We do. How much money went into making new Star Wars movie? How much money is tied up in the forty-odd Marvel movies being made over the next few years? For th

We do. How much money went into making new Star Wars movie? How much money is tied up in the forty-odd Marvel movies being made over the next few years? For that matter, how much money has gone into making any of the retellings of traditional fables and myth that has been bread and butter for Disney's animated features since 'Snow White'? (And into relentlessly policing the unauthorized use of the Disney rendition of these characters?) There is a lot of creative accounting going on in Hollywood, but there is an entire industry built on making these movies that are the only lawyer-approved way of working with these characters. It has its pitfalls but if you can get into it, you can have a fairly comfortable middle-class lifestyle, if you don't mind regular periods of unemployment when one feature/tv show/etc ends and you haven't found a new one yet. And occasionally having some creative accounting fail to pay the last few bills of the subcontracted effects company you working for. We are even beginning to get better about rewarding the people who work down in the comic-book trenches creating these characters. Creators reaching their prime learnt from the miserable treatment Marvel and DC gave folks like Siegel & Shuster (Superman's creators) or Jack Kirby (co-creator of pretty much the entire fucking Marvel Universe), and became more canny about not signing all their rights away - Eastman and Laird (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) are a great example.