They’ve just cancelled their upcoming film “Coyote vs. Acme,” and everyone is calling it a tax write-off, just like they did with the cancelled Batgirl film.
Having spent so much on the production of these films, how is it beneficial to them to cancel the film outright? What is a tax write-off in that sense?
In: Economics
Forget the whole tax write-off for a bit. That’s a distraction. The real point is that they’ve decided to not market the movie because they don’t think it will make enough money to recoup the cost of completing, distributing, and promoting it.
The thing about the tax write-off is that they have to declare it as kaput and never to see the light of day to be able to take that tax deduction right now as opposed to amortizing some of it over time or having to wait altogether for a later date if there was the possibility that they might still release it. I don’t know the mechanics of tax law for filmmaking, but that’s how other businesses deduct their expenses from income. And ultimately, pretty much all business expenses can be deducted – it’s just a question of when and that’s the key bit to them doing this stuff over the past several months. They want to just be done with it all for these affected titles.
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