Hacker Cinema
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
2007 · Film · 138 min
Part of Harry Potter Collection
Directed by David Yates
Returning for his fifth year at Hogwarts, Harry is stunned to find that his warnings about the return of Lord Voldemort have been ignored. Left with no choice, Harry takes matters into his own hands, training a small group of motivated students to defend themselves against the Dark Arts.
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10 comments on Hacker News
I found out his mom directed the movies "Monsoon Wedding" and "Mississipi Masala" with Denzel Washington.
Allegedly she was tapped to direct "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", but her then 14 year old son talked her out of it to do "The Namesake" instead
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26410290525844-Public-Content-Policy
Reddit may presume that the user holds the copyright and is legally able to grant a license, but it isn't necessarily so. There are users who set their avatar to "Baby Yoda", or posted 3 paragraphs they transcribed from their print edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, or just copied photos from their classmate's phone camera app without asking.
If you look through Flickr you will find many photos and collections with fake licenses. All those sites you Google that advertise "Free Public Domain Clip Art / Stock Photos" maintain plausible deniability. Look through any wiki on Fandom.com and see whether the film studios go after their most ardent fans who upload dozens of stills and screenshots to promote The Twilight Saga or something.
In 1990 I wrote a configuration file to assist me in using GNU Emacs. I wrote and debugged it from scratch, in my free time, on my family's dime. I decided that it had a broad enough application to be useful to other Emacs users, so I submitted it to the developers. They included the file in a subsequent release of Emacs 18, and it was there for a decade or more.
My submission had been quite informal and, while I'd included some self-attribution at the top of the file, there was no explicit LICENSE or GPL or assignment of copyright. By submitting it to the developers of GNU Emacs for distribution, I had implicitly licensed it via the same GPL.
However, this informality was not enough to pass an audit later. By ca. 2010, they combed through the sources and removed the file I had submitted, along with others, because they were unable to track down the explicit licensing or copyright assignments that were seen as necessary by then.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
That's basically how Hollywood accounting works, with some of the highest grossing films and franchises in history not paying a penny in tax due to showing a 'loss' on paper.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) ended up with a $167 million loss on paper after grossing nearly $1 billion. According to New Line's accounts, the LOTR trilogy made "horrendous losses" and no profit at all. Same as Forrest Gump, Men in Black, and Return of the Jedi.
The Music industry is far worse in its financial machinations.
With some minor exceptions, the companies involved in this are all American.
Uh huh. Sure.
There's a reason they call it Hollywood Accounting[1].
Not that Warner Brothers is new to this game either:
>A Warner Bros. receipt was leaked online, showing that the hugely successful movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ended up with a $167 million loss on paper after grossing nearly $1 billion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
> He went to their office to have a look at the accounting books and found out that they were making $80 million loss. So he looked down at the expense items and he noticed a big expense item of $140 million.
This is how every major film works. Sometimes that offset will be for future films, sometimes it will be a charge for "marketing and promotion" paid to a child company of the studio, but no matter what you call it you don't make a blockbuster film without this kind of funny bookkeeping.
Warner Brothers claimed a $167 million dollar loss on Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix, a film that made nearly a billion dollars in theaters.
https://www.slashfilm.com/insane-studio-accounting-warner-bros-claims-167-million-loss-over-harry-potter-and-the-order-of-the-phoenix/
See the incredible profit/loss sheet there.
Top talent – A-list stars – negotiate for gross points. Daniel Radcliffe likely made a percentage of 600 million. Secondary stars might've got a percentage of gross after the "distribution fee" (paid to the same studio making the movie). Everybody else got a percentage of negative one hundred sixty seven million.
Daniel Radcliffe war the same thing every day (http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0051271/) in order to prevent paparazzi getting useful pictures of the ongoing filming of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
One particularly famous example: "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" earned $940M at the worldwide box office, yet Warner Brothers reported the film at a $167M loss on paper.
Link with an itemized, Hollywood Accounting-style breakdown:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml
Unreal: "A WB receipt was leaked online, showing that the hugely successful movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ended up with a $167 million loss on paper. This is especially unusual, given that the Harry Potter film series is the highest-grossing film series of all time."
"A good example of “Hollywood accounting” would be “Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix”, which took in $938 million in revenue, yet still produced a $167 million loss. In cases like this the distributor, Warner Bros., still makes a bundle, but the film and its backers, set up as a independent corporation, wind up in debt. How is this possible? You can get a more detailed picture in this episode of Planet Money, which details how Disney paid itself more than $200 million in distribution fees on the Nicholas Cage vehicle “Gone in 60 Seconds.” The film made a lot of money for Disney, even while the corporation created to produce “Gone In 60 Seconds” was a loser on the official accounting."
Now I understand why Hollywood does not want simplified and efficient distribution. It has nothing to do with ignorance and everything to do with greed and avoiding all risk. They overcharge for complicated distribution and DRM, and pass all the risk of to the film and its backers.
> Devil's advocate: would Wheaton be speaking out in this way if he were more successful actor?
How successful? Courtney Love also complained about this ages ago:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml
And Wikipedia also has a whole list of lawsuits over it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
For example, on paper, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix lost $167 million dollars. How bad is that? Well:
"Order of the Phoenix is the unadjusted 15th highest-grossing film of all time, [...] The film opened to a worldwide 5-day opening of $333 million, fourth all-time, and grossed $939 million total [...]"
But you have a point. The people who aren't that successful can't afford to rock the boat. But the people who are successful have less incentive to want to, because it no longer affects them as badly. They can demand cash up front and worry less about the alleged financials of the work.