I am part of the Hollywood Accounting system... I know how it works better than you do. The numbers are not manipulated; that would be fraud and most Hollywood

I am part of the Hollywood Accounting system... I know how it works better than you do. The numbers are not manipulated; that would be fraud and most Hollywood studios are publicly traded, so there are constraints on the accounting methods they can use. What people refer to as "Hollywood Accounting" is actually just dividing up accounting line items across multiple entities. Production costs are put in one entity, rights (and licensing profits) in another, and marketing is handled by a third company owned by the distributor to extract profits.