Two vastly different distribution strategies went head-to-head recently.
Following the status quo, Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet was released theatrically.
Disney+’s Mulan forwent cinemas and was streamed as PVOD (premium video-on-demand) exclusively to its subscribers.
Both are $200-million-plus movies that normally would have been summer blockbusters. How did they do?
Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson reports that “opening in 2,810 American theaters, including some in California, Tenet grossed $20.2 million over its Thurs-Mon Labor Day weekend.” Ten days into its domestic release, The Numbers reports the worldwide gross as $207,500,000.
Daniel Roberts of Yahoo Finance reports “downloads of Disney+ spiked 68% from Friday, Sept. 4 through Sunday, Sept. 6, compared to one weekend prior. Consumer spending in the app also spiked 193%, which can obviously be attributed to customers paying the $30 ‘Mulan’ fee.” Ten days into its international release, The Numbers reports the worldwide gross as $39,601,014 — but this does not include ANY of the streaming revenue.
Because Disney has not released its streaming revenue attributable to Mulan, comparing the two distribution strategies is kind of like comparing apples with kumquats. Stabs have been made to guesstimate the number but it remains a mystery.
“Mulan is outright bombing in China, having earned $8.27 million on Saturday, just 5% from its mediocre $7.9 million Friday gross. Credit the Chinese media blackout, online piracy from last week’s PVOD debut via Disney Plus or that the film isn’t clicking with Chinese moviegoers and Disney made a mistake to presume they would automatically show up.”
It seems neither distribution strategy is doing particularly well.
My take: CV-19 is upending the standard distribution model. While I applaud experiments in new ways to get movies to the masses, I can’t help but wonder if the summer blockbuster is dead. $200-million-plus movies require too large a box office to break even. I suggest immediately making more modest-budget movies. (Hey, throw me $10 million and I’ll deliver a moneymaker.) Check out this primer from Gray Kotze for comparisons between movies at three cost-points:
Ajay Kishore, Founder and CEO, explains to Julia Sun and David Grasso that: “Stareable provides tools that help creators build an engaged audience of fans who will pay for bonus or premium features.”
Beyond building the Stack Exchange of web serious, Stareable seems to be having a lot of fun.
They put on a three-day conference and festival each year:
My take: I’m currently developing a web series, so I’m a potential customer. I realize Stareable is concentrating on web series producers right now but as a content consumer too, I find the website lacking. I wonder if an A or B model would work better: one side for consumers and the other side for producers. Heck, why not just put the producer side behind a log in screen: dangle some success metrics in front of producers and they’ll all sign up. How big is this community of web series creators, and how large is the viewership?
“We should rethink why we are making independent films in the first place, especially indie sci-fi and speculative films. I don’t think we should even be trying to compete with Hollywood. We should be striving to make films that are strikingly different from big-budget films.”
Aleem faced five challenges making After We Leave and solved them creatively. Although he answers them from a sci-fi point of view, they can be extrapolated to indie filmmaking in general.
#1. The Brainstorming Phase: What Are Sci-Fi and Indie Film’s Core Strengths?
“Hollywood is very good at making its kind of movies. Why should we try to compete with them with a lot less money? In my mind, the only reason to make an independent feature film is to create a movie that only you would make. A kind of film that wouldn’t exist if you didn’t exist. I think what independent films can offer are new directions in style, tone, theme, topic, representation, and viewing experiences. They can challenge the mainstream artistically, politically, and narratively.”
#2. World building does not have to be expensive.
Rather than with a VFX-laden long shot, sometimes a world can be built with a carefully composed close up:
“The future version of Los Angeles that I imagine in my film is undergoing severe water shortages. This glass is the only clean water we see in the entire film. Every other time characters drink, they drink dirty water or something other than water. I don’t have a shot of a huge empty reservoir. I don’t have a shot of drones “mining” water from clouds. I have one clear glass of water, provided by the most powerful and richest character in the film… and my main character chugs it down. It cost me nothing. But it’s definitely world building.”
#3. The standard model of film production discourages artistic risk-taking.
Aleem laments, “The system is always telling us to play it safe.”
To counter the “stay on schedule” mantra, he bought their camera gear:
“We could choose to just try one crazy complicated shot, exactly at sunrise, and then we’d all go off to our day jobs. If it didn’t work we could try again the next morning. There was no downside other than our time… and because we were fitting it in around our existing work and lives. This way of working was, in fact, the thing that convinced collaborators (some long time friends, some new) to work on the film. They all had day jobs that paid way better than I could. The reason they gave up their nights and lunch hours and weekends to work on After We Leave was that I was offering them a chance to try things they normally didn’t get to try. To reach for things in a way they normally didn’t get to.”
This also freed up his actors to ask for extra takes and for his DOP to extend magic hour by shooting at the same time over a number of days.
As to locations:
“I ‘scouted’ for hours on Google Street view looking for rundown and beautifully gritty locations… and then I placed small scenes in each of them. We shot all over Los Angeles. We didn’t get a single permit. We didn’t need to because we didn’t care if we got kicked out of somewhere… it wouldn’t throw off our schedule or make us cut the scene or waste a ton of money. We’d just film it next weekend at a different location. And the truth is, most days we were a crew of three people with a DSLR, a Zoom recorder and a mic, plus one or two actors. We shot in 25 different exterior Los Angeles locations and were approached only once by the police and twice by private security. And in two of three of those times, they weren’t telling us to stop filming… they were making sure we were safe in what they perceived to be a dangerous location.”
#4. VFX don’t have to cost a lot of money, they (just) cost time.
Rotoscoping and motion tracking in Adobe After Effects have improved so much in the last ten years that green screens and locked off cameras are no longer necessary.
#5. There is actually a huge advantage to being micro-budget when you reach the distribution phase.
Aleem realized his advantage was, “I needed to make back less money than other films.”
After being rejected by top film festivals, he found success at niche ones:
“After being rejected by 22 festivals in a row, I got an email from Sci-Fi London raving about my movie. I gave them the world premiere and After We Leave won Best Feature Film there and everything started to change. We went on to Berlin Sci-Fi, Other Worlds, Boston Sci-Fi and won a number of awards and got great reviews.”
Aleem concludes:
“The big lesson I learned is to only do what I felt we could do well and to pick a story that makes use of that. And that’s the irony… by avoiding mimicking the films that try to appeal to huge audiences, I actually created a film that resonated with audiences.”
My take: Lots to take away here. Embrace your limitations. Less money can mean more time. Raise enough to get it in the can. Then raise more to finish it. Use the right festivals to connect with your true audience. Never compromise your vision.
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.
“New viewing habits brought on by the rise of streaming have hastened the demise of the mid-budget American indie, changed the very definition of arthouse cinema, and shaken the indie distribution business. But theatrical is still here to stay, attendees of the Macao International Film Festival’s closed-door industry panels concluded Saturday.”
Some takeaways:
“Prestige” films by streamers are more about awards and PR than a threat to theatrical.
Mid-budget indie films have all but disappeared and the theatrical box office is blockbuster movies on one hand and local fare on the other (in the massive India and China markets at least.)
Audiences are more inclined to search out indie films at home on their streaming services than at the multiplex.
“Arthouse used to mean a Korean film that was award-winning. Now, an arthouse film is not a comedy, not ‘Star Wars,’ and everything else. Even mid-budget, $10 million movies are all arthouse.”
“Producers are happier and distributors are miserable. There’s more production work for hire and less of an opportunity to nurture talent as there once was.”
My take: as the decade closes, streaming has truly conquered both TV and theatrical to become the undisputed source for the majority of viewing. The technology has matured so that bandwidth and resolution are no longer issues. However, access and discoverability, as well as curation and choice are increasingly becoming problematic for indie filmmakers and their supporters.
Using Ravenous as a case study, we learn the team started with a social media marketing campaign to “develop a community of Quebec horror film fans to generate a significant number of ‘Likes’ as well as followers, tags, shares and retweets on social networks.” They did this by:
A micro-site to collect subscriptions to their newsletter
A contest for 100 zombie extras
Four video demos
Next they watched the reactions of their subscribers and followers to various news items such as casting and distribution announcements.
This helped them understand their best platforms and main influencers.
The article then moves on the review sites. In their case, IMDb and Letterboxd proved to be their most popular.
The article closes with these four recommendations:
Use more visual and video elements (such as gifs, memes, etc.) to feed the social network accounts more systematically and in other than informational contexts (humoristic, based on the news and calendar, etc.)
Develop more promotional content such as the exhibit of storyboards… and format it in such a way as to be able to monetize it with ultra-fans.
Distribute on a larger scale all of the official visual elements and those designed by fan communities throughout the world in accordance with a deployment schedule developed with everyone involved in the film (distributors, sales agents, festivals, influencers) to the greatest extent possible.
Analyze, target and reassess main influencer types and functions at each stage of the film’s operational cycle (festival, local premiere, theatre release, VOD distribution).
My take: fascinating reading! I think almost all of this can be applied to any indie film. Glad I now know about Letterboxd!
What is an aggregator? In simplistic terms, film distributors might get your film into theatres whereas aggregators might put your film online. Aggregators have relationships with all major online outlets and know what they want: both for content and for deliverables.
Noam mentions a couple of aggregators to check out:
You’re going up against every other film, most with budgets many times larger than yours. The key, John says, is your concept:
“The key to a successful poster is the concept behind it…. When you bring a designer on board, give them as much to work with as possible, every available image as well as letting them watch a screener of the film. No amount of synopsis or breakdowns can help a designer understand a film better than watching that film. Film is a visual medium — and so are movie posters. There are many parallels between the two, and there are sometimes iconic graphic devices used within a film that as a filmmaker you might not pick up on, but that a designer’s eye will be drawn instantly to as a subject to expand upon.”
John also reminds you that your poster needs to work in many formats:
“Your traditional 27×40” movie poster is excellent for film festivals and your IMDb page, and is the perfect way to commemorate the countless hours poured into production, with a framed print on your wall. However, that’s only a small portion of the usages your poster will be needed for. Once streaming, your poster will have to be in a horizontal format on many services. A horizontal format would also be useful right off the bat as the poster frame of your trailer on Vimeo and YouTube. A square format is very useful for social media.”
My take: I’ve mentioned before that I sometimes start with a logo that expresses a project’s identity even before writing the script that gives it a voice. It’s also worthwhile exploring the graphic design requirements of some of the streaming services so you know what they don’t allow (things like titles, laurels, URLs, etc.) so you can make sure to get all your visuals during production. For a compilation of movie poster themes, there’s none better than Christophe Courtois.
“Several emerging filmmakers who relied on Amazon Prime to distribute their work report that their movies have disappeared from the platform without warning. They say they were given no warning about the removal and that Amazon informed them those titles will not be accepted for resubmission, essentially killing any chance that audiences will discover them. Their predicament exemplifies the risk of becoming too reliant on a powerful platform whose benevolence can be fleeting.”
“Amazon has touted the way its video platform supports indie creators, previously reporting that, in its first year, Prime Video Direct paid tens of millions to rights holders…. Being cut off from Amazon Prime… has meant a loss of income for… filmmakers, though it’s pennies compared with even a modest VOD release. Prime Video Direct shares between 4 cents and 10 cents for every hour a title is streamed in the U.S.”
“I would never recommend putting all your eggs in one basket. Indie filmmakers need to take this advice to heart and explore as many opportunities as they can to make sure their films get seen.”
My take: I agree; exclusivity should come at a premium. However, the reality is that it’s very difficult to make your own market. For instance, you could sell your film from your own website but that just begs the question, “How will your viewers find your website?” The unblemished truth is that the last fifteen years have seen all manner of new markets appear, with no clear replacement for the orderly windows and territories model of the last millennium. Just as we’ve witnessed an explosion of digital content, marketing options have multiplied likewise. Luckily, the future has yet to be written; nimble filmmakers can still control their destiny (at the cost of time and effort.)
“Since Netflix took its streaming video service truly global in 2016, the company has pretty much had the market to itself. But things are about to get very crowded, very fast. While Disney and Apple roll out their own services — with WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal hot on their heels — scores of local players, in Spain and Singapore, Britain and Berlin, are pushing into the SVOD market, looking to occupy at least a portion of Netflix-controlled territory.”
Here’s a list of some of the countries and the contenders:
Britain: BritBox
France: Canal+Series
France: Salto
Germany: TV Now
Germany: ProSiebenSat.1
Spain: Rakuten TV
Spain: Moviestar
Scandinavia: Viaplay
India: Hotstar
Malaysia: iFlix
Indonesia: Hooq
China: iQiyi
China: Tencent
China: Youku
My take: Everyone has woken up and realized there’s a battle for the eyeballs to be won — or lost. As TV continues to decline and mobile continues to rise, old media needs to reinvent itself to take on Netflix, which is itself in its second incarnation. The two advantages they have are their localness and their non-Americanism. However, I think there are big improvements waiting to be made in how viewers discover content. Two ideas: the SJ (Streaming Jockey) who is the next version of the VJ (who was the next version of the DJ) and Viewing Clubs that allow you to band to together with like-minded folks to share recommendations and even comment on things you’re all watching at the same time (I think there’s something like this in Asia already.) This would be one strategy for all the smaller platforms to band together and collectively build their audiences.
