[noelwelsh]

The difference is 1) the power law distribution of revenue and 2) the finality of a movie.

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?

[mk_stjames]

Good points, helps solidify differences that I had trouble thinking about.

But to add, for me I wasn't talking about software, I actually engineered hardware- in my case, vehicle and airframe structures. Way more direct and less abstract than software. Large software systems may be some of the most difficult examples in the credit tracking problem, for sure.

[noelwelsh]

My bad for assuming software. In your case, I imagine it's the lack of power law returns that make profit sharing less attractive.

[em-bee]

point 1 to me is an argument against profit sharing. direct profit sharing would mean that only those who contribute to a profitable movie earn any of the profit. but we also need to pay people working on movies that don't make a profit. the only way to make that work is to use the profitable movies to finance the unprofitable ones. if there is profit to be shared then it would be the profit of the studio as a whole after all movies are paid for, and that profit should be shared with all employees and contractors of the studio.