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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 bo
by 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 agoDid 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 agoNot just iffy :)
- pmiller2 6y agoIt 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 agoRead 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.
- hn_check 6y agoFTA- "Four-walling is when distributors rent out a movie theatre and buy all the seats," Mr Tabach, who used to work at BuzzFeed making viral videos, explained. "So they pay a flat fee to the theatre, and any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets. The moment we realised that was an option of distribution, we went for it." They pay the fee to the theater, but as the distributor of the film they then get that money, or some large percentage of it.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoSounds to me like they're renting the theater, so they can then sell tickets they way they want. So they "sell" the tickets to themselves. They pay rent, then the ticket sales are a wash, but can be reported as "ticket sales."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- squeaky-clean 6y agoGenerally the listed budget for a movie is the production budget, which does not include marketing the film. Generally for a big "blockbuster" style movie, you can generally assume the marketing budget is almost equal to the production budget.
- addicted 6y agoEven if they did buy the tickets, they paid themselves with those tickets. They paid a small fee for four walling (which they probably got for a token amount because of COVID and the fact that one of the guys might know the owner since he worked there). And that was pretty much it as far as actual costs were concerned.
- jedberg 6y agoAll of the $25K went back to them as their part of the ticket sales. So they only paid the screening fee.
- xcavier 6y agoMy take is it is inferred box office receipts. When they ‘four wall’, they pay a single fee to rent the entire cinema (the ‘small fee’ they paid to a friendly cinema owner. They then ran 5 viewings. So they are claiming being sold out for each of the viewings. (5 * seat capacity * ticket price), but didn’t actually pay themselves for all the tickets (no revenue - small fee = small loss)
- sorbits 6y agoTo me it sounds like they basically just lied to the maintainers of the BoxOfficeMojo list, because it’s a list of revenue, and their movie did not create any revenue at all, even though they rented a cinema and did five screenings, nobody paid to see the movie.