Tag: film financing

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Truly Free Film

Why Good Films Don’t Just Sell Themselves

I found that it never was just the film that drove sales, but very much a cocktail of:

  • relationships that the sales company & its executives had (and their product flow),
  • the marketing support/strategy the sales company created,
  • the passion by which the sales company communicates to position the film,
  • the prestige or urgency by which the film is launched,
  • the prestige/popularity of the collaborators,
  • the quality of the film, and
  • the critical response to the film at the time it is released.

If films are not reaching traditional foreign sales percentages, does this indicate that your film is not what you think it is, your sales agency is not serving your film, or that the industry has significantly changed?

Can we even compare apples and oranges?  As another sales agent recently said to me: “It’s very dangerous to compare movie deals in that spectrum of films where none of the films are really comparable.”

And of course there is a much bigger question: Is there even a foreign sales business for indie or art film when 30% of the market vanished last year (Italy, Japan, Spain, & Greece)?

Categories
Truly Free Film

IndieFilmFinanceModelV2011.1 : The Ten Factors

Yesterday I went into some of the factors determining how the Model for IndieFilmFinanceV2011.1 may be set.  If you were taking notes you probably recognized that these are the factors, but I thought it was worth jotting them down for our cheat sheets:

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Issues and Actions

181 Renewed! Indie Filmmakers Rejoice!

Why does this matter? Zak Forsman tweeted it nicely: ” if tax payer is in 35% tax bracket and the film’s shot in a state with a 42% credit, investor’s eligible to get 77% of her investment back.”

To go a tad deeper, Zak Forsman posted it well:

Minutes ago, I received this email from my friend and fellow filmmaker, Justin Evans.

Dear Film Professionals –

Section 181 has finally been renewed! The new Tax Bill was signed into law by President Obama earlier today. The tax law includes Section 744, which includes language that replaces IRS Section 181’s expiration date of December 31, 2009 with December 31, 2011.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111hr4853enr/pdf/BILLS-111hr4853enr.pdf

Here is what this means:

  • Any money spent on qualifying domestic film production* in 2010 now qualifies for the Section 181 tax write-off.
  • Any money spent on qualifying domestic film production* in 2011 will also qualify for the Section 181 tax write-off.
  • There is no gap in Section 181 protection…which means all the fear and worry that someone might have begun a project in 2009, somehow didn’t get the financing in place and investors invested in early 2010 can now breath a sigh of relief.

Read all of what Zak has to say about it here. Thanks Zak!

Categories
Truly Free Film

Simple Observation: One Reason It Is Hard To Finance Films

Movies don’t have the same value as they used to, but they now cost much more to market.

Okay, maybe this simple observation is not as simple as I first thought.

When I started out in the film business, it was considered reasonable to value North American rights on a feature at 50% of negative costs.   If I was asked to value such rights today, on the average, I would say they were either zero or they would be a negative.

When I started producing movies, a well packaged and developed project could anticipate get 80% of it’s negative cost from licensing foreign rights.  The value of foreign rights has been dropping consistently for years.  What were once major territories in terms of revenue they returned, now seem virtually impossible to do deals in.  Television rights abroad supported acquisition prices for years, but now those slots are increasingly difficult to obtain everywhere.  If an independent film can piece together 50% of its negative cost from international, I think they are pretty fortunate.

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