Re:Anime is booming, so why are animators living in poverty?
by chongli on Friday February 26, 2021 @12:36PM
(#26277429)
A lot of what you said doesn’t apply to game developers or animators in the anime industry. Hollywood workers, famous and otherwise, are all represented by powerful unions. Game developers and anime animators (cf. western animators) are not.
Re:Anime is booming, so why are animators living in poverty?
by gamblor956 on Saturday February 27, 2021 @02:11AM
(#26283291)
The Hollywood guilds were fine with Hollywood accounting for decades. It was individual actors and directors and producers that filed the lawsuits that made Hollywood accounting too much of a risk for the big studios.
And more importantly, unlike Hollywood talent, game developers and anime animators as a group have never been entitled to a share of the profits of the products they helped create.
In part, this is because so many people were burned in the past that it's now standard for contracts to include provisions specifying which profits the talents/investors are getting a % of. There's also many A-list talent that simply refuse to work for a studio which uses Hollywood accounting. And finally, the public-trading status of so many studios today basically renders Hollywood accounting impossible at a legal and financial level.
But the primary killer of the Hollywood accounting system is the big switch to streaming, in which royalties/etc are paid upfront (at a time-value discount) rather than over time, which essentially eliminates all of the opportunity to include "costs" (like usurious interest or marketing expenses) that had been used to generate paper losses on otherwise successful films.