Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

When Jeremy Irons was asked why he did Dungeons & Dragons (2000), he replied "Are you kidding? I'd just bought a castle, I had to pay for it somehow"

(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190374/trivia/)

Michael Caine's quote about Jaws 4 is similarly great:

"I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

As someone with more modest means, I'm wondering - was that just a quip, or is it really possible for rich people to buy property first, and then figure out how to pay for it? How do they finance it?

> How do they finance it?

The same way most people do, with a mortgage. The difference is what a bank is willing to lend you if they see you have a significantly higher than average income.

It's also possible he wasn't just talking about the purchase payment. Large, old, valuable buildings also often require very large upkeep bills.

It depends on levels of money. At musk levels, it's cheaper to borrow from your shares on margin, spend that, and never repay anything but interest - no financing involved except lending out your own assets. At multi-million illiquid, you're going to go to a bank, show them accounts and historic income, and because you're an actor with bursty income, they'll smooth out the line and decide if the loan you want is above it or below it. He likely had the means for the down payment and the assets for enough monthlies that the bank felt it was de-risked, but you can also do hard-money loans and similar if you have expectations of payment - but they tend to come with heavy duty strings.

Which is to say - for musks, not like you or I, for the illiquid, very much the same process, but with money managers and the like doing the actual bank negotiation.

For the type of rich people like actors, sports stars, etc, yes.

You may have an actor of a certain budget who has no roles lined up currently, but is a pretty safe bet he will get some lined up eventually, and so he's a decent risk for a loan.

This is private lending and is a completely different world than a home loan that is resold. Depending on the dollar amount, the lender will have their own appraisers, etc taking careful look at the collateral (which might be the castle you're buying, or that and more, or something else entirely, like royalties due, etc).

They will then structure it so that it's a heads they win, tails they don't lose - only lending as much as they're sure they'll be able to get back out (up to and including having alternate buyers lined up to purchase the property if it gets foreclosed, etc).

This is the castle in question:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilcoe_Castle https://jeremyirons.net/kilcoe-castle/

It’s quite something. He bought it for IEP 150,000 (around €190,000) but likely spent an order of magnitude more restoring it.

from the Hot To Trot Wikipedia page:

"In an interview in 2011, Bobcat Goldthwait said that he got the script for Hot to Trot and wrote "Why would I do this?" on the cover, to which his manager responded by writing a dollar sign"