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Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

310 points by zeristor 6y ago

flak48 6y ago
TL;DR Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie at a local movie theater on June 10th. Which turned out to be more money 'earned' than any other movie in the US that day, allowing them to top the charts as the highest grossing movie. Edit: whoops, looks like I may have misunderstood and they probably didn't pay that much, as replies to this comment are pointing out
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Looks like they lost the long-tail opportunity to sell their "One Weird Trick That Movie Critics Hate and Will Make You Rich"
- shaftway 6y ago
  Did it cost them that much? I think it wasn't clear on that point. It looks like they rented the theater out for a fixed fee (since they have connections to the theater let's say it was $100). Then they can sell tickets and they get to keep the money for selling said tickets. So they sell tickets to themselves for $25,488. According to the theater that's the profit for the movie, and they're only out of pocket $100. I suspect the $25,488 was so low to keep it believeable.
  - geoelectric 6y ago
    either that, or the "ticket revenue" from selling out a full theater was ~$5100. Average theater seats about 2-300 people, so ~$20 a ticket (not sure of the per-ticket price, but it was the premiere after all) works out at 250 seats.
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie The film studio usually gets the majority of the ticket sales for a movie, so even if they didn't have connections it would cost them much less than a normal person to rent out the theater. > Arrangements vary, but the movie studio usually ends up with about 60 percent of the proceeds from American box offices. > ... > That figure varies according to the usual supply and demand principles — an extremely hot first-run movie may start out with distribution fees up to 90 percent (in other words, 90 percent of the fees during that time are going back to the studio). As the film stays in distribution longer, the fees go down since demand goes down until eventually the theater replaces it with a different film. https://theweek.com/articles/647394/when-buy-movie-ticket-where-does-that-money https://theweek.com/articles/647394/when-buy-movie-ticket-wh... Given that the theaters were completely empty at the time, I'm sure they could have negotiated some pretty good rates.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
koolba 6y ago
This is the same strategy as getting on the NY Times best seller list by literally buying lots of copies of your own book[1]. The key innovation is realizing how cheap it would be to make it to the top with nearly every theater in the USA closed. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-how-you-buy-your-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestsellers-list/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...
- teach 6y ago
  I "participated" in a less nefarious strategy. In 2010, when the collection of short stories "Machine of Death" was about to be released, the editor Ryan North asked us not to pre-order. Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it's a superb book. (Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".)
  - evan_ 6y ago
    It beat a book by right-wing pundit Glenn Beck, who accused it of being an intentional attack on him and emblematic of the “liberal culture of death”
  - scubbo 6y ago
    > Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic". And of "To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure" and "Romeo And/Or Juliet", CYA retellings of Hamlet and R&J; and of "How To Invent Everything", a handy-dandy guide to bootstrapping modern technology if your time machine malfunctions. AND he is the human of Noam Chompsky, a Very Good Boy.
    - bryanlarsen 6y ago
      OK, that's the third time I've seen "How to Invent Everything" recommended in 3 very different places. Ordered.
DevKoala 6y ago
I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture. How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  I doubt it's anything more than the cyclical nature of trends, and chance. There was already a movement away from Zoom to platforms that were less closed, but then the pandemic happened.
  - DevKoala 6y ago
    But the movement to leave Zoom happened due to the prominence of Zoom in many B2B companies that didn’t realize they were risking their security. Just reaching the status Zoom reached in 2019 is bonkers considering the competition had been at it for decades.
- FirefoxIsSlow 6y ago
  M$ charges money. Cisco charges money. Google discontinued their video/messaging services too many times for people to get used to. Heck for a moment I thought "Houseparty" was going to be a new social media, but I think their push notifications were too annoying.
- sp332 6y ago
  Zoom is still in "growth phase" which means they aren't under a lot of pressure to turn a profit at this particular moment. So they proactively offered their free service to schools, the free tier isn't time-limited, plus their corporate product is basically the same as the consumer/free product. And on the other side, Google was totally caught napping and assumed that everyone knew about Meet. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-virus-facebook-google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-vi... "[Google’s chief business officer] Mr. Schindler tried placating the engineer’s concerns, the people said. Then his young son stumbled into view of the camera and asked if his father was talking to his co-workers on Zoom."
ascar 6y ago
While reading this I wondered how they ended up at a box office of $25,488. Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?! If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings. The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 seats [1]. 425 Seats * 5 viewings * $12 a ticket actually ends up at $25,500 or $25,488 if they did not report 1 ticket for whatever reason. As "any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets", I suspect they simply sold the tickets of the 425*5 seats they rented for a flat fee for $12 a seat to themselves and reported that as Box Office. [1] https://whbpac.org/general-information/ https://whbpac.org/general-information/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?! According to the TV news this morning, yes, they did buy all of the tickets themselves. Which kinda makes the "$0 Budget" headline a little iffy. $0 to make the film. But $26k to achieve their goal.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    Not just iffy :)
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    It seems more like $0 to make the movie and $26k for distribution. Do traditional movies count distribution costs in their budgets? Hollywood accounting is weird.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
    - mattmanser 6y ago
      Read the article, the GP is wrong. They paid to rent the cinema (small fee), then "sold" themselves the tickets. So their expenditure might have been $26k, but their income would have been $26k. In reality, I assume no money changed hands. It's almost more fun to imagine they sold each other one ticket at time handing the same ten dollars back and forth between themselves. They held 5 viewings, making roughly $5k per viewing.
hirundo 6y ago
Demonstrating Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
ARandomerDude 6y ago
The only thing worse than a Zoom meeting would be paying to watch other people in a Zoom meeting.
- allarm 6y ago
  There’s nothing wrong with Zoom meetings. It’s a great product, if not the best. Their politics is a different story.
ansible 6y ago
Spoiler alert, they talk about significant plot points in the article.
gumby 6y ago
This is quite brilliant, and also instructive. They saw a corner case and took advantage of it.* But when you're starting a company this is a danger: you might get some initial traction but is your growth all in a corner case? This is almost a restatement of the "early adopter" cohort in "Crossing the Chasm". Dominating a niche isn't alway bad BTW -- FB's niche was college students, who could evangelize and grow the overall market.... though notice that FB is pretty much nonexistent in that niche today. * I mean this in a good sense: "exploit" and "take advantage of" often imply something shady.
swanson 6y ago
Reminds me of the great "Nathan for You" episode where Nathan creates his own film festival so that he can award his own movie a judge's prize.
peter303 6y ago
Anyone dream about a Zoom meeting yet? Since I have seen a hundred zooms since the lockdown, I recall seeing one while dreaming.
leoc 6y ago
One vaguely related thing is the 1953 jukebox hit, "Three Minutes of Silence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs which delivered on its promise. (It doesn't seem to have a WP page yet. Does anyone know of a WP-friendly source of information on it?) Here's a Spotify playlist of various (apparently) silent tracks, useful for inserting pauses/silent intervals into Spotify playlists as (AFAICT) there isn't any other way to do so. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fN5YP4n8aGCSS4j3MQoeo?si=EKLr6Wl6Q5283j3btyMt-A https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fN5YP4n8aGCSS4j3MQoeo?si=... .
david_draco 6y ago
Movies with similar concepts, which were surprisingly good: - Searching (2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/) - Unfriended (2014, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/)
- geoffreyy 6y ago
  - Unfriended - Dark web (2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/) aren't you thinking of this one instead? I've seen it and it was pretty good. When I saw your comment I was like, no way it was from 2014.
  - jccalhoun 6y ago
    I think that is a sequel to the one from 2014.
sgp_ 6y ago
I spoke with Eric a few months ago to help give a few pointers when he was considering the idea for this movie. He saw some of the media surrounding "Monero Means Money," our film that we put together from idea to theaters in a week. I explained how I cold called theaters who were very willing to show unusual movies at this time while they have essentially no revenue. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewky/how-a-random-guy-made-the-2-movie-in-america-for-dollar1000 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewky/how-a-random-guy-m... For us, getting a movie on the charts was more of a logistics challenge than anything, and I assume it was the same for him. Congrats to Eric and everyone else involved for topping the charts!
row_number 6y ago
A couple of German film Students recently made an Instagram web series [0] based on video calls in Corona times (subtitled). [0] https://www.instagram.com/curfew_calls/ https://www.instagram.com/curfew_calls/
chaostheory 6y ago
Not on the same level but this is semi-Blair Witch genius
parsimo2010 6y ago
"So they pay a flat fee to the theatre..." "In that sense, "we made a slight loss" on the movie, Mr Tabach said." Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie. I suppose they probably get at least that much value in free publicity from articles like these and us talking about them online. Now they can pitch their next project as coming from the brilliant minds of chart-topping filmmakers. Bravo to some guys that figured out how to game the system a little. I hope enough people rent the movie to get their fee back.
- Jedd 6y ago
  > Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie. Note that the movie's actual production cost / budget was indeed $0. In order to then get to the top of this particular list on IMDB - by showing the movie in an actual cinema - that bit cost some small number of $'s, according to TFA.
  - parsimo2010 6y ago
    In strange Hollywood accounting you're right. But it's a fact of real life accounting that you can't take a loss on something that cost $0.
SeanFerree 6y ago
Awesome! I'll have to watch this!
quickthrower2 6y ago
To take to the next level, get some VC welfare. Buy the tickets with MoviePass, and order the popcorn on Grubhub, and catch an Uber home.
bitwize 6y ago
I thought four-walling was a conspiracy theory invented by racists, incels, and Russian bots that is supposedly what Disney did in order to boost the box-office figures for that totally amazing, legitimately groundbreaking movie about Captain Marvel.
ant6n 6y ago
It seems like it would be possible to hack the charts during normal times. It may involve renting a stadium, designating it a movie theatre and playing the movie 24h straight (then every 10K seats could create 10k seats * 10$/seat * 10 showings per day = 1 Million $ in revenue).
iamyourcattle 6y ago
does anyone hav a link to see the movie? thanks in advance

310 points by zeristor 6y ago

TL;DR Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie at a local movie theater on June 10th. Which turned out to be more money 'earned' than any other movie in the US that day, allowing them to top the charts as the highest grossing movie. Edit: whoops, looks like I may have misunderstood and they probably didn't pay that much, as replies to this comment are pointing out

heavyset_go 6y ago
Looks like they lost the long-tail opportunity to sell their "One Weird Trick That Movie Critics Hate and Will Make You Rich"
shaftway 6y ago
Did it cost them that much? I think it wasn't clear on that point. It looks like they rented the theater out for a fixed fee (since they have connections to the theater let's say it was $100). Then they can sell tickets and they get to keep the money for selling said tickets. So they sell tickets to themselves for $25,488. According to the theater that's the profit for the movie, and they're only out of pocket $100. I suspect the $25,488 was so low to keep it believeable.
- geoelectric 6y ago
  either that, or the "ticket revenue" from selling out a full theater was ~$5100. Average theater seats about 2-300 people, so ~$20 a ticket (not sure of the per-ticket price, but it was the premiere after all) works out at 250 seats.
nordsieck 6y ago
> Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie The film studio usually gets the majority of the ticket sales for a movie, so even if they didn't have connections it would cost them much less than a normal person to rent out the theater. > Arrangements vary, but the movie studio usually ends up with about 60 percent of the proceeds from American box offices. > ... > That figure varies according to the usual supply and demand principles — an extremely hot first-run movie may start out with distribution fees up to 90 percent (in other words, 90 percent of the fees during that time are going back to the studio). As the film stays in distribution longer, the fees go down since demand goes down until eventually the theater replaces it with a different film. https://theweek.com/articles/647394/when-buy-movie-ticket-where-does-that-money https://theweek.com/articles/647394/when-buy-movie-ticket-wh... Given that the theaters were completely empty at the time, I'm sure they could have negotiated some pretty good rates.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

koolba 6y ago

This is the same strategy as getting on the NY Times best seller list by literally buying lots of copies of your own book[1]. The key innovation is realizing how cheap it would be to make it to the top with nearly every theater in the USA closed. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-how-you-buy-your-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestsellers-list/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...

teach 6y ago
I "participated" in a less nefarious strategy. In 2010, when the collection of short stories "Machine of Death" was about to be released, the editor Ryan North asked us not to pre-order. Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it's a superb book. (Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".)
- evan_ 6y ago
  It beat a book by right-wing pundit Glenn Beck, who accused it of being an intentional attack on him and emblematic of the “liberal culture of death”
- scubbo 6y ago
  > Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic". And of "To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure" and "Romeo And/Or Juliet", CYA retellings of Hamlet and R&J; and of "How To Invent Everything", a handy-dandy guide to bootstrapping modern technology if your time machine malfunctions. AND he is the human of Noam Chompsky, a Very Good Boy.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    OK, that's the third time I've seen "How to Invent Everything" recommended in 3 very different places. Ordered.

DevKoala 6y ago

I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture. How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?

heavyset_go 6y ago
I doubt it's anything more than the cyclical nature of trends, and chance. There was already a movement away from Zoom to platforms that were less closed, but then the pandemic happened.
- DevKoala 6y ago
  But the movement to leave Zoom happened due to the prominence of Zoom in many B2B companies that didn’t realize they were risking their security. Just reaching the status Zoom reached in 2019 is bonkers considering the competition had been at it for decades.
FirefoxIsSlow 6y ago
M$ charges money. Cisco charges money. Google discontinued their video/messaging services too many times for people to get used to. Heck for a moment I thought "Houseparty" was going to be a new social media, but I think their push notifications were too annoying.
sp332 6y ago
Zoom is still in "growth phase" which means they aren't under a lot of pressure to turn a profit at this particular moment. So they proactively offered their free service to schools, the free tier isn't time-limited, plus their corporate product is basically the same as the consumer/free product. And on the other side, Google was totally caught napping and assumed that everyone knew about Meet. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-virus-facebook-google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-vi... "[Google’s chief business officer] Mr. Schindler tried placating the engineer’s concerns, the people said. Then his young son stumbled into view of the camera and asked if his father was talking to his co-workers on Zoom."

ascar 6y ago

While reading this I wondered how they ended up at a box office of $25,488. Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?! If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings. The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 seats [1]. 425 Seats * 5 viewings * $12 a ticket actually ends up at $25,500 or $25,488 if they did not report 1 ticket for whatever reason. As "any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets", I suspect they simply sold the tickets of the 425*5 seats they rented for a flat fee for $12 a seat to themselves and reported that as Box Office. [1] https://whbpac.org/general-information/ https://whbpac.org/general-information/

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
reaperducer 6y ago
Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?! According to the TV news this morning, yes, they did buy all of the tickets themselves. Which kinda makes the "$0 Budget" headline a little iffy. $0 to make the film. But $26k to achieve their goal.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  Not just iffy :)
- pmiller2 6y ago
  It seems more like $0 to make the movie and $26k for distribution. Do traditional movies count distribution costs in their budgets? Hollywood accounting is weird.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    Read the article, the GP is wrong. They paid to rent the cinema (small fee), then "sold" themselves the tickets. So their expenditure might have been $26k, but their income would have been $26k. In reality, I assume no money changed hands. It's almost more fun to imagine they sold each other one ticket at time handing the same ten dollars back and forth between themselves. They held 5 viewings, making roughly $5k per viewing.

hirundo 6y ago

Demonstrating Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

ARandomerDude 6y ago

The only thing worse than a Zoom meeting would be paying to watch other people in a Zoom meeting.

allarm 6y ago
There’s nothing wrong with Zoom meetings. It’s a great product, if not the best. Their politics is a different story.

ansible 6y ago

Spoiler alert, they talk about significant plot points in the article.

gumby 6y ago

This is quite brilliant, and also instructive. They saw a corner case and took advantage of it.* But when you're starting a company this is a danger: you might get some initial traction but is your growth all in a corner case? This is almost a restatement of the "early adopter" cohort in "Crossing the Chasm". Dominating a niche isn't alway bad BTW -- FB's niche was college students, who could evangelize and grow the overall market.... though notice that FB is pretty much nonexistent in that niche today. * I mean this in a good sense: "exploit" and "take advantage of" often imply something shady.

swanson 6y ago

Reminds me of the great "Nathan for You" episode where Nathan creates his own film festival so that he can award his own movie a judge's prize.

peter303 6y ago

Anyone dream about a Zoom meeting yet? Since I have seen a hundred zooms since the lockdown, I recall seeing one while dreaming.

leoc 6y ago

One vaguely related thing is the 1953 jukebox hit, "Three Minutes of Silence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs which delivered on its promise. (It doesn't seem to have a WP page yet. Does anyone know of a WP-friendly source of information on it?) Here's a Spotify playlist of various (apparently) silent tracks, useful for inserting pauses/silent intervals into Spotify playlists as (AFAICT) there isn't any other way to do so. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fN5YP4n8aGCSS4j3MQoeo?si=EKLr6Wl6Q5283j3btyMt-A https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fN5YP4n8aGCSS4j3MQoeo?si=... .

david_draco 6y ago

Movies with similar concepts, which were surprisingly good: - Searching (2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/) - Unfriended (2014, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/)

geoffreyy 6y ago
- Unfriended - Dark web (2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/) aren't you thinking of this one instead? I've seen it and it was pretty good. When I saw your comment I was like, no way it was from 2014.
- jccalhoun 6y ago
  I think that is a sequel to the one from 2014.

sgp_ 6y ago

I spoke with Eric a few months ago to help give a few pointers when he was considering the idea for this movie. He saw some of the media surrounding "Monero Means Money," our film that we put together from idea to theaters in a week. I explained how I cold called theaters who were very willing to show unusual movies at this time while they have essentially no revenue. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewky/how-a-random-guy-made-the-2-movie-in-america-for-dollar1000 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewky/how-a-random-guy-m... For us, getting a movie on the charts was more of a logistics challenge than anything, and I assume it was the same for him. Congrats to Eric and everyone else involved for topping the charts!

row_number 6y ago

A couple of German film Students recently made an Instagram web series [0] based on video calls in Corona times (subtitled). [0] https://www.instagram.com/curfew_calls/ https://www.instagram.com/curfew_calls/

chaostheory 6y ago

Not on the same level but this is semi-Blair Witch genius

parsimo2010 6y ago

"So they pay a flat fee to the theatre..." "In that sense, "we made a slight loss" on the movie, Mr Tabach said." Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie. I suppose they probably get at least that much value in free publicity from articles like these and us talking about them online. Now they can pitch their next project as coming from the brilliant minds of chart-topping filmmakers. Bravo to some guys that figured out how to game the system a little. I hope enough people rent the movie to get their fee back.

Jedd 6y ago
> Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie. Note that the movie's actual production cost / budget was indeed $0. In order to then get to the top of this particular list on IMDB - by showing the movie in an actual cinema - that bit cost some small number of $'s, according to TFA.
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  In strange Hollywood accounting you're right. But it's a fact of real life accounting that you can't take a loss on something that cost $0.

SeanFerree 6y ago

Awesome! I'll have to watch this!

quickthrower2 6y ago

To take to the next level, get some VC welfare. Buy the tickets with MoviePass, and order the popcorn on Grubhub, and catch an Uber home.

bitwize 6y ago

I thought four-walling was a conspiracy theory invented by racists, incels, and Russian bots that is supposedly what Disney did in order to boost the box-office figures for that totally amazing, legitimately groundbreaking movie about Captain Marvel.

ant6n 6y ago

It seems like it would be possible to hack the charts during normal times. It may involve renting a stadium, designating it a movie theatre and playing the movie 24h straight (then every 10K seats could create 10k seats * 10$/seat * 10 showings per day = 1 Million $ in revenue).

iamyourcattle 6y ago

does anyone hav a link to see the movie? thanks in advance