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Originally Posted by GatorB
And my answer is so? So what if you never work again. If you get a job at McDonald's and after 10 days get fired you should get paid residuals? Since when should failure to maintain employment be rewarded?
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It is different. If you work at McDonald's and your job is to make the fries you make the fries, someone buys them and eats them. That is it. The fries are sold once to one person who eats them. With a movie the same product can be sold over and over again without any additional work going into it. If you are in a movie that movie can be released in theaters, then sold on DVD, rented on DVD, sold to premium cable like HBO, sold to pay per view, sold to basic cable, sold to tons of foreign markets, sold to regular free TV, sold to syndication type distributors who resell it to independent TV stations all over the globe, packaged and resold to other basic cable channels and now possibly put online. All of these are reselling the same product over and over again and generating revenue for the studio. What is wrong with those people who are in the movie getting a share of the profits?
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And how many actors are there in that movie? dozens? each getting a piecve like that or more. I'm sure studios take residuals into acount when they price movie theater tickets, DVD, rentals, PPV, cable/TV deals etc etc. Which is why I'm paying $8 to see the movie and $17 for the DVD.
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I don't totally disagree with this, but I don't think it is fully correct either. If there was no such thing as residuals how many professional actors would we have today? If you work hard and get small rolls in 10-12 or more movies that get played on TV/Cable regularly or sell well on DVD you might make enough money to live on for a few years without working. You aren't going to get rich, but you might be able to support yourself while you pursue more acting jobs. If that were not the case you would have to get another job and work that job while you tried to make it in the business, but then making it in the business would be next to impossible. If you had a regular job and you suddenly got offered a part that was going to pay you $800 a day and you would get 45 days of work, great. Chances are you would have to quit your regular job to take that part. After 45 days you earn 36K. But after taxes and agents fees you will see maybe half of that. Even so, 18K is a nice piece of change for 45 days of work. But that is it, nothing else will ever come of that so you will have to get another job and go back to work doing something else while you try to get another acting job. Becoming successful as an actor is basically already a nearly impossible task. If there were no residuals the odds of doing it would be like winning the lottery twice. We would have fewer and fewer decent actors and the quality of TV shows and movies would suffer greatly.
I can see your point. I believe you are saying that if there were no residuals that movie tickets and DVDs would cost less. I disagree to some point. If the movie is a flop and doesn't sell any on DVD there are no residuals to pay out, yet the studio still had to front all the money to pay to make the movie. It is kind of like a sales commission. If you don't sell anything, you don't get any commission. So sure, they might lower the price of the tickets or DVDs a little, but I doubt it. I think they would stay the same, the studios would just pocket a larger portion of money for themselves and they would justify it by saying that most movies don't make a profit anyway, so they are just covering their losses.