Complex piece, Super 8 director JJ Abrams cites the startling poster of 1974's disaster movie epic Earthquake as a childhood obsession (along with Famous Monsters, Dick Smith make-up guides and super-8 film projectors). It certainly is a remarkable piece of movie poster art. Details :
“I was obsessed with the design of the poster for ‘Earthquake’ so we have it in one of the kid’s rooms…it was an image of people just falling. I can’t tell you how many times I just drew it. I was just massively obsessed."
Trailer :
The special effects seem remarkably more 'real' than a lot of the complex CGI work we've seen in the recent revival of the Great American Disaster Movie.
'Earthquake' came in a swarm of big budget, star-soaked disaster dramas of the 1970s - Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno - and many of them, like Earthquake, were massive successes, earning more than $300 million in today's dollars at the box office. Before Star Wars and Jaws supposedly invented the Monster Box Office Movie, these films did enormous business and the disaster genre was a steady earner for Hollywood studios right through the 1970s.
A quick list :
Airport (1970)
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
The Towering Inferno (1974)
Airport 75 (1974)
The Swarm
Beyond The Poseidon Adventure (1979)
The Hindenburg (1975)
The Cassandra Crossing (1976)
Two Minute Warning (1976)
Black Sunday (1977)
Damnation Alley (1977)
Airport 77 (1977)
The Swarm (1978)
Avalanche (1978)
City Of Fire (1979)
Airport 79 : The Concorde (1979)
Meteor (1979)
Rollercoaster! (1979)
When Time Ran Out (1980)
For the decade of the Great American Disaster Movie time had most definitely run out. The next disaster-themed movie to set fire to the box office was the brilliant disaster epic satire Airplane.
Thursday, June 09, 2011
A perfect example of what the human race can do when it embraces co-operation, instead of confrontation :
Friday, June 03, 2011
Join The Marines, Fight Balrog
They're not really showing much reality in these US military recruiting ads, are they? Unless there are special Marines now fighting dragons in alternate universes :
"...the New York Times this week tells us that the Pentagon is -- shocker! -- using all sorts of media channels to glorify militarism and sell it to the nation's children. The armed forces, of course, have been carefully constructing this child-focused Military-Entertainment Complex for the better part of three decades. And that complex includes directly subsidizing Hollywood's pro-militarist films, despite the Times' insistence that the military's financial support of "X-Men: First Class" represents the Army's "first sponsorship deal with a Hollywood film."
One part of the Pentagon is employing every media instrument available -- Twitter, Facebook, TV commercials, movies, etc. -- to tell America that becoming a soldier gets enlistees immortal superpowers that will keep them safe on the battlefield. At the same time, another part of the Pentagon is employing its considerable influence over that same media world to try to prevent the blood-soaked truth of the battlefield from ever being seen.
That may help the Pentagon boost its short-term recruitment numbers, but it screws over enlistees who are promised one experience, and given another.
Buy The Fantasy, Live The Reality (For The Rest Of Your Life)
Thursday, June 02, 2011
The Fake Knight Rises
By Darryl Mason
The new Christopher Nolan Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, is still shooting but something of a teaser clip campaign has already begun on YouTube. An account called The Fire Rises has been posting short clips, with a focus on what appears to be the burning of Gotham City and an unintelligble chant. In the order they were posted since May 21 :
Are they chanting, "This is murder, murder, murder, this is murder"?
UPDATE : Warner Bros. is yet to clear this up, but there's a bit of controversy about whether the above clips are actually connected with Nolan's new Batman film, or whether they're in fact 'fan made' and therefore fake.
The chant in the above clips is from the official The Dark Knight Rises website, launched a few days before the first of the clips appeared on YouTube, but some of the footage used is actual news footage, from our world.
For example, the '419' clip uses a processed version of the Philadelphia gas main explosion clip below :
And '419' also uses this footage of a spectacular 2009 skyscraper fire in China :
So they probably are fake, but they're very well done.
Anyway, can't imagine Warner Bros. would be too upset with all the online discussion and speculation these clips have generated. Interesting, though, that after a week they've made no effort to have the clips taken down, even though they sample footage from the first of Nolan's Batman movies.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Murdoch Media Blames 300,000 'Global Warming Deaths' A Year On Obese People
The stories themselves make exactly the kind of hysterical and grandious claims, about the reality and impact of global warming, that the Murdoch media used to once hammer people like Al Gore for spouting off about. But not anymore.
GLOBAL warming is ALREADY killing 300,000 a year, it grimly emerged yesterday.
Another 300 MILLION are also victims - suffering misery as they battle floods, famine and other natural disasters caused by climate change.
Worldwide a whopping FOUR BILLION people are at risk.
Meanwhile, this story from the UK Sun demands, " ... overweight must eat less for planet" :
The rising number of fat people was yesterday blamed for global warming.
Scientists warned that the increase in big-eaters means more food production - a major cause of CO2 gas emissions warming the planet.
Overweight people are also more likely to drive, adding to environmental damage.
Each fat person is said to be responsible for emitting a tonne more of climate-warming carbon dioxide per year than a thin one.
It means an extra BILLION TONNES of CO2 a year is created, according to World Health Organisation estimates of overweight people.
The scientists say providing extra grub for them to guzzle adds to carbon emissions that heat up the world, melting polar ice caps, raising sea levels and killing rain forests.
...Oxfam warned yesterday that the number of people hit by climate-related disasters will soar by more than half in the next six years to 375million.
The impact of more storms, floods and droughts could overwhelm aid organisations.
The Sun website even includes a countdown clock based around a Prince Charles quote on how long he thinks we have left before we will be destroyed by global warming :
Rupert Murdoch is the world's most influential, powerful promoter of corporate greenism, climate change disasters and global warming 'reality'. That Murdoch also, for 'balance', employs a handful of journalists who theatrically rail and shout about "the Green Faith" and "global warming hysteria" does not alter the fact that Murdoch's biggest TV shows, newspapers and websites are all on board to promote Murdoch's Green Agenda.
That Murdoch's worldwide media operations are now all 'carbon neutral' may be good news for the environment, but once a global price has been set on carbon dioxide emissions, that corporate greenism is going to prove to be very, very good news for Murdoch's profits.
And that above all else is what ultimately matters for Rupert Murdoch.
