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Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

The argument isn't that WB shouldn't be able to scrap projects. The argument is that the tax break for doing this is bad and should not exist

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Except the post very much is arguing studios shouldn’t be able to scrap projects. Did you catch the end? “governments exist (in part) to regulate corporations, in order to stop them from doing things that are deleterious or destructive to the public good and to individuals who work for them.” This isn’t saying the tax break is bad, it’s saying that deleting a film is what’s bad.

> This isn’t saying the tax break is bad, it’s saying that deleting a film is what’s bad.

That's a true statement, though. What's wrong with saying that?

And if you change the tax breaks, you can get the desired behavior without imposing additional rules.

That is not necessarily true. Studios can still decide that a movie is sufficiently bad that it is a brand risk and will still refuse to release it even if they cannot deduct some or all of the expense to create it.

That would at least make this happen a lot less often.

I wasn’t suggesting above that anything is wrong with say deleting a film is bad, only pointing out that is what the article is claiming, contrary to the parent’s claim.

That said, TBH, I don’t see a problem with deleting a film, if there are no tax breaks in question. I don’t agree with the author that governments should force anyone to sell or give away something they don’t want to sell or give away. I’m pretty sure the author’s suggestions and a bunch of the commentary here is completely naive and unrealistic about the ramifications of being forced to release a film against the studio’s will; there are many reasons studios don’t want to do that aside from money, including reputation, liability, copyrights, brand recognition, etc.. The author suggested trying to use moral rights to force the release, but the funny thing is that using moral rights to prevent the release is a much stronger argument, if the film is actually crappy, right? I don’t know exactly what the tax breaks in question are, but I don’t see a problem with not paying taxes on profits either. I do see a potential problem with doing both things at the same time - if the tax breaks were more than not having to pay a percent of the profits; that’s does start to sound like burning down your house for the insurance money.

I’ve worked overtime on a project that was canned after being finished, and also worked at a studio that was closed on the heels of $1B in sales, with rumors the execs said the tax break was bigger than the remaining profits. These things suck hard and they’re destructive and it’s obvious that accountant-executives lack all imagination and can’t see potential. But should it be illegal? Probably not, forcing people to do business when they don’t want to would drive businesses into the ground and ruin people.

If we're to do that are we going to force every company to release a product they've developed, or otherwise the code/blueprints for it?

Aside from the reputation hit I mentioned, the unreleased film might have some neat ideas they want to recycle into another, better project.

There's a case to be made that we should eliminate tax breaks for all "R&D" work, but this article doesn't persuade me. It reads like it was written by someone who'se unhappy that they're work won't see the light of day, which I get. I've developed several products that at the last minute the exec team decided wasn't worth the capex to tool up...it's just a part of the game.

Again, eliminating a perverse tax incentive doesn't "force" anyone to do anything. Why is it self-evident that we should subsidize failure at the level of a corporation to prevent balance sheets going negative, especially when we are so against doing the same for an individual to prevent them from becoming homeless?

Don’t think it’s self-evident. My point was only that if I were to accept OPs argument I’d have to accept them larger argument to abolish the existing subsidies, and the article didn’t persuade me that to do so is the best way to go.

I’d like to read an argument against subsidizing development.

One argument is that that particular kind of subsidy is incredibly easy to game, and so you tend to create more reward-hacking than actual benefit

They're turning $10 into $3 except at the scale of millions of dollars.

What hack or gaming did they perform?

In this case, refusing offers to sell in favor of a strategy that simply wastes the time and effort of everyone involved in the production with no recourse. This should at the very least not allow them to write it off their taxes. Admittedly, a lot of the problems that enable this situation are more about how IP and ownership work as well as the consolidation of the entertainment industry (and every other industry for that matter), but I think the fact that there's a monetary incentive for this kind of thing which directly exhibits the exact kind of anti-productivity incentives at scale that people use to argue against social programs warrants special consideration in its own right

> wastes the time and effort of everyone involved in the production with no recourse

Those people were already paid for their work.

And the vast overwhelming majority of them are not being paid comparably to jobs that require similar workloads and levels of education, due to the "vocational awe" of working on a movie. This is so pervasive in the arts that it's been talked about for decades, but it's not a problem our economy seems equipped to solve: Since people like working on art projects, people will often line up to do so even when conditions and pay don't economically square with their effort. To benefit from this vocational awe and then scrap the project is itself a moral injury to those workers

> but it's not a problem our economy seems equipped to solve

It's not a problem at all in my opinion.

> Since people like working on art projects, people will often line up to do so even when conditions and pay don't economically square with their effort.

The pay has only to be accepted to be fair. You're free to start your own production company that pays more "fairly" but you'll find yourself with fewer opportunities to give people this "awe" than the company that can finance more projects.

> To benefit from this vocational awe

Warner Bros. is losing money by scrapping the movie, how are they benefiting in this case?

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