(photo by eye of einstein)

One thing is clear. For independent cinema to grow and thrive, it needs to find a more sustainable business model. And while there’s been a lot of hype around new forms of “alternative” (or “direct”) distribution, few people have an answer to …]]>

(photo by eye of einstein)

One thing is clear. For independent cinema to grow and thrive, it needs to find a more sustainable business model. And while there’s been a lot of hype around new forms of “alternative” (or “direct”) distribution, few people have an answer to the sixty-four thousand dollar question: “How does this new approach to distribution make me more money than the older more “traditional” approach?”

Akin to the old catch-phrase “Where’s the beef?”, today smart filmmakers are asking “Where’s the business model?”

Having spent the last three years analyzing all aspects of independent cinema in incredible detail (from production to marketing to distribution), I’ve developed my own answer to this question, which I put forth in the form of an equation. With the recent launch of BOND360, I’m calling it the “360 Equation”:

Community + Data + Content Bundling + Dynamic Pricing = $$$

Treated separately, none of these elements (Community, Data, Content Bundling, and Dynamic Pricing) will on their own bring financial success. They are only pieces of a much larger puzzle. But when you put all of them together, and execute them well (that’s the hard part), they form a very potent combination. And if you develop and distribute your film in a certain way, adopting the 360 equation will definitely bring in more revenue for an independent film than any of the alternatives, including the more “traditional” ones.

So first, let’s break down each component:

Community:  Today when people hear the word “community” they immediately think that their community equates to the number of fans and followers their film has on Facebook and Twitter. And while this is indeed a form of community, in itself its not at all what community is about. Today, filmmakers are being pressured by consultants to arbitrarily increase the number of their social media fans, all the while without being given any direction on how they should be using them most effectively. But how many fans is “enough”? 500? 5,000? 50,000? The number is completely arbitrary. The reality is that true results from a community comes from its quality, not its quantity. Having over the last twenty years worked on more community based projects than I can count, one thing that I do know is that the number of fans and followers your film has does not alone, in any way, equate to your future success. I’ve had films with almost no social media followers do EXTREMELY well financially and I’ve had films with tons of followers absolutely bomb. Communities need to be curated and nurtured, not “acquired.”  A community that will bring long term rewards is always earned and never bought. And the problem for most traditional releases is that this takes time. The process of building a sustainable community can’t be confined to the weeks that a social media agency has been retained by a distributor  Community is the by-product (the results),  that, after a lot of hard work, comes when your film starts to connect with audiences. It comes from goodwill, benevolence, and the creation of an environment that motivates people to get involved. It’s the rewards of your efforts, not the genesis of it. And it’s developed more offline that it is online.

For me, your community are those people who want your film to succeed as much as you do, and are willing to do anything and everything they can do to help it get there. They are the people who are willing to spend their Saturday afternoon putting up posters for you in their local towns. They are the ones who can’t wait to meet others who share a similar passion for your project. The real value of community is that these are the people who will tell ten others to go see your movie.  And there’s nothing more powerful (and inexpensive) than leveraging the passion of your community.

When people ask me what the “call-to-action” should be for their film, I always have the same answer – “Get your core fans to tell ten others to go and see it.”  And because of this, when I’m asked what the most powerful community building platform is for independent filmmakers, my answer is never Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr.  It’s the personal email lists of the filmmaking team. Nothing is more powerful when it comes to getting people to see a movie.

Data: When someone watches your movie on any of the older established transactional platforms (brick-and-mortar movie theaters, Cable VOD channels, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, etc) you, as the content creator, are given ZERO access to an incredibly vast array of data that that platform has collected from the sale or rental of your film. Not only do you not have the ability to communicate directly to those who’ve watched your film, you’re not given any information as to who they are, where they live, what they like, etc. Because of this lack of transparency, a growing movement of content creators who are demanding to have direct access to their own customer data has lead to a whole new wave of more open (and not always film centric) dashboard based digital platforms like Kickstarter, VHX, and others. The real threat that the more established players in digital distribution face is not coming from any one of a host of new hot start-ups. Rather, it’s coming from all of them. The threat is not a company per se, it’s a philosophy is one of data portability. Companies like Apple will either become more open with their data, or eventually they will be left behind. What retailers have known for years is that owning the relationship with your customers means having the ability to reduce waste in your marketing. And in reducing waste, you will reduce your costs. And in reducing your costs, you will be increasing your profits. Its as simple as that. And the key to all of this is having access to your own data. The good news for filmmakers is that each month new start-ups are being formed where giving the content owner direct access to customers is a core principle of the platform.

Content Bundling: Filmmakers who will succeed in the new direct-to-fan model will be those who understand and maximize the bundling of digital content and physical goods to raise the average price point of their films when they’re offered direct through their own digital channels. To be successful, the value that is given to fans through your own website needs to be greater than what’s being offered elsewhere. And the best way to do this is to bundle digital content and physical goods so that a higher price point becomes not only justified, but something that fans desire because they’re getting exclusive materials directly from the filmmakers. Today, we’re giving away far too much good content for free as part of our marketing campaigns because we don’t have any other use for it. We’re still conditioned to think that all bonus materials that’s any good should be put on a DVD for your film. But when was the last time you purchased a DVD?  If you’re like me, you haven’t bought a DVD in years. Until companies like VHX and Vimeo began allowing filmmakers to sell direct, there was no commercial use for bonus content other than on a DVD. Today, smart filmmakers are bundling this content with their films when offering them for sale on their website and giving fans more value for their money. Today, nobody can compete on price with Amazon. And a a time where Netflix offers a month of unlimited access for less than the price of a single movie ticket, the only way filmmakers can make any money by going direct to fans is to offer them something that the other platforms can’t. And if done well this can come at a higher price as long as you are giving fans more value at the same time.

Dynamic Pricing:  For me, the most exciting aspect of new direct-to-fan video streaming tools like VHX and Vimeo is not simply that filmmakers can now offer their films directly to their communities through their own websites; it’s that they can control the pricing of their films without having to go through a third-party. Success in retail comes not from establishing a fixed price and then keeping it at that price until declining sales compels you to lower it. It comes from analyzing sales patterns and adjusting pricing to take advantage of opportunities that occur each and every day. Dynamic pricing is both an analytical and creative process that, if done well, can be the differentiator between making money and losing money. Today, “agility” is the key factor which determines success and failure. And because of this, putting the control of pricing into the hands of the content owner is, for me, the true “game changer” when it comes to VHX, Vimeo, and others in this category. Today, most people believe the statement – “Prices never go up, they only go down” But, for those who know how to use these tools, this is simply no longer the case. When you connect dynamic pricing with content bundling not only can prices go up, they can go up and down as often as you like.

$$$: From all of the work that I have done in this area, I’m convinced that signifiant revenue for independent filmmakers will never come from the current platforms that are based on the old models. Rather, to truly have a sustainable business model for independent film, we will need new platforms that were never a part of the old way of doing things.

And one thing is certain, they will be platforms that offer filmmakers a true “360 Equation”.

So to recap…

Community (Curating and nurturing those who are not only willing to pay more, but WANT to pay more… as long as they’re getting more value.

+

Data (Reaching your community directly, without going through a middleman, thus reducing waste)

+

Content Bundling (Offering a wide variety of versions of your product at different price points)

+

Dynamic Pricing (Adjusting pricing “on the fly”)

=

$$$ (Profit, baby!)

(An earlier more stream-of-conscious “draft” version of this article was shared with those on my personal email list. To subscribe, click here)

(photo by MOJO MOOMEY)

Every industry has a set of metrics to benchmark its success or failure. And while I haven’t been in the film industry long enough to know exactly when the “opening weekend per screen average” became one of the de facto metrics for success …]]>

(photo by MOJO MOOMEY)

Every industry has a set of metrics to benchmark its success or failure. And while I haven’t been in the film industry long enough to know exactly when the “opening weekend per screen average” became one of the de facto metrics for success or failure for independent films, what I do know is that our obsession with “per screen average” is slowly killing independent cinema.

Before you stop reading, I’m aware that’s this is a very strong statement that not everyone will agree with.

But let me explain:

Everyone wants their film to be judged a success (even when they know it may not be deserved). And the quickest way for a specialty film to be perceived as an instant success, is to achieve the highest per screen average for an independent film on your opening weekend. When you accomplish this, two things happen. First, you’re awarded with a wonderful attention grabbing headline in Indiewire and Deadline on Sunday afternoon (which then leads to a steady flow of congratulatory emails from colleagues and peers) and second, the phone starts to ring from exhibitors across the country who now want to book your film even though they may have previously turned it down.

Before you say it, I do know that it would be stupid for me to completely trash the value of both of these outcomes. Nobody can argue that its great to have those headlines, or that you’ll likely increase your gross earnings when you’re wanted by more theaters across the country.

But the question we should all be asking as an industry is – What price are we willing to pay to achieve these results?

Today, the “price” for a specially film to get an attention grabbing opening weekend per screen average is often outweighing the returns. In fact, the tactics that are now needed to obtain that headline in Indiewire are the same tactics that may eventually kill the film’s chance for future financial success.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that if you spend, say, a million dollars on marketing a film that’s in one or two theaters, you’re likely to get a higher per screen average than if you spend that million dollars to market that same film in ten theaters. Today, we’re often “buying” our per screen average by limiting the number of screens we’re in on opening weekend to artificially jack up the per screen average. Now, this alone isn’t a huge problem. If you hit it out of the park on opening weekend, many distributors and P&A funders will free up more budget to help expand the film to more markets than they had at first anticipated. If you can get the screens there’s no downside to this.

But what happens when you’re NOT the highest per screen average that weekend, but you’ve still achieved a decent, but not spectacular, per screen average (as most films do).

Here’s what happens: In the pursuit of that high per screen average you’re most likely front loading the majority of your marketing and advertising spend leading into opening weekend when you’re in the smallest, not the largest, amount of theaters in your release. What this most often means is that there’s very little left to spend after the first ticket buyers enter the theater on opening night. When 80% of your marketing budget is spent leading up to opening weekend when you’re in only two or three theaters, there’s obviously not a lot to spread around afterwards when you’re set to expand and you need that money the most. But if you don’t hit it out of the park in your first weekend agency retainers are dropped, internal resources are re-assigned to other films, and the movie that you just worked tirelessly on for months to set up, is now set on auto-pilot with minimum spends and little or no support in it’s expansion.

Today, if you’re releasing a documentary, to get the national press and to qualify for an Oscar, you need to open in both New York and Los Angeles. And to be efficient, both cities usually happen on the first weekend. But everyone knows that Los Angeles is an absolutely horrible market for documentaries. So to hedge against the likely scenario that the opening weekend per screen average will be lowered by terrible grosses in LA, we’ll often open a doc in one or two theaters in New York, get that amazing per screen average, and then open it the next weekend in LA when everyone has moved on to the next wave opening weekend films. Again, this – in theory – shouldn’t be a big problem. It’s only a problem when you’ve spent most of your budget leading into your one or two theaters in New York.

And this happens far too often.

The reality is that even with the best films, some theaters and markets perform a lot better than others. When you look at a Rentrak report, your top grossing theaters are often many multiples of the gross of your lowest grossing theaters. On the same weekend, you can be turning away people in Washington D.C but playing to half empty theaters in Philadelphia and Miami.  When you’re playing the per screen average game this could be a huge problem. But when you’re spending little to no money on your lower grossing theaters, this isn’t a problem at all if what you’re making from those theaters is more than what you’re spending on them.

But the real problem with playing Russian roulette and spending a ton of money to get a high per screen average is not only that you’ve spent most of your budget when you are in the smallest amount of theaters, it’s that it also completely decimates your social media strategy. And today, in an age where word-of-mouth on Twitter and Facebook has more impact on a specially film than any ad or commercial you can buy, flushing your social media strategy down the toilet can be the sole reason why your film underperforms.

More and more, we now access our social media channels from our mobile phones and tablets. The most effective period in your social media campaign is just after people see your film, not when they are being marketed to. When someone sees your movie and then tweets about how much they loved it, the impact that this has on getting others to see your film is more powerful than anything else you can do if your goal is “conversion”.  But if you’re in only one or two theaters, its not that easy to scale positive word-of-mouth. We lack what’s called “social proof” in the marketing world. And because its harder to scale word of mouth, if you didn’t screen your film extensively before your opening weekend, your positive word-of-mouth and social proof will be extremely limited. That’s why, as a marketing strategist, in the age of Twitter and Facebook, the first rule I have when a film is good and we’re opening in just a few theaters is to “screen the hell out of it” beforehand in major markets like New York and LA.

One of the best decisions John Sloss, Richard Abramowitz, and myself made on the release strategies for films like Exit Through The Gift Shop and SENNA was that we were not worried at all about “over screening” these films in major markets. Rather our goal was to get as many people as possible to see them before they came out. I’m a firm believer of John Sloss’ motto – “It’s impossible to over screen a great film.”

So if we as an industry what to save independent cinema, especially as more films open day-and-date, we need to find and agree upon, a common metric other than our opening weekend per screen average.

And for me, and others, that metric is obvious:

Gross sales across all platforms.

But unfortunately that’s not likely to happen anytime soon unless we all fight to make data from online and cable platforms more transparent and accessible.

(But that I’ll leave that subject for another article)

Late last week, after more than six months in development, my firm BOND Strategy and Influence officially launched BOND360, a new initiative that provides filmmakers with strategic consultation, marketing, public relations, financing, and technical support to help connect their films and related products directly with fans.

We created BOND360 to address the fact …]]>

Late last week, after more than six months in development, my firm BOND Strategy and Influence officially launched BOND360, a new initiative that provides filmmakers with strategic consultation, marketing, public relations, financing, and technical support to help connect their films and related products directly with fans.

We created BOND360 to address the fact that independent cinema is rapidly evolving, and new innovative approaches for connecting films and filmmakers with audiences is desperately needed. Our goal with BOND360 it to give filmmakers the expertise and resources to build community around their creative work. By deploying strategies previously not applied to independent films, we look to create a diverse set of revenue streams for filmmakers for years to come.

Today, change is coming not only from the disruption that’s being caused by new digital technologies. Most importantly, it’s coming from a profound shift in the mindsets of emerging filmmakers in how they approach their creative work. A young filmmaker entering the industry today views him or herself more as entrepreneur than as a “director” “producer” or “writer”. Increasingly, filmmakers want the flexibility and agility to make films as an extension of their overall creative interests, and don’t want to be labeled solely by their functional role. Because of this, filmmakers are increasingly looking for alternatives to the traditional systems that give them more control. As they see it, there’s no need to cede it.

The biggest barrier you hear from a filmmaker today as to why they didn’t “self distribute” was that they didn’t have the resources or time to do it. The phrase “self distribution” itself scares off a lot of filmmakers because it literally means doing it by yourself. But as I’ve said before, self distribution is a badge of honor that nobody wants to wear. Because of this, at BOND we prefer the term “alternative distribution” or, even better, “direct distribution.”

To fully embrace direct distribution, history tells us that if we truly want innovation in the digital space, we must first adopt an “open source” mindset.

If you followed the rise of “Web 2.0″ start-ups in the early 2000′s, you’ll remember that what fueled that fertile period of innovation was a collaborative culture where companies shared and gave away the underlining code to their software which then allowed others to build their own businesses faster, cheaper, and smarter. The result was one of the most productive times in recent history.

To survive, the independent film industry needs to adopt some of the same principles that the software industry discovered years ago: The more you give things away, the quicker you can scale and create a true digital marketplace. The real threat to industry stalwarts like iTunes, Hulu and Netflix will not come from other industry giants. Rather, competition will come from agile entrepreneurial start-ups who can offer storytellers access to more effective tools, ownership of their own data, and more transparency in their relationships with suppliers.

With BOND360, we hope to provide the community with that much needed repository and archive of available tools and case studies for filmmakers to use and iterate upon to reach their goals.

Recently, I was asked my thoughts on who where some of the most influential people in the independent film world. As I considered my answer, the first names that came to my mind weren’t the well known industry figureheads who had, in most cases, obtained their power by limiting access to what they controlled. Rather, they were people like Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky who, with Indie Game, completely gave away their knowledge, learnings, and expertise. True power comes from influence. And the best way to gain influence today is to give away your tools and your knowledge. Today, when someone asks me for advice on what they should be reading to keep up with the changes in the film industry, I tell them to read the Indie Game case study. Published in five parts, each loaded with incredible details, the Indie Game case study is the most comprehensive roadmap to understanding alternative methods to release your film but in building on top of what had been already achieved. And it was given away completely for free.

To be a truly independent film industry, we need to start collaborating as a community of storytellers, programmers, marketers, etc in an environment where we’re all willing to give away our “source code” for free so that others can develop new applications and strategies on top of them.  My hope is that BOND360 becomes a hub for that exchange.

For me, the realization of the need for a resource like BOND360 came from personal experiences on recent films that I’ve had the privilege to work on such as Exit Through The Gift Shop, SENNA, and The Imposter.

When it comes to building and nurturing community as a way to market our films, the current model is almost completely broken.

Today, if you release a film through the traditional distribution systems, the majority of the marketing budget that will be spent during the entire life of that film is spent in the week’s leading up to opening weekend. For someone like myself who believes that success or failure will come from how effectively we build community around a project, today almost the entire marketing budget for a film is spent when the community is at it’s smallest point, not it’s largest. Today people see films in lots of different ways (in theaters, on cable VOD, on iTunes, on Netflix or Hulu) and in a time frame of their own choosing.  As a marketer, I’ve learned that an active community around a film is at its highest not when the film is first released, usually in a limited amount of theaters, but rather many months – or even years – later when it its widely available on Netflix.  But by this time, all of the marketing for that film has ended, and nobody is attending to the community. Our goal with BOND360 is to continue to nurture and grow these communities throughout the entire lifecycle of the project so that the filmmaker can continue to have access to their fans and continue to update them with new content and creative work. Ultimately, the goal is to monetize the largest group of fans that we have taken years to build.

I hope that you will follow our progress and contribute to the dialogue. I encourage you to follow us on Twitter and share with us your experiences. Together we hope to shape a future for the independent film community that is vibrant, inclusive, and prosperous.

(photo by Bahman Farzad)

One of the most misleading labels associated with independent cinema today is the phrase “self distribution.”

As digital technologies provide filmmakers with a growing number of options for how they can bring their films to audiences, the phrase “self distribution” has quickly become a …]]>

(photo by Bahman Farzad)

One of the most misleading labels associated with independent cinema today is the phrase “self distribution.”

As digital technologies provide filmmakers with a growing number of options for how they can bring their films to audiences, the phrase “self distribution” has quickly become a catch-all term associated with any choice made by the filmmaker that’s outside of the traditional distribution deal.

But not only is the phrase “self distribution” demeaning, it’s also inaccurate. Today, as filmmakers become more entrepreneurial and want more control in how their films are released, going outside the system should not be akin to sitting at the kid’s table at Christmas dinner.

For filmmakers like Shane Carruth who embraced “self distribution” with the recent release of Upstream Color, your “Plan B” is his “Plan A.”

The reality is that a filmmaker who decides not to sell their film to a distributor often has the ability to put together a “dream team” of talent that the traditional distributors can’t. To create efficiencies that can accommodate their sheer volume of releases, distributors have locked themselves into a specific group of “vendors” (another demeaning word) – designers, publicists, social media agencies, etc – who work across an increasingly large slate of releases and are hired not always because they’re the right person or company for the job, but because they’re cheap and efficient for the distributor to work with.

As “alternative distribution” continues to rise as more and more films find success by going outside of the system, the talent pool available to filmmakers to release their films is becoming more diverse and more accomplished. When working with John Sloss and Richard Abramowitz on such films as Exit Through The Gift Shop, SENNA, The Way, and Brooklyn Castle, we were able to create a “war room” environment where the traditional silos between departments were removed and everyone working on the film was committed to one single goal – getting people to see our film no matter what it took, no matter what the idea was, and no matter where it came from.

Today, success for independent films comes not from buying awareness through advertising, or from public relations alone. It comes from meticulously building and nurturing your community through goodwill and benevolence. And there’s nobody better in the world to build and nurture community than the filmmaker. If given the right guidance and support, no agency or studio can match the social media marketing prowess of a filmmaking team. But no filmmaker can do it alone. And that’s why the phrase “self distribution” becomes so incredibly inaccurate and patronizing.

But lets be honest. When the traditional distribution system works, it works extremely well. The problem is that it doesn’t work for as many films as it used to. And as more-and-more good films that have real potential with audiences are offered no-cash advances, the need for a “Plan B” that’s more effective than the ‘Plan A’ that was offered, becomes increasingly important. Today, far too many good independent films are “bought”  with no-cash advances and then dumped into the marketplace with little more than a few weeks of publicity support. And we’re being conditioned to believe that because the film was bought, its outcome was a success. But was it?

The good news for filmmakers is that P&A funding is becoming increasingly available to them. More and more filmmakers are using crowd-funding platforms such as Kickstarter to not only fund their productions, but to also fund their releases. For many, grants to pay for outreach campaigns and social media activations are also becoming increasingly available.

But the real problem with the proliferation of the phrase “self distribution” is not that it’s inaccurate. It’s that “self releasing” is a badge that nobody wants to be associated with. The perception is that if you “self release” your own film you didn’t have an alternative. But many did and do. And the reason why they did was they wanted to retain the copyright to their films and have more input in how they were deployed. Until “self distribution” loses its stigma (which it won’t) many accomplished filmmakers with really good films will give their films to distributors with a no-cash advance rather than find an alternative, if that alternative is labeled as “self distribution”.

So if you’re in the media or in the industry and currently using the phrase “self distribution”, please reconsider and start using the term “alternative distribution”. Until you do so, you’re holding independent cinema back. And that’s something that nobody benefits from.

(photo by dneesespix)

As new digital technologies continue to evolve and disrupt the landscape for independent cinema, I continually get asked by filmmakers for my thoughts on how they should adapt.

My answer lately has been…

“Stop acting like a filmmaker, and start acting like a rock star”

And I don’t mean this figuratively. I mean it …]]>

(photo by dneesespix)

As new digital technologies continue to evolve and disrupt the landscape for independent cinema, I continually get asked by filmmakers for my thoughts on how they should adapt.

My answer lately has been…

“Stop acting like a filmmaker, and start acting like a rock star”

And I don’t mean this figuratively. I mean it quite literally.

Unfortunately there aren’t a ton of good examples and case studies on how the film industry is FULLY leveraging the convergence of social media (which in my mind is nothing more than “community building”) and digital distribution. For me “FULLY” means that the filmmaker, not only the distributor, is making more money from leveraging the new model than they would have if they had gone with the old model. While selling and renting movies on iTunes has been around for quite awhile, it’s only now that we have a truly viable set of diverse choices for how to digitally distribute our movies.

But when you look at the case studies that have indeed proven to be real success stories in this new distribution paradigm (INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE, BONES BRIGADE, and BURN to name just a few) you start to see that all of the filmmakers of these films took a page out of the book that rock stars have been reading for a long, long time.

1. Treat your fans like they are the most important thing in the world to you

2. Build your community of fans yourself and then sell directly to them without a middleman

For most bands, their recorded music (which is usually owned by their record label) is only one piece of a much larger pie of their annual income. And for the most successful bands, music sold through their record label is usually the smallest piece of that pie. The real money isn’t made from selling CDs and downloads. It’s made on the road doing live gigs and selling merchandise directly to fans.

For filmmakers, the idea of treating your film like its your latest album, and then “going on tour” to do a series of live in-person events directly with fans in support of the film is a completely new and foreign concept. Common wisdom has been that live events don’t “scale”. And because of this, it hasn’t been part of the current model for film distribution.

But this didn’t stop Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky when they turned down down offers for their Sundance hit INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE, packed their bags, hopped into a van, and then took off on a fifteen city in-person US tour completely sponsored and paid for by Adobe. Not only did Lisanne and James act like rock stars, they BECAME rock stars, doing meet-and-greets with their fans each night just as a band would. They instinctively understood what most filmmakers don’t — that the key to their success was not going to come from selling their film to a distributor, but rather it would be achieved by bringing the film directly to the community of fans that they had built and nurtured while making their movie.

For most, the days when a filmmaker could earn a nice living by selling their film, immediately move on to a new project, and then return to the previous project for a couple of press days is, sorry to say, over.  Not only do filmmakers need to adapt to this new reality, so do the distributors. In the future, the real money from theatrical releases of indie films won’t be in traditional box office receipts. It’ll be made by going completely outside the current system. What bands know that filmmakers don’t, is that they can often make more money by taking a larger percentage of a smaller number of events. The key to doing this successfully is that the film itself becomes only one part of the larger attraction. Bands have known forever that what people want when they leave their couch is to be part of a live experience that feels like a truly spontaneous event where each and every night is different. And when that live event over delivers on your expectations, not only do you buy the ticket but you also buy the “t-shirt, cap, and jacket.”

If movie theaters started selling merchandise today, for most films it would be a complete disaster. The merchandise wouldn’t sell, and a lot of money would be lost. But what if that film was a true live event positioned as a  “limited engagement” where the filmmaker and cast present the film in the same way as when a band plays a gig? When you limit your audience, the average ticket price can be much higher and merchandise sales not only do quite well, they often become a significant part of the “take”. It works for most music tours and Broadway plays and, in theory, it can work for films too.

Today we live or die on a model that is completely dependent upon the amount of screens a film plays on. Common wisdom is that the more screens your movie is playing on, the more money you’re making. But for most films, this is a complete falicy in which demand is not meeting supply and costs are exceeding revenue. And because of this, for far too many good movies, the theatrical window has become nothing more than a loss leader.

But it does’t have to be this way.

As bands have learned long ago, the key to making money is to make things feel exclusive and special, and then work to get the “average spend per customer” higher. But today, when someone goes to the movies, the sole beneficiary of a higher “average spend” is the theater owner, as increased revenue can only come from the concession stand. But if that filmmaker “owns” the live events for their film, just as James and Lisanne did with INDIE GAME, and then sell merchandise directly to fans as Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez have done with BURN, the money they will make will be considerably more than if they had if they had sold their films to a traditional distributor.  Its not a model that will work for every film and every filmmaker. But for those that it IS right for, the rewards will be well worth the effort.

Today most filmmakers are still thinking that their interaction with the public is “film-by-film.” And because of this, the direct relationship they have with their fans is extremely limited and of very little value. But for those filmmakers who think that building community around their creative work is something that THEY need to be doing themselves 360 days a year, and not something that their distributor should be doing for them, the reward for this hard work and expense will be that as their community grows they can go directly to their fans to make money in a myriad of ways.

So if you’re a filmmaker who wants to be part of the new paradigm, stop trying to act like Quinten Tarantino  and start acting like Dave Matthews.