No, they'd have paid exactly what they want to. If they want the movie to make no profit, they'll charge HBO nothing, or perhaps they'd have the gall to have _HBO charge the movie studio part of warner_ a fee for showing it on HBO, perhaps filing that away as 'marketing expenses' or some similar scam. Anybody with monkey points (entitled to a cut of the net earnings) is out of luck.

Conversely if they want it to be a windfall for some reason they charge HBO idiotic amounts of money for the distro rights, which HBO will happily pay because Warner tells them to do so.

That's exactly hollywood accounting.

I have no idea if it was actually 'done' to the matrix here.

> they'd have paid exactly what they want to.

sorry, yeah I agree, this is a better way of saying that

Oh very interesting! I wonder how that looks from an accounting/profitability perspective?

This reminds me of my dad’s story at work on time. He worked at a mill and the higher ups had a meeting with everyone. They said due to the high pricing of logs currently we are thinking we have to lay some guys off we didn’t want it to come as a surprise. My dad spoke up and said you own this division and the logging division. You set the price of the logs. You are telling us you charge yourself too much for logs and now we are going to lose work? There was union talk of a mill wide strike if they did it and they ended up not laying anyone off.

You know that game where you put a table-tennis ball under plastic cups and slide them around and you have to guess where the ball ends up?

That.

And that’s how you end up losing $100 million on paper.