JOHN PTAK: The studios used to totally finance their own pictures, but in the last fifteen years, studios have become more involved in cofinancing, negative pickup deals, and outright purchases. Cofinancing is where a studio puts up, say, a million dollars, and a private financier puts up another million. To make the case easier, when someone like Dino De Laurentiis puts up a million dollars and Paramount puts up a million dollars, Paramount might get US and Canada, Australia and Great Britain, your principal English-speaking countries. For De Laurentiis’s million, he would get the rest of the
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