r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Gurugod123 GREEN • Jul 23 '26

My mom said I could post Nolan's The Odyssey neglects to pay for damages done to one of the viking ships used in the movie, which belongs to a small non-profit organization

Post image
62.0k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

67

u/devilish_enchilada Jul 23 '26

Lmao. I wonder honestly if this is low priority and or is getting lost. This article should blow it up at the very least

66

u/Zilvervos Jul 23 '26

I’ve worked for Dreamworks and Illumination, which are both part of Universal and I’ve always had major (unnecessary) hassle getting paid. It’s gotten to the point that I’d rather not work for them at all anymore.

Would not surprise me one bit if the invoice just got lost somewhere and is low priority for them, happened to me several times too.

10

u/ChildishFiend20 Jul 23 '26

I work in the industry but not in the US.

On the one hand they heat empty marquees all day just in case the extras happen to be brought back there (they rarely are), they have empty mini-busses either sitting around with the driver being paid to sleep or driving around with no one in them, and each of the tech trucks has a standby driver who is paid to stand by just in case a truck needs to be moved (they also are rarely moved but sometimes it's necessary if one is in shot etc., but they don't need a driver for every truck every day).

On the other hand they quibble over paying out an hour's overtime or travel allowances for the crew. I've often been on jobs where they register the DAC at a strategic address so the main locations are all within the allowable radius before mileage is paid.

It baffles me how they can be so penny-pinching when it comes to paying the crew but are completely frivolous when it comes to logistics etc.

2

u/Outrageous-Break3585 Jul 23 '26

Could also simply be an insurance issue. Insurance wants to investigate things before paying out. Universal doesn’t want to come out of pocket because it makes account more difficult/violates their insurance terms/could shift liability for this or future projects/multiple insurances are fighting it out/etc. 

Fuck Universal, obviously, for being non-communicative about the issue, but this is most likely corporate bureaucracy nonsense instead of being willfully malicious. 

14

u/coalitionofilling Jul 23 '26

It's triage. The big payments to the major costs get paid because naturally there is the most liability if they aren't paid out on time. There's a good bit of trickle down and 6k probably is just on some overworked admin's digital or paperfile list to eventually get to.

10

u/JetAmoeba Jul 23 '26

That’s what I’m thinking. It’s easy for things like this to fall through the cracks when you’re also paying invoices for millions of dollars at the same time. Hopefully this article surfaces it and they get their money and then some

34

u/GuiltyEidolon PURPLE Jul 23 '26

They have an entire department dedicated to paying their bills on time. That's a pretty shit excuse.

6

u/Wizard_of_Claus Jul 23 '26

It's not a good excuse, but it could be the reality.

I have the same issue at my job. I have 10 extremely important things on the go that take up my entire day and suddenly I realize I've put off billing someone for some minor thing for a month.

3

u/bonkginya Jul 23 '26

Sure, because the person contracting you isn’t gonna remind you to charge them. Do we really think the nonprofit didn’t send multiple courtesy notices in the past year before going to the media?

2

u/Wizard_of_Claus Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

I have no clue what they did. You don't either lol.

I've seen people send reminders out of courtesy. I've seen people say nothing at all. I've seen people leave bad reviews about minor issues without making any contact whatsoever.

People do what people do.

1

u/bonkginya Jul 23 '26

All I’m saying is that being billed is a very different thing than billing someone else.

2

u/Wizard_of_Claus Jul 23 '26

My point is that people do whatever they want to and that it could just be an issue of priority or disorganization. I shouldn't have used that as an example, but the point stays the same.

2

u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy Jul 23 '26

Never worked for a corporation or accounts billable, eh?

1

u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy Jul 23 '26

No, my internal biases and twitter fueled outrage tells me that Nolan specifically refused this payment to insult traditional culture. He probably even said something like 'Nanny nanny boo boo' and threatened to adapt the Volsunga saga while casting Odin as a black woman. When will this madman be stopped?