Naomi McDougall Jones shares on the excellent Seed&Spark What the Joyful Vampire Tour of America Taught Us About Independent Film Today.
Naomi is the writer and one of the producers of Bite Me, a $500,000 subversive romantic comedy about a real-life vampire and the IRS agent who audits her.
They wanted to do distribution differently:
“Our distribution plan was based on two core hypotheses. The first was that, although Hollywood is constantly complaining that people don’t want to see movies in theaters anymore — thanks to Netflix, streaming, having to put on pants to do so, etc — those complaints didn’t jive with our observations about the people around us. In an age where technology is isolating us all ever-more-aggressively, drawing us further into our phones and farther away from each other, we felt that people are actually desperate for excuses to get out of their homes and into community. It isn’t that people don’t want to leave their homes, we figured. It’s simply that you need to give them a better proposition than “pay upwards of $50 for two people to go to a movie theater, interact with no one you didn’t come with, and have no added positive experience above what you would have gotten for the cost of your monthly Netflix subscription at home without having to put on pants.” Our second hypothesis was that, if we did some crazy marketing stunt like, say, travel around the country with the film in an RV for three months, and also put substantial marketing dollars into social media and YouTube ads, that all of that buzz, news, fun and marketing would translate into a larger number of people renting and/or buying the film online.”
The filmmakers are brutally honest with the number of tickets and merchandise they sold in the real world and the digital revenue online.
They thought they’d rake it in online and their real world tour would not amount to much more than a cute publicity stunt.
Good surprise! They grossed $38,000 in ticket sales across 51 screenings, meaning an average of $745 per screen. They also made an additional $9,000 in merchandise sales, for a total of approximately $47,000.
Now, if their online revenue was ten times as much, they’d recoup their film cost.
Bad surprise! Less than 600 people rented or purchased the film online, generating these numbers: $1,821.45 from iTunes, Amazon, and GooglePlay/YouTube combined and an additional $5,522 from Seed&Spark, for a grand total of $7,343.45 in digital revenue.
That’s actually less than their merch.
Along the way, they heard that TVOD is dead: “TVOD sales for everyone have declined 50% year-over-year for the last two years.” Yikes!
Wait, there’s more!
They also made a fascinating 12-part documentary series that follows them across the States as they promote their film and show it to paying audiences. See Prologue, Part1:
My take: Kudos to the Bite Me Team for this unparalleled access. The glimpse into their truth is humbling. Finding your audience is harder than ever; there’s just so much competition for eyeballs. I would actually like to see the documentary series cut into a feature, something that chronicles the wide-eyed optimism of the filmmakers, their journey around the country and the realizations they stumble on. Of course, then they have to take that on a second tour across the continent.