I mean, Hollywood accounting makes it impossible to determine how much profit any big film has made. You can get a ballpark, probably a couple of years after release, but the way things get tied up in this and that, it's a mess.JulieYBM wrote: ↑Tue May 26, 2020 12:56 pm That's $10,000,000 profit, I should add. Which means the production budget has been made back and now the film's made $10,000,000 profit. This means the film enters public domain and can be adapted or sold by anyone. Of course, Disney already being a massive studio is going to be able to do those things quite easily and quickly.
I'll also add that Infinity War's budget is stated to be about 300 mil, whereas its opening weekend was 600 mil. So, it would still have entered public domain in its first weekend.
Public domain doesn't mean "The previous owner can't use this", it means "Anyone can use it."
Infinity War and Endgame could very well still have happened in a world with sensible public domain; even if anyone can use the characters, not just anyone could make the MCU.
Though if no one can make more than $10,000,000 off any piece of media, the MCU wouldn't have happened AT ALL. No company puts $140,000,000 (the budget of Iron Man) into a movie for only a $10,000,000 profit.
I was completely behind you on the idea that copyright should only last 20 years, but profit capping is just not something that would ever work. Policing it would be impossible, and if it wasn't, it would stifle all large-scale mass media, and any workarounds for that are just as problematic (for instance, if the cap is somehow arranged to be set to $10,000,000 per person profiting from it, then congratulations, corporations still get to rake in billions of dollars, because they can just spread the money out between the gigantic number of people who work on a major movie, so Infinity War's copyright lasts years; meanwhile, if an indie video game made by one person suddenly gets mainstream success, it goes into public domain over a weekend. It would just be yet another seemingly-good-faith change to law that actually just screws over the little guy even more).
In big business terms, though, $10,000,000 is peanuts.JulieYBM wrote: ↑Tue May 26, 2020 12:56 pm Again, the $10,000,000 figure is just a random number that at present seems ridiculously high. In practice that figure would be different because I chose the figure for a book based on the idea of "Well, the cost of creating and publishing is minute in comparison".
It wouldn't, though. It would mean no movie/book/whatever of a scale similar to Infinity War or Endgame would ever happen. It would stifle creative work, not support it.
And "You're making too much money; now you don't get to make any more" is such a hostile move towards any kind of business... Not only would all the companies be against it, but all the fans of any kind of mass media would be too. It would never happen, and if it somehow did, everyone would hate it.