Film Profitability Quotes

Box-office poison? Mr. Louis B. Mayer always asserted that the studio had built Stage 22, Stage 24 and the Irving Thalberg Building, brick by brick, from the income on my pictures.

Economics drive the creative, and for a long time, movies about men were just considered 'movies,' whereas movies about women were considered niche and only appealing to women. This is to an extent still true, and what it does is represent movies about women as less profitable.

The Cable Guy was underbudgeted, so it was always a debate about whether we could have more days or certain things that we needed, because the budget was determined before the script was written. So that made it a hard production on everybody. But it's also a funny thing, because it's one of those movies that cost $40 million to make and made $100 million around the world, but at the time, it seemed like a disaster that it didn't make hundreds of millions of dollars, because Jim was on such a tear. But it was actually a successful movie.

I love the process of making films and an incidental satisfaction is the fact that most of them made money.

There's still a lot of investors wondering what to invest in. And, of course, I think entertainment looks attractive when you read the few films that make these insane amounts of money. What they don't know is they don't always do that.

It's obviously a lot more of a political undertaking making a movie in Hollywood and it's a business there. In Australia, they don't expect films to make money; whereas in America they're counting on it.

So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.

Things are shifting; man is evolving in many different ways. The Internet has created a portal for people to connect with each other in a way they never could have before. When it comes to African-American or black films, it's different because there is a model that you can actually look at, an equation that shows that these films earn money.

Sometimes earning awards doesn't matter as much as earning revenue or profit, or having a good response from the audience. No matter how many awards you win, if you can't earn any profit from your movie, if the audience doesn't like it, then it doesn't matter how many awards you get.

You can't do anything about a film's fate at the box office.

If everybody had 100% record of hits and flops, there would have been no surprises. There's not one director with 100% success rate.

Just because there are celebrities in a movie, it doesn't mean anything. I don't think The Ant Bully did all that well the first week at the box office. Compare the movies that have a lot of celebrities with the Jimmy Neutron movie, which had no celebrity voices and grossed almost one hundred million dollars.

You know, social issue movies don't make a lot of money.

I go into movies I hate, and that movie will make $500 million.

I know it's easy to say the box-office numbers doesn't matter, but the reality is it actually does.

There's no money in documentaries.

Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.

Who says that big-budget films are safer than mid-range films? In terms of return on investment, I'd rather have 'Sling Blade' and 'Shine' than 'Volcano.'

I think "Avatar" is kind of a unique category where people are enjoying the unique theatrical experience even though they may have seen it on the small screen. They want to have that immersive, transportive experience. "2001: A Space Odyssey" played for three years at the Loews cinema in Toronto. I remember that. It just kept playing. People wanted to return to that experience. That may not be the best example because I think "2001" took 25 years to break even.

We have a conservative government that only thinks in terms of efficiency. They are spending a lot of money on military expenses and less and less on culture. My position is that culture can actually be economically viable. When I make a film, the film costs $3 million. Now, in Quebec, it grossed $3.5 million, which is a small film. It's not a comedy. There are no stars in it. And, it still grosses $3.5 million. That's just in Quebec.