Brendan Fraser says ‘Batgirl’ being shelved shows that movies are being ‘commodified’ in Hollywood.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    They already have the enormous cost of production sunk though. I understand not paying for marketing, but projected profit goes from “negative” to “massively negative” if they don’t at least license it out to streaming.

    It’s probably something tax related, but still.

    • Zahille7@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      It’s literally all tax-related. Every single thing, not just Hollywood and movies.

      If something doesn’t make sense to us, it probably makes sense to the people who actually do the math on a regular basis.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Yeah.

        An anecdote: AT&T was having a fire sale on the base iPhone 16 Plus, like so cheap that it must have been a loss. It didn’t make any sense to me, but an employee speculated that, since it was their worst selling model of the lineup, they were clearing the inventory and writing it off as a loss to compensate for some other transactions.

    • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      23 hours ago

      This is classic sunk cost fallacy logic. It’s because they had the enormous cost of production sunk, they resisted the fallacy and sinking more money into it since the returns were not favorable.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        But this doesn’t apply. This product has like zero per unit cost, and (per reports) it’s all but finished.

        Hence the bare minimum cost for getting it out the door is basically nothing. With the state they have, they could use a tiny amount of money to make much, much more, no matter how poorly the movie performs.

        The only reasonable explanation is some external benefit to sinking it instead of releasing, like a tax write off.