| > But if I did edit a feature length film that became a major box-office hit, I should get some residuals to help tide me over. This is the line that made me sit and think about this whole construct for a bit. I've worked as an engineer for multi-billion-dollar companies. I've designed components and whole systems that then get put into mass production and stay in production for years. Safety-critical in some cases. Some of those components are still being made today and still generating revenue for those companies, nearly a decade after I moved on. Should my work back then be continuously rewarded if that company still uses that design, unchanged, and still generates revenue from it? I've since gone into consulting, and as a private contractor I work similar stints as a hollywood editor- sometimes I do not have a steady client for many months at a time. It would be great if my engineering work for companies past could 'hold me over' via residuals. But that isn't how getting paid for my time works. I just bid my hourly rates accordingly, of course. You could say stock options in companies are similarly equivalent to residual checks for hollywood, but... it's not. Stock prices aren't always tied to anything rational (although... I don't know how hollywood accounting is either). And they aren't something that are guaranteed to be negotiable or granted post-facto. What I'm trying to point out here is... a lot of people in Hollywood seem to think they have something special somehow and aren't at the will of a market to set prices. If they want better profit sharing, there should be ways to do that, but its ultimately down to setting your prices and being paid for your time and thats is how it works for nearly everyone else in the world who 'creates' things. |
1: A few movies (e.g. Barbie, Spiderman, Oppenheimer this year) make the majority of the money. Most movies make little. So if you pay based on expected return you probably don't pay your actors at all, or pay them peanuts. That's inequitable. But you can't pay them lots because you don't know how much money the movie is going to make. The solution is profit sharing. Most software business have much more stable income.
2: A movie, when finished, is done. There may be a director's cut in a decade or two if it's a super popular movie. There are occasionally different edits for different markets (alternate endings etc.) But basically it's done. The movie that is shown on release is the movie you watch 20 years later. So you can easily apportion credit to the actors, writers, etc. This isn't the case for software. It continually evolves. You made the initial design, but 64 other developers have worked on it since. Who gets credit?