General Entertainment Fox ordered to pay $179 million over shady accounting case (re: Bones show)

[CitizenVectron]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-rocked-by-179-million-bones-ruling-lying-cheating-reprehensible-studio-fraud-1190346

 

Quote

The decision, made earlier this month but until now a secret, pertains to the Fox-produced series Bones, which starred David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel and ran on the Fox network between 2005 and 2017. But the 66-page ruling by arbitrator Peter Lichtman, who concludes Fox executives lied, cheated and committed fraud at the expense of the show’s stars and executive producer Barry Josephson, is about a whole lot more. The nearly $200 million award amounts to the second-largest in television industry history, after a 2011 jury verdict punishing Disney to the tune of $319 million over profit-sharing for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It will not only put Murdoch’s Fox sale in a whole new light, but may also raise questions about the future viability of Hulu, plus any platform enjoying what’s pejoratively known as “Hollywood accounting.” The ruling also comes as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has allowed to stand another mega-merger between AT&T and Time Warner, an example of vertical integration between a distributor of content and a producer.

 

Article makes it sound like more of these are coming. Studios "sell" their shows for cheap to their distribution services (like Hulu) and avoid having to share profits with the creators since no profit is recorded (it's made on the distribution end instead).

 

This phony accounting is the cost of having these giant vertically-integrated companies, and will likely only get worse as they control more of the streaming services.

[Guest]

I think I told you guys about Fox having us book movies we don’t actually play and the reporting their grosses to help push movies past certain performance benchmarks for contractual reasons.

[Kal-El814]

I’d just like the point out that kids born in 1997 have never known television without David Boreanaz. That is all.