this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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I kinda wonder if the airport has way too much money (but maybe this is more of a tax writeoff for wēta?)
My assumption is the original one done for a Hobbit promo was probably done at a big discount since it's basically advertising.
Not sure about this one. Tax writeoffs don't let you deduct any more than actual expenses, so you unlikely they gain financially from tax reasons. Might be the replacements are more overt about advertising for Wētā workshops, or are smaller. Or perhaps Wētā are struggling for work at the moment and have done a deal to keep staff busy.
I presume council spending is public or gets made public at some point?
The airport is not council funded and is only minority-owned by the council, so we won't find out any commercials that way
Hmm maybe. I was thinking maybe the council might see this as a tourism draw, and have some tourism boosting money they could put into it.
Honestly I'd love to know what it costs to get a bit Gwaihir with a Gandalf on its back.
It would easily be worth hundreds of thousands as part of a tourism push, but I guess it would cost millions. But really I have no idea, it might be less costly than I'm assuming (or perhaps the replacement ones will be a lot cheaper, since they don't have a Hobbit movie to help finance it).
Oh, they couldn't claim on the labour involved in producing a gift? There goes my whole straw man...
To be fair, the advertising is unreal but I struggle to see how it might connect to work coming in. Increasing visitors to the Wētā cave tours is a different matter, I guess.
I still love they did it, but surely the fixture has a bunch of regular costs (the mounts and supporting infrastructure, etc). It does make the terminal more interesting, which is much appreciated. I still get hung up on the cost/benefit analysis
Sure they could claim the labour, but they also have to pay for that labour. If they were going to make a 100k profit, they might have to pay 30k in tax, pocket 70k. But if they spent 100k on labour, they then make a $0 profit and pay no tax. But they pocket nothing.
For a company that can't manipulate governments, paying tax is a good thing. It means you made a profit.
For work coming in, imagine they have 50 salaried staff. Costs them X per year. US economy tanks and now they have no work. They could make these staff redundant, pay them a bunch of redundancy money. Or they could keep them on the books and pay them to do nothing. Or a third option, take on work even though they are only covering say 80% of what it costs, under the assumption that doing this for a year is cheaper than paying redundancy.
Hard to say what the actual argument was for spending the money without knowing the discussion around the decision.
I've absolutely seen companies take on work at break even, or even at a loss, just to keep staff employed and the business ticking over through a quiet patch.
Can you imagine how hard it must be to hire someone with the skills those Wētā Workshop folk have? I expect there's a really good reason to tide over a downturn with some work to keep the team busy if you have hope over the horizon.
Oh, absolutely. There would be people there with decades of experience in a very niche field, and if you let them go, you'll likely never get them back.
Brilliant example (I wonder how tariff-exposed they are, presumably it's significant)
Yeah I wonder. NZ only got a 10% flat rate as I understand it.
But if there is a lot of uncertainty in the market (say a US president that could do anything crazy at any time), then companies are likely to hold back their spending to keep cash in reserve in case something happens. That might mean movies and TV shows go for cheaper special effects than they otherwise might have, so perhaps they get CGI instead of Wētā Workshop hand crafted models.
It also often means less advertising, which maybe Wētā might rely on for business as well.
Government decisions have wider effects than the immediate impact, one thing our own government is finding out after making 8k public servants (or whatever the current count is) redundant.
Trump recently announced 100% tarrifs on "Foriegn made movies" by which I think he means runaway Hollywood productions and Hollywood co-pros, both of which will affect the NZ film industry.
At this point there's got to be a less than 20% chance this plan will see the end of the month, or even the end of the week, right?
And there aren't any details, right? A movie isn't a car, it can be made in 10 places at once. How do you tariff a movie that was shot in Europe with scale models from NZ that was financed and produced by a US company?
How do you do it when it's an animated movie created by remote workers all over the world?
I think the problem is more the market uncertainty he and his cronies create.
Stocks dipped on it not because it will be coherent and work, but more because of the chaos badly-thought-out policy directives could create. It could for example take the form of levying studios who currently film overseas for the tax breaks, or it could take the form of an actual tarrif on distributors (which will hurt the US way more than it hurts anyone else, because Hollywood is now so reliant on Chinese box office that it factors it into content, so if China reciprocates it will hit hard).
I think it's clear at this point he is trying to create the unstable market. A stable market isn't a good place to make a lot of money. The ups and downs are where money is made (and lost) in large amounts.
I agree; it's definitely some kind of extension of disaster capitalism. "Blood in the streets" is how you make money (if you're already rich) and the shock doctrine has also shown that it's how corporate power is minted and entrenched.
This sort of seems worse. Did you see this recent Klein article?
I had not seen it. I feel like we have a lot in common right now with the people who were living through the post WW2, cold war error, thinking the world was going to fall apart. These articles read like dystopian fiction, but it's really happening.
I think you're right. And it feels like a lot of what is impinging on peoples' consciousness in the West now has already happened elsewhere, for example the rise of free market oligarchy in Russia after the fall of the USSR, or the experiences of refugees at the hands of ICE and their ilk, or the endless genocides.