Film Industry Economics Quotes

During the '90s, a lot of us in the indie film world were not making our money off our movies. We were screenwriters doing scripts for hire for studios.

The typical output deal from a studio is 10 to 14 movies a year.

I've never made a film that lost money.

When you're spending $200 million on a movie, you need to make $400 million to break even. It's a spectacle.

I believe we can balance the scales if Tom Cruise would lower his quote by a mere $29 million... I assure you my salary would not make a difference. My annual salary is the budget for Altoids on one of Tom's movies.

I believe in making all movies at their most reasonable. That I get a lot of money as an actor is because nobody else will get it if I don't.

The better the script, the less money there is. That's just the economics of the studio system.

If you have $300,000 to shoot a cigarette on a table, it's an enormous amount of money. Maybe that's why my movies are the way they are. But it's the only way I can make a living.

All the interesting films are now being made by their subsidiaries for very low budgets. But the studios are not making money. They're making these big, very expensive pictures that take a lot of money but don't really pay for their costs. So they're having a very difficult time. I can see the system breaking down. I think the American studios are a reflection or a metaphor for American industry altogether, which is failing in the world. Its economic domination is being broken down and I think the same thing is happening to the studios.

Now, grosses are listed in the newspapers and on television like it's a sporting event. It's ridiculous, because when you're watching a movie, unless you're an investor in the movie or a stockholder in the studio, what do you care how much it's grossing or how much it cost or any of that stuff?

It is extremely difficult to get movies that cost more than $40 million to be made these days.

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.

I've done a couple of movies for scale, and it's the only way to get a lot of these independent movies made. The actors negotiate deals where they're given just enough money to live on during the filming, but then they participate in the back-end. If the movie suddenly makes a gazillion dollars, we'll participate in that profit.