4 ms·
I do wonder whether the licensing snafu that is the movie world is, in the long term, going to kill it or at least badly damage it as an artform. We already kn
by thenomad 11y ago
I do wonder whether the licensing snafu that is the movie world is, in the long term, going to kill it or at least badly damage it as an artform.
We already know it's hideous and irritating from a consumer's point of view. But what you may not know is that it's horrendous from a creator's point of view too, at least if you're making a film with a less than $20m budget.
And that accounts for a great deal of the talent entering the industry.
In order to sell a film the conventional way, you have to visit multiple film markets to meet potential buyers, do a festival run for social proof (and go to all those festivals), potentially pay out of your pocket for a cinema run, negotiate with a bunch of people who all have far more information than you do as to the value of your film, employ third parties (sales agents) who have a near-universal reputation as crooks, and finally, quite likely sue to get anything beyond the advance you're promised.
(And other stuff. Lots of other stuff, which I'm not going into here. Masters, E&O insurance, delivery formats...)
Selling a film - not making it, just selling the finished thing - takes 1-2 years, and can easily require a $50k budget.
(Yes, you can sell the film as an MP4 from your own website. But the problem is that people won't buy it because that's not how the public are used to getting their films. At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - and that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they knew of anyone who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally from their own site. Nobody did.)
By contrast, selling a book involves uploading that book to Amazon, setting a price, and promoting it. If you're being thorough about your launch process it might take 3 weeks.
I've been a filmmaker for 20 years. I'm currently dipping my toe in the world of games development, for pretty much exactly these reasons.
- aluhut 11y ago> At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - and that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they knew of anyone who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally from their own site. Nobody did. Has that ever happen at all? I didn't hear about that yet.
- thenomad 11y agoVarious people have tried it, but it usually works somewhere between "not well" and "terribly". Although information flow in the film world is so limited that it might well be there's someone out there who has cracked it and is making a healthy profit - they're just not telling anyone.
- loudmax 11y agoIs the "narrative" qualifier there to exclude documentaries? I paid to stream the Minecraft documentary (http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft). I think that is the only documentary my kids ever got excited about watching.
- giaour 11y agoI assumed the question was phrased to exclude pornography, which is often profitably distributed online via the producer's site.
- thenomad 11y agoYes. Documentaries are a completely different world to narrative feature films and one I don't know a lot about. The financials work very differently.
- edraferi 11y agoYou should check out the Distributed Library of Alexandria. It doesn't solve the promotions piece, but does make it much simpler to sell direct.
- pjc50 11y agoArguably the film business is already dying, and all it has left to offer the mass market is bigger and bigger cinema spectacle in increasingly stupid superhero movies. A lot of talent and longer, more complex storytelling is moving to TV, which is itself moving to Netflix.
- fluxquanta 11y ago>(Yes, you can sell the film as an MP4 from your own website. But the problem is that people won't buy it because that's not how the public are used to getting their films. At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - and that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they knew of anyone who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally from their own site. Nobody did.) What about Horace and Pete (Louis C.K.'s self produced/distributed "web series")?
- thenomad 11y agoWebseries are a slightly different kettle of fish to feature films, and generally in the indie world people draw a distinction between indie movies from relative unknowns (which can cheerfully include people with multiple features under their belt, but doesn't include A-list movie stars, for example) and things made by people who are genuinely extremely famous. Obviously if Tom Cruise, say, decided to fund his own $100k feature film he could probably distribute it at a profit.
- fluxquanta 11y ago>but doesn't include A-list movie stars, for example Surely you aren't still talking about Horace and Pete. Aside from Louis C.K. himself being one of the top comedians (among other things) in America, Horace and Pete starred Alan Alda, Steve Buscemi, Jessica Lange, and Edie Falco, among others. They, and the format of the series itself, is why I used quotes in "web series". I think it would be hard to argue that it wasn't a successful self produced distributed piece of cinematography that didn't include a cast of stars. That said, I agree to an extent -- I haven't seen a feature length, stand alone film that has been successfully produced and distributed independently like that.
- thenomad 11y agoThat cast's vastly beyond the reach of anyone not spending $50m on a movie. Steve Buscemi alone is enough to open a picture. And I'd argue Louis CK is, at this point, big enough to qualify as close to A-list by himself. He's famous enough to get a TV series greenlit essentially on the strength of his personal brand, for example. Essentially, that example shows that if you have a lot of very famous people who are willing to be in your series, and you yourself are also very famous, you can self-distribute. No-one's really denying that.