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A comment on Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series. Parent comment

Re:Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Ring... by dr_dshiv on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @07:50AM (#31987067)
Speculatively, is there some tax optimization purpose? Eg, if you invest in content that builds technology that could be used for other purposes? Amazon is pretty amazing at tax optimization. But R&D tax writeoffs are pretty great, so not sure what it would accomplish.

hmm, so maybe this is just cover for the UFO skunkworks.

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Re:Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Ring... by heurisko on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @08:33AM (#31987435)
I don't think it is the case here, but this happened in the UK.

> Tax inspectors were told that A-listers from Hollywood were starring in a £19.6m production that would be shot in the UK. However, the movie was never made and the only footage shot was seven minutes of "completely unusable quality" filmed in a flat, which cost just £5,000.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/01/uk-film-executi...

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Re:Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Ring... by kgwgk on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @08:09AM (#31987219)
> But R&D tax writeoffs are pretty great

Great like salary tax writeoffs and rent tax writeoffs. (And even if R&D isn’t expensed right away it will still have the same impact on taxes in the end. Now it will be depreciated in five years in the US.)

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Re:Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Ring... by youngtaff on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @11:22AM (#31989287)
It’s shocking how much Amazon are getting from the NZ government
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