Quote:
Originally Posted by BrudLee
War of the Worlds
Mission: Impossible 3
If your business crashes because a couple of movies only made $981 million, I wouldn't blame the movies.
I'm only defending Cruise because he may come to my tailgate on the 11th, now that he's an employee.
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Brud, if you think NFL salary caps are complex, welcome to the fun and exciting world of Hollywood accounting.
The most important thing to understand is that everyone involved is screwing everyone involved.
The world box office gross has no real relation to how much money Paramount made. Pulling the production costs and ad budget from the gross also doesn't tell you anything. There are 30 other line items on the expense side that you have to know. These numbers are better protected than NSA secrets, so it is impossible to know the real numbers.
Paramount may not have lost money on WotW or MI3, but they definately didn't make what they needed to in order to keep doing business as they were. From a $$ perspective, those movies were disappointing to everyone who had put upfront skin in the game.
The Cruise/Wagner firing is actually only a small part of the Paramount story -- it was just the only 8 figure development deal they killed. The bigger story are the several dozen 6 and 7 figure development deals they killed because of what it means for their ability to generate future projects.
If Cruise really was a billion dollar ATM for Paramount, he could quit Scientology, go on Oprah jump on the sofa and profess gay love for Bin Laden and he wouldn't be fired.