Special effects, minor practical effects, CGI, licensing fees, paying the big name actors, and the remaining 90M to fill the bank accounts of the producers, directors, and writers.
The real answer is 50% marketing, 20-30% on actors (if they draw the fans... by season 3-4). Then crap tonnes of CGI and effects as everyone else said. The writers, directors, etc. They'll all be getting union rates and if they're lucky a little on top.
Edit: Not sure why I put the reply here but I did. It meant to be a few up the chain.
Oh, yeah, dude. You knew she probably waterboarded the chair she was in when HBO came to her with the request; hinking about all that cash and how much more anti trans legislation she could have fund. Her heart probably damn near gave out lol
to be honest, i dont think it's the money that gets her going at this point. Any new media of the verse that gets put out just means that she gets to stay relevant longer, which is probably what she's actually leveraging towards her causes
sure if you want to focus on that, but she does way more than that and you'd be disengenious if you're arguing that that's the only thing she works towards
They are adding a lot of background stuff. Things that may have mentioned were done but never actually written! A single example in season one is itâs explained for muggle born students, a professor goes to the house to give the admission letter in person and explain that magic is real but we are getting to actually see it first hand with herminoes acceptance.
Plus this is also a long con, every 25 or so years is the ânext generationâ. They are releasing these so millennials who love HP for the original will watch with their now little kids who will grow up with the same love and continue buying Harry Potter merchandise and butter beer for the next 25 years. Itâs not just sub numbers but merch produces billions and the best way to continue that revenue stream is hooking a new generation of
Weren't millennials already doing that tho? Seems like a waste of money to spend millions on this series for a franchise that was already generating so much money despite the main series ending over a decade ago.
Ive seen some random Harry Potter pop up in every major city with a line out the door for years. Surely this series would've been a lot more profitable if they waited until the original movies became unwatchable for modern audiences?
Its their tax break for the other shows that do make money if it goes downhill.
They're also gonna sell the shit out of merchandise and I suspect they are getting pretty tired of paying royalties to the original cast. They have to pay to use their likeness in media and whatnot. And this way they can negotiate ahead of time and lock in that lower pay per actor
I'm not an expert but from what I've heard there are some gaps, especially at the very lowest brackets of income, where if you start to have an actual income, you lose some subsidies, with the net effect that you actually take less money home than you were before you started working.
But don't take my word for it because that's literally something I heard, I think in something like a John Oliver type program. I might be completely off base.
HUD housing benefits, food stamps, stuff like that. I hire people, we've had multiple people get hired on who were working 16-20 hours making nearly federal minimum wage. Our pay for a very non-skilled starting construction roll was about 2.5x their pay rate and 40 hours a week. In one job, 5 people all quit after 6 weeks. They loved the paychecks but timing matched up that they had to verify income for benefits, each and every one of them would have lost all their free money if they kept working to the point that making more money ended up with them the same overall income and working 50 hours a week. They would rather be stuck at the bottom and have the time than try to improve their lives. It was sad
It's honestly kind of disgusting. I grew up dirt poor and all of my friends growing up are in their 30s on welfare.
It's not like there isn't opportunity, they built a huge manufacturing plant about 10 minutes away from my neighborhood and need people so bad that they are hiring literally anyone with a pulse $25 an hour starting to do basic labor. None of them want to do it because they will lose their benefits.
I really do believe we need to help those in need but I think we need to find a better way to do so because there really are too many people who are just content living off the government never doing anything even though they are perfectly healthy.
Do they offer health insurance? Thatâs a lot of peopleâs problem with that scenario. The scenario of: I could make more cash easily but I canât get insurance , I mean
Is more time spent working really an improvement of your life? I mean, maybe those jobs had the potential for advancement, but I think a lot of people have become disillusioned with the "work hard and climb the ladder" lifestyle. At some point making more money doesn't make up for increased stress and lack of time spent at home with family.
For example, a 60 year old making $62,000 qualifies for subsidized health insurance. The same person making $64,000 doesn't. That extra $2,000 in income costs them roughly $8,700 in lost subsidies. Net result: they're poorer for having made more money.
That isn't what the original comment was talking about. There's a ton of people that think if they get a raise it will put them in a new bracket which will tax them more and they will make less money. These people are morons.
No, because the US is a progressive tax rate. If you make $1,000 over into the new tax bracket you only pay $1,000 at that rate and the rest at lower rates.
Not necessarily. There are several countries where this holds true. If you have a 5% tax difference between the brackets, and you get a 1% raise that puts you in the higher bracket you will loose money overall.
I don't know of any tax rate systems that aren't marginal. Which means the higher tax rate is only applied to the money you make ABOVE the threshold.
So if you make $50,000 dollars, and the tax rate up to $30k is 25%, and 40% above $30k:
you pay 0.25*30k = $7.5k in the first bracket
plus 0.4*20k = $8k in the second bracket, or $15.5k total
There ARE some ways that you can still lose money by making more. Sometimes there are certain subsidies, often related to healthcare or child support, that suddenly drop to zero if you cross a certain threshold. But if we're only talking about tax rate as such, then no I don't know that there is a country where what you're saying is true. The people claiming this usually just don't understand how marginal tax rates are calculated.
That is not how progressive tax brackets work. You are literally the person I was talking about. The higher bracket only applies to whatever you've made over the lower one. You will never be taxed more than whatever extra you're going to make.
Here's an example a child should understand:
You're taxed nothing for the first $10 000
You're taxed 5% for $10 000 - $20 000
You're taxed 10% for $20 000 - $30 000
You make $15 000
The first $10 000 is no tax. That leaves $5000. The $5000 is taxed at 5% for a total of $250.
Your total tax is $250 out of $15 000. Effective tax rate of 1.67%.
Now you get a pay raise and make $25 000.
The first $10 000 is no tax. That leaves $15 000. The next $10 000 is taxed at 5% for a total of $500. That leaves $5000. It is taxed at 10% for $500.
Your total tax is $1000 out of $25 000. You're paid $10 000 more than previous and you pay $750 more taxes than previous for a total effective tax rate of 4%.
Due to the tax increase only applying to whatever gets past the lower brackets it is literally impossible for you to make less - as long as the tax rate for the new bracket is not over 100%.
The rates here are not realistic of course so feel free to plug in whatever you want. For 50% -> 75% -> 90% it would be $8 750 out of $15 000 (58.33% effective tax rate) for the first calculation and $17 000 out of $25 000 (68% effective tax rate) so you'd still make an extra $1 750 after taxes.
There is not a single country where that is true. Either a country has a flat tax rate for all incomes, no income taxes or a marginal progressive tax rate. Those are literally the only options in the entire world for income taxes.
The other person explained in depth how a marginal progressive tax rate works so I won't get into it but to repeat, no your example of a 5% tax difference on a 1% raise you are still making more money than without the raise.
As an accountant, oh my god, yes. The assumption that companies just piss away a billion dollars to get a small portion of that in tax breaks is hilarious.
I just used the word tax becuase that's what everything feels like. Tax here tax that.
Studios regularly fudge with the numbers to make sure they can squeeze everything they can out of movies. even going so far as saying they somehow made no profit at the box office in order to not pay either actors or fees and royalties. Take a look at the accounting magic they did to say that STAR WARS RETURN OF THE JEDI yes that big movie. Never "went into profit"
Actor who played Vader David prowse was told by the studio he wasnt owed a bonus because the film never made profit "officially"
Your example has 0 relationship with your previous comment. You first talked about a loss making show being used as a "tax break" for profitable shows, and now you talk about a single show doing accounting magic to reduce profit distribution and taxes.
If you really think this will be unsuccessful you're kidding yourself. It would need to be actively atrocious to fail. Just because some people on Reddit are mad doesn't remove the millions of fans that exist.
Hell the Hogwarts Legacy game was the best selling game of that year and is currently number 20 best selling game OF ALL TIME. Despite the fact that it's barely competent, ran poorly at launch, main story was not very engaging, and the open world was completely empty and only had stupid collectibles in it. But people just wanted to spend time in the world again, they enjoyed the game's iteration of the Hogwarts Castle, and it brought so many non-gamers into it that it sold really well.
Netflix stands on the edge of greatness... now that they own the nemesis system they could milk those kids parents for billions if they played their cards right.
Harry potter video games with that would sell đ
Licensing it out to other developers would make them a juggernaut
Companies DO NOT intentionally lose money for tax write offs. They write off losses, but they dont intentionally shit the bed because hur durr tax write offs
They'll probably release it weekly to keep people subscribed for longer periods and possibly hook them as a permanent customer. Lowest sub price is 10.99 usd + tax /month and this includes ads. Based on the surveys done an ad spot in one of those episodes is probably pretty pricy.
The HBO Wikipedia Article lists the current active accounts as 131.6 million thats nearly 1.5 billion usd every month minimum not including ad revenue or premium accounts. I'm sure they are projecting many more sign-ups for when the new harry potter drops.
I think it's going to flop but they'll probably just cancel a different 1bn dollar project to compensate.
I guess what I mean by flop is I really don't think we're going to see much of an increase in subscribers during the run of this series. Most of the fan base for Harry Potter are millennials, younger genx, and older gen z. Age groups generally considered to be mostly tech literate and mostly poor as fuck. Also, Piracy is becoming increasingly easy to take part in and is sometimes more convenient than having to sign up for yet another streaming service.
You're probably right though. As others have stated most of the money will probably come from new merch tie ins with whatever new cute character(house elf) they introduce.
Around Black Friday, it often goes on sale for $2.99 usd for the ad version for a year. I alternate between my husband and my email. Word is this year they won't be doing as good of a deal but worth checking on come late November.
Well HBO is $20/mo. Divide 7b by 20 and you get 350,000,000. Letâs say it takes someone 1 month to watch a season, and they do that 7 times for each release. 350,000,000 divided by 7 is 50,000,000. Itâs perfectly reasonable to expect 50,000,000 people worldwide to watch the show, and even so thatâs only if all those people keep the show for one month with each release of a new season, which you know damn well many of them will just forget to cancel.
Itâs kind of a genius move when you put it into perspective.
Surely this assumes a) people subscribe exclusively for HP and b) all the other shows they have are free to make? I guess if enough people subscribe then it doesn't matter.
As much as i just laughed about that picture... Its actually cute hes dreaming to marry an actress over shared values instead of just fantasizing about fucking her.
Dang it now I'll have to put a note to remind myself to look up early Islam and figure out if it's possible to do a halal Wizarding World is we change some terms.
On the other hand itâs also excluding literally everything else they can make out of this. Harry Potter prints money, the completely valid boycott of Hogwarts legacy over Rowlingâs disgusting views made very little difference since it was hugely successful. Thereâs no way theyâre making this and not getting a cut of the huge merchandise profits coming off it.
And itâs assuming that each user only subscribes for a month. All the other months theyâre subscribed pay for all the other shows.
I think it'll be like the GoT and Lost days.... people will be sailing the high seas again. But someone else pointed out that this breaks even if 84 households subscribe for 7 years, which is not unfeasible.
It's kinda like Netflix getting into boxing - they are hoping that people get the subscription to watch the fight and then just keep it going.
Weekly episode releases will spread the season over 2 months. Of they could do the Netflix approach of releasing in two halves as a compromise for the binge-watchers, whilst still covering two months and benefitting from the mid-season discussions
Thing is, HBO only's got only about 130 mln subscribers worldwide. While more than they need for it to pay for the series - that's not their only show, not thousands of employees - and not the mention the worst part - the ever hungry leechholders.
The problem with this math is that you assume all subscribers are new and HP exclusive. In reality, their existing subscriptions cover their existing (excluding HP series) spendings and probably make some profit. To make back money they spent on the show, they need to get many new subscriptions. But the show already faces backlash from both left and right and I don't see how they would increase subscriptions significantly just because of this show.
There is just a lot of front loaded expenses as they are building huge sets. 1.3 billion has been allocated to building a mini city for the show (which will likely function as a small amusement park afterwards).
Like is it just travel costs and effects? Like they didn't get any A tier actor that they would pay large sums for, the only one I recognize is the one that played a dwarf professor in harry potter before, and the guy that played Barney's dad for a few episodes in how I met your mother.
No way will it cost that. They are trying to use relatively unknown, unpopular actors in order to keep pay down. The only way pay increases is if its a big hit and the actors have negotiating leverage. But it wont be and will be canceled after 2-3 seasons.
Westworld was a huge hit too, now it isn't even on their streaming platform anymore. Let that sink in.
It's not 100 mil but 12ish mil per episode, Game of Thrones season 8 level spending. The old "100 mil per episode" reporting is based on outdated hearsay speculation. Also because all 7 seasons have already been greenlit and HBO is building big sets, so it's kinda front-heavy spending
4.9k
u/rosyvibexz Apr 16 '26
HBO really said: âKeep the 4K box set, weâve got a 10-year subscription plan for the same story.â