Mike Flanagan Quotes

If someone puts up $100 million on a movie, they're gonna be concerned about whether they'll get it back. So they're not gonna make a movie about three girls, you know?

I don't see me doing $100 million films because $100 million films, the very nature of them, you need to offend as few people as possible just to make your money back.

Sponsorships and marketing are oftentimes pretty short-lived. From a company's standpoint, they're often not looking to do tremendously long contracts. They're always trying to catch the next big thing.

When you take the individual out of the equation, then you're making programming based on some marketer's idea of what will sell, and not based on the idea of what an individual would like.

No one wants to risk a million dollars on a few laughs. The big, flashy commercials are out. The soft sell is out.

I'm not looking to double my money with one golden opportunity.

It's a sin to have your films not to make money.

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.

Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.

In the U.K., there's absolutely no money for television. So you can do pretty much whatever you want. They're not losing money on any of the shows, so they'll give you a lot of creative freedom. In the United States, there are millions and millions of dollars at stake, so they need a sure formula.

There is no sense in making a film that no-one will go and see, just to create a perfect, but useless, work of art.

The studio is spending great amounts of money, and they want some insurance they will get money back. They go for the middle of the road, broad in appeal. It's restrictive. It's a constant struggle, but if you give in, you're just making cottage cheese, and that's the end of it.

With so much money invested in their most promising projects, Hollywood executives will understandably do everything in their power to make their products a success in the marketplace. Therefore, the most expensive films often also get the highest marketing budgets, and are slotted into the most favorable opening weekends.

People are very reluctant to invest unless they know it's going to be a sure thing, and let's face it: film is never a sure thing.

To me, the box-office is basically the cost of film. If your film costs so much and your box-office is so much and a bit more, you are okay.

There is no free lunch, so if you're playing with the big train set - on big movies - it's a lot of money they're entrusting you with, and you have to get that money back for them. I don't take that responsibility lightly.

Well, in our industry it's that the movies cost so much money to make they have to appeal to a broad audience. And I think that's part of what will loosen up in the future, as technology makes it cheaper, you'll be able to make films for a more selective audience. I think people will be able to make more personal movies.

Brand loyalty starts in the cradle and ends in the grave, as I wrote in my first book, 'Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers.'

It's hard to make a movie that's very expensive and not be thinking of the results all the time.

You come out of drama school and do theatre and are interested in creative endeavour, then you drift into TV and movies and realise that artistic endeavour needs to balance with financial success. There's no point spending millions on a movie that doesn't make any money, because the people producing it won't make another one.

If I had taken money from, say, venture capital, they would have wanted a certain return in a certain time period. McDonald's, on the other hand, seemed very interested in my passion about creating this brand. I trusted them, and they did not really interfere with the brand.

I have realised that it has become essential to promote your film. God forbid, if a film doesn't run, I shouldn't be blamed for that.

A lot of people ask me, 'Are you going to do a sequel to 'The Guest' or 'You're Next?' - those movies weren't financially viable, so even though there are a lot of fans of it, it'd be a pretty small market we'd be appealing to. It's got to be a big hit for you to really justify that.

I make all my advertising decisions based on what is best for my customers and my employees.

It's nice to stretch in different directions and use different muscles. You can get swallowed into Hollywood, where it's all about bums on seats and how commercial a film is.