BUILDING YOUR LIBRARY OF FILMS
Your negative is valuable in more and more ways. Someone is always working on a new way of showing entertainment. So hold on to those rights! Don't sell yourself cheap. Always sell for a limited period, like five years, seven years or ten, never more!
You should start building up a library of films. If a major studio picks up your film, you should demand over $2,500,000 I don't care what your budget was, otherwise you're a fool for selling all your rights to a major. Because you can be sure when you sign the contract, that film becomes the property of that major and it goes into their library!
Have you ever wondered why when a major studio sells it's old movie library they get between $500,000,000 and $7,000,000,000? It's because of the "mummies" they've acquired. Your film becomes preserved for posterity, only not your posterity but theirs, the ghouls of cinema!
Always store your negatives in a safe place. Proper temperature and humidity are important. And don't let all your negatives and masters be in one place! Make second masters and even IPs for your most expensive productions and put these in a place that you can get to whenever you need to.
Years ago I read a very interesting story regarding Stanley Kubrick. He'd called one of the large labs in London (where he lives) and asked about his negative (I believe it was A CLOCKWORK ORANGE) and someone at the lab had told him, "We can't find it." (He'd meant temporarily I'm sure.) Kubrick had hit the ceiling, "What! What do you mean you can't find it?"
A little later, he was informed that they found it. He then, had taken three cars and a motorcycle. He'd taken the film out of the lab. He'd sat in the middle car, with the film around him. One car drove ahead of him and the other behind him -- in case of accidents! And the motorcycle had led the way, so that they wouldn't be obstructed by traffic jams! They'd delivered the film into another lab's vault, which Kubrick had arranged.
You too should go to any length to secure your movie negatives. There's no telling what they'll be worth someday.