How are movie accounts calculated?

Zhang Yimou's kung fu epic "Hero", which cost a full 30 million US dollars to produce, was sold to the US company Miramax for only 25 million US dollars. A production of such a large scale and budget is unprecedented in the history of Chinese cinema, and so naturally the public cried out that a "national treasure had been sold too cheaply". It is clear that everyone has been comparing these two figures and calculating a "shortfall" of 5 million US dollars. This has somewhat caused feelings of grievance in Zhang Yimou, who has recently been hailed as a "god of Chinese cinema" by sponsors, because film accounts aren't calculated this way.

Take this piece of news for example - it doesn't even mention the scope of this deal: does it refer to the sale of screening rights for North American (US and Canada) movie theaters, or for other regions of the world (the three largest global film markets being North America, Japan, and the EU)? Were just the movie theater screening rights sold (commonly referred to in the industry as theatrical exhibition rights), or were all kinds of television broadcast rights and video disc rights also included? Was the perpetual copyright sold outright, or just the copyright for the next few years? There are a great many questions like these, otherwise how could it be necessary for highly paid lawyers and MBAs to sign those contracts and documents thicker than "Dream of the Red Chamber"?