You are not reading everything. Evil Twin is saying that studios have to pay money purely to hold onto the film or lose money from holding onto it alone, money that they simply can't just get back at a later period when it's released, nothing to do with the marketing campaign. What I'm saying is purely holding onto it -- they simply get the money back later, and that they don't have to pay to hold onto it. I have never seen this to be the case and it seems like something simply made up -- as I'll refer to it now as "a holding fee" -- so I'll I'm saying is to provide ample evidence that there is a "holding fee" whether from experience or from a journal.
Let me guess, you're on the creative side of the business and never took an economics class.
If a movie was financed by borrowing, like most major productions, interest is being racked up by a delay in revenue. As it is for any loan. If you paid cash, because you're filthy rich and didn't want to leverage your investment at all, then you're bypassing interest your money could be collecting because a film sitting on a shelf doesn't pay interest. That's the same as putting money under your mattress instead of in a bank. That's money out of your pocket either way. But, I suspect that Joe was financed through some production loan.
That's economics 101.
A movie sitting on a shelf for an extended period of time costs the parent company money in one way or the other, either literally through interest or through opportunity cost. The sooner you can get a return of revenue on an investment, generally the better.
Look up the time value of money and inflation and tell me again that $130 million in 2013 dollars is worth the same as $130 million in 2012 dollars. No economist will tell you that. That's the basic economic argument. You're trying to look at it in terms of pure accounting, while I'm saying there's some basic economics for why films aren't routinely delayed 9 months at the last minute. And why the concept of interest exists.
There's a reason that the norm is to finish a movie and then to release it shortly thereafter. Again, time value of money is an important, and fundamental, economic argument and you're arguing against fundamental economic principles.
Now, Joe may have ended up doing better internationally because of the 3D conversion. That's the reason that the delay may be justified, but there's a reason that the original plan was to shoot it in 2011, do post-production in 2012, and get it out in theaters in Summer 2012. And the studio and Hasbro took on economic costs because of that delay. Perhaps not costs where you see someone write out a check, but costs all the same.
Interest and inflation are two factors that work against delaying a film, regardless of the financing. Paramount wasted a lot of resources planning a release in 2012 and then scuttling it that could have been put to other, more productive uses. Not merely a second marketing campaign, but they could have been working on a film that would actually have been released on time.
Heck, one of the reasons that Star Wars is full speed ahead is that Disney spent $4 billion and needs to get a return on their investment sooner, rather than later.
And, in much shorter version, what Fenrir said.
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