Joe Dante, famous for 1980s classic Gremlins, says he's proud he managed to complete his latest movie, The Hole 3D.
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"Sometimes you get as far as casting them, you get as far as finding locations and then all of a sudden the money dries up."

It's not how the studio system used to work, the director told Newsbeat.

Bean counters would never have allowed Metropolis or Gone With The Wind or Blade Runner to be made.

it was a massive cinematic flop upon it's initial release.

Which kind of makes my point. Hollywood built its whole reputation on being a dream factory. Without that element of risk, we end up with the generic mix of CGI and impossible explosions we get now.

I'd say the last Hollywood film I saw that could even possibly fall in to this category would be Moon. It cost $5 million to make and made just over $9 million at the box office.
Now I'd call that a good return, but I'm not sure Hollywood would.

Mark

Is that before or after Hollywood accounting?

"You're going to be seeing more genre films, there are going to be more horror films, there's going to be more action movies," he told Newsbeat.

All losses are put against Babylon 5, which made a staggering large pile of money, but was never profitable due to this silly practice.

Yes the writer said that he was billed for some loss in the Congo or other.

What?

Mark

Hollywood accounting is not limited to movies. An example is the Warner Bros. television series Babylon 5 created by J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski, who wrote 90% of the episodes in addition to producing the show, would receive a generous cut of profits if not for Hollywood accounting. The series, which was profitable in each of its five seasons from 1993–1998, has garnered more than US$1 billion for Warner Bros., most recently US$500 million in DVD sales alone. But in the last profit statement given to Straczynski, Warner Bros. claimed the property was $80 million in debt. "Basically," says Straczynski, "by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits.

The show, all in, cost about $110 million to make. Each year of its original run, we know it showed a profit because they TOLD us so. And in one case, they actually showed us the figures. It's now been on the air worldwide for ten years. There's been merchandise, syndication, cable, books, you name it. The DVDs grossed roughly half a BILLION dollars (and that was just after they put out S5, without all of the S5 sales in).

So what does my last profit statement say? We're $80 million in the red.