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However, many factors can impact how much an accountant will charge you for tax assistance. For an accurate price estimate, request quotes from severalcertified public accountants near you.

If net profit formulas in studio contracts do not correspond to generally accepted accounting principles those same studios might face something as frightening as an audit from the Securities and Exchange Commission. And if that were to happen, the entire profit hiding scheme might become a thing of the past. Naturally Buchwald sued, as his contract with Paramount indicated he would be paid for creating the film’s story. The California Superior Court heard Buchwald v. Paramount and reached a verdict in 1990, deciding in favor of Buchwald. The court stated that a preponderance of evidence proved that Coming to America was based on Buchwald’s treatment especially because Landis and Murphy had full access to this treatment as well as the previous versions of the script. Because of the decision that the story was “based upon” Buchwald’s work, Paramount’s option agreement specified that he would be paid should a movie based on the treatment be made and Buchwald was, in fact, never paid Paramount was found in breach of the contract.

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However, the Foxy accountants revealed that by this time the film had actually lost over $2 million for the studio since its 25 May 1979 release. Accountants may offer a package rate for weekly, monthly or annual services to reward ongoing customers. Many accountants offer online services where small businesses can access online accounting software and payroll assistance, and the accountant — for a monthly or other recurring fee — provides financial analysis and reporting of their numbers. For basic monthly accounting services, an accountant might charge anywhere from $75 to $500 or more, depending on what was included in a given package, the size of the client’s business, and the complexity of work requested.

Namely, these percentages are assigned without much regard to how, in reality, these estimates relate to actual overhead costs. In short, this method does not, by any rational standard, attempt to adequately trace overhead costs. CPA, we assist with a wide range of tax services from simple tax returns to more complex tax planning strategies. If there is any lesson to be learned here, it’s that Hollywood Creative Accounting will always be a standard practice as long as there are pieces of the financial pie to share. Studios cannot change agreed-upon percentages, so the smartest and most money-making strategy is to simply make the pie itself smaller and smaller and smaller . By 2007, after a string of flops for New Line, Jackson was brought back to the studio to first executive produce, then to officially direct the new trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit . This reversal was partially because co-studio MGM shut down production without Jackson.

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Keep in mind that the aforementioned expenses include revenue sharing with the actual exhibitors as well as shipping costs and the cost of printing the actual films to put in those shipping cans, it’s true that the costs can add up. That’s where large box office revenues tend to cancel out the expenses. True, the more screens a film lights up, the more money it costs to make the prints to display on those screens, but in general https://accounting-services.net/ the increasing number of tickets sold greatly exceeds that cost. Brandywine, the production company responsible for Alien thus sued Fox over the distribution of those profits, delaying the sequel that Brandywine was determined to make as quickly as possible. Fox, for its part, pointed back to its financial reports that indicated that Alien was, at best, a low earner and at worst, a money loser and thus, did not warrant a sequel.

Contact local CPAs or tax professionals to see if they can offer their services without in-person contact. Many firms can operate remotely or virtually, and others that typically operate face-to-face may be changing their procedures to keep up with social distancing guidelines. Despite grossing $153 million against a $26 million budget, the 2019 romantic-comedy Yesterday reportedly lost $87.8 million, according Bookkeeping Hollywood to Universal Pictures accounting sheets. Don Johnson won a lawsuit in 2010 against Rysher Entertainment which had attempted to wipe profits for the show Nash Bridges ( ) off the books in order to reduce Johnson’s 50% backend stake to zero; the jury awarded Johnson $23.2 million in damages. All of the above means of calculating overhead are highly controversial, even within the accounting profession.

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In spite of the $790 million in profits, Warner Bros. claimed that amount was actually minus $167 million. Any percentage of a negative number is a negative number (even if Time Warner’s own cut was not so negative). While we can’t know exactly how the expenditures broke down it’s easy to imagine Warner mandating that Phoenix trailers be placed at the beginning of any New Line or Warner Bros. features for months prior to that film’s release. As a former projectionist I had distributor preview mandates for most every print. Any Warner Home Video releases of Warner or New Line films could also have Phoenix previews included on the discs. Then there was also the obligatory soundtrack (thanks to Warner Bros. Records and Warner Sunset Records) and the video game (distributed by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment). All of this could easily be shoved into that undefined mass of “Advertising and Publicity” and “Negative Cost and/ or Advance”.

Warner Bros. eventually offered the producers a settlement, which their attorney described as the value of “two popcorns and two Cokes”. They might need to buy a few more than two each, because while this verdict seemed to contradict the previous win against Paramount, all wasn’t lost for Uslan and Melniker. Both men have been listed as Producers on every single Batman film since the 1989 movie, whether live action or animated, including the Christopher Nolan “Dark Knight Trilogy” that kicked off in 2005. 20th Century Fox had just made boffo box office with Star Wars when one of the best, scariest and most profitable films of all time was released by the same company. It was called Alien , it cost between $9 and $11 million to make and by April of 1980 the film had already made over $100 million at the box office.

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The cast and producers of the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding ended up going to court to sue Playtone Pictures, HBO and Gold Circle Films for unpaid profits. The studios claimed the film lost $20 million, despite being one of the highest-grossing independent films of all time (and a record-holder for highest-grossing independent for several years). A Warner Bros. receipt was leaked online in 2010, 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. This is especially egregious given that, without inflation adjustment, the Wizarding World film series is the third highest-grossing film series of all time both domestically and internationally, after Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“Hollywood accounting” is what led to the Writer’s Guild of America strike in 2007. The WGA , in a nutshell, decided to strike because the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were deadset against increasing DVD royalties for said writers. At the end of the strike, the WGA accepted a minor increase in royalties, far below what they had originally set out to achieve. Paramount and CBS have never paid any of the Star Trek actors for the use of their image in any of the merchandising that has been sold for the series, claiming that it has lost money in all of them. A particularly nasty case occurred when Disney was discovered to have stopped paying royalties to various authors, most notably Alan Dean Foster, for Star Wars Legends novels among other franchises, including Alien and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The implication is that Disney made nothing from the sales of said stories, but given that the authors were receiving royalties before Disney bought the properties, many, including Foster, aren’t convinced.

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Right there in black and white are the beautiful words illustrating that a full three percent of the film’s profits are yours, yours and only yours. Warner Bros. and Fox are definitely not the only companies in Hollywood to employ this sort of creative accounting (nor is this merely a Hollywood phenomenon, if the word “Enron” means anything to you). Without adjusting for inflation, the Harry Potter series of movies is the highest grossing film franchise of all time. In fact, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 is the highest grossing Warner Bros. movie ever made.