[bruce511]

It's worth understanding that "profit" is usually not the goal, and in any business can be easily made to go higher or lower.

For example if I want my business to make more profit, I can stop paying me a salary. I can just take the same money out as profit. Or vice versa. Ultimately I end up optimising my salary/profit ratio according to the tax laws.

Notice the studios managed to spend 8 billion on "other stuff". That's not "profit" (so less to pay people who have profit share) but it certainly went somewhere. And those feeding at the $8b trough certainly view big budget movies as a massive win.

Sure Hollywood Accounting is well known, but it's no different to any business. Profit is a meaningless number and ultimately the flow of money is optimised for many other things.