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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

> usually don't even count their revenue from outside of movie theaters

I assure you, people are counting revenue. They're not releasing Blurays as a charity.

I meant in publicly available "box office" figures and all that. Box office earnings alone usually cover all the expenses already, many times over.

I'm fairly sure the only reason for this is to minimize backend payments to actors & directors.

Exactly, it's to not pay anyone that has terms in their contracts that say something like "earns 1% of the film's profits". If all the revenue is paid out to the studio in the form of "consulting fees" then voila: no profits.

The industry doesn't exist in a vacuum - movies and TV shows are all financed with the expectation of long tail revenue and the people financing them are the ones who invented Hollywood accounting. A lot of the big budget stuff would be too risky without that revenue and it effects everything from the actor-SAG-studio relationship to licensing deals between major studios.

So we would get smaller but more movies, about real stuff and not generic stuff that can be mass marketed.

> I meant in publicly available "box office" figures and all that. Box office earnings alone usually cover all the expenses already, many times over.

Maybe it covers the expenses for the studio but it's not necessarily sufficient for all artists involved in the creation. Movie tickets (and/or other short term revenue streams) would have to be more expensive if artists (actors, writers, directors, ...) wouldn't be able to get a cut of streaming- and other secondary exhibition revenue for a while after release.

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