Distribution Rights Quotes

The film business has changed hugely. You seem to spend about 30 per cent of the time producing the films and 70 per cent talking about it.

Everyone who makes a film is at the major distributors' mercy.

Once you work with a studio on a film, the studio is sort of like this enormous clam that just opens, takes everything and then closes, and no one enters again. They own it all.

I mean, once work's out there it's meant to be used.

Basically, the big studios and companies distributing your movie just take a big cut of profit for making posters.

You'd be naive if you think you are going to retain any control once you option a character to TV.

Retail should never ever tell the copyright owner how their stuff is sold.

It's just hard to get an independent film made.

We don't decide how a movie will be distributed until it's finished. It might be on iTunes, it might be on 3,000 theaters, but we make that decision after the fact.

We make a lot of movies that I don't think merit a wide release. We have this label called Tilt, and we have the movies come out on that, and that's fine. But it shocks me when, having done this a few times, when I really believe a movie should get a wide release, and I struggle to get it released. That does surprise me.

First of all, what in this world does not revolve around money? But money is a big part of film, unlike a lot of other art forms.

Because we self-published 'Draculas,' we control the rights. Not just for now, but forever.

A company like DreamWorks, all we do is make product. That's all we do. We don't own distribution. We are purely in the creation of content.

My experience with record labels throughout my career has generally fallen into wishing I could do things that they're not built to do, whether it be arguing about having a nicer package - because I do believe some people care about that - to trying to always bank on art-versus-the-easy-commerce route; there's always been headbutting involved.

I don't think I'll ever be a producer who's into taking the meetings and fighting the big fights with studios. I really don't like that part. I'm much more interested in the material.

Today we often take for granted the fact that supporters of The Militant can stand in front of a mine portal and distribute the paper. But this was a right that we along with other miners had to fight for against the coal companies and some conservative-minded workers.

We own our movie and are now close to breaking even, even without finishing domestic DVD deals.

If you do a film with a studio, agents step in, they start saying, 'My actor has to get this amount of money', and it becomes about deals.

By the time we got to MGM, and Lions Gate the movie was done there was nothing else to say. It was done. Just as at Universal, it was art by committee.

Profile has half the publishing and they control and administer the publishing and distribute and own the records, so our group is a 10-point crew. But we got a lot of money off of the shows.

That's what's nice about directing a film and having it done: There's nothing more I can do about it. It's done. That's it. All I can do is let it go and hope that people are kind to it.

And Warner Bros. seems to be pretty much into re-releasing all of their catalog. So there's the Warner Bros. stuff and the stuff that we have control over, we're gradually re-releasing it. Some stuff we don't have control over.

Before our albums are released I feel like we still own it, that we have control over our music. But once it's out there in the world it's no longer ours.

The standard publishing contract is replete with clauses that strip authors of control over their books.

There was no studio involved when we made 'Stargate.' It was financed through Le Studio Canal+ in France and, after the film was finished, it was sold to MGM. When the film was a success, MGM decided to do a television series based on the movie.