Hollywood accounting is always a murky pool to wade into … unlike accounting in the real world, it’s very, very difficult for outsiders to understand how the money is spent and where the profits go. Christopher Nolan’s new film seems to have broken new ground in Hollywood accounting, very much to Nolan’s benefit:
So Nolan is getting 15% off direct revenue, (not profits, gross, and his wife another 5%) from the Odyssey, basically risk free, AFTER his 20 million up front.
That’s a better cut than a lot of mob bosses take off drug dealers (which tend to vary between 5 and 30% depending on how much violence they can command).
And probably core stars (Damon and Hathaway mostly) are getting some smaller percent of the same deal.
This is unheard of. Basically a violation of fiduciary duties to the investors.
Studio execs paid all these people to make this movie this way against their own investors’ interests.
So if another 10-30% of gross is divided across Damon, Hathaway, Holland, Pattinson, and Theron … You know the real stars (Zendaya, Nyong’o, and Page don’t draw crowds and aren’t getting that) …
Then you might have to effectively cut all revenue first by 50% for theaters, then by another 40-50% for the star power.
It other words … The Odyssey would need to make 800 million – 1 billion before it could even hypothetically start to turn a profit for investors.
All the Woke casting etc. Is actually a cover for basically outright money laundering and embezzlement by the entertainment class. And because its “sticking it to the Chuds” business news and institutions are covering for the fact a bunch of studios just defrauded Universal Studios’ parent Comcast, to possibly the tune of hundreds of millions.
Comcast is a publicly traded company. That’s 401Ks and pension funds.
And all the woke stuff is in there so that no studio execs, corporate leaders, media, or corporate watchdogs will call them out for basically transferring hundreds of millions of retiree dollars into their own pockets.
All the discussion of “Will the Odyssey make its money back” is missing the point that there is almost NO WAY for the Odyssey to actually produce a reasonable return to investors … BY DESIGN.
It is a pure, basically fraudulent, wealth transfer from American middle-class investors to Hollywood insiders irrespective of whatever money the film does or does not make … intentionally.
And all the woke window dressing is chaff, or a bonus to prevent any institutions from having the nerve to call them out lest they get called, racist, sexist, and transphobic.
