[nerdponx]

Buying the Mona Lisa for $200m is not at all the same thing as netting a $200m profit.

Better analogy: you buy a big museum collection that contains some lost Rembrandt paintings, widely regarded as his worst, but still considered valuable because it's Rembrandt. You think you might have a hard time selling them, so you look up their original purchase price and find that it was $1 million, so you burn them instead and claim a $1 million writeoff, for a guaranteed $250k decrease in taxes for essentially 0 additional cost, resulting in $250k of extra profit.

[prepend]

This example doesn’t work. You’d only be able to deduct your cost to buy them, not their potential value.

It only works if you pay $1M now and then years later burn them to offset a different $1M in income. But that would still be stupid as you’re better off selling them for $1M than burning.

I don’t think you’re thinking the math through properly.

Studios aren’t writing these off because they are stupid or scheming. They are writing them off because they can’t sell them.