Tag: film investment

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Truly Free Film

What Do Film Investors Need To Become A Sustainable Class

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By now I think you know that creating a Sustainable Investor Class For Indie Film is a priority for me.  I have been sharing my thoughts on a weekly basis in this regard for some time now.  Today is a good time to collect those thoughts and take stock as to where we are. Our future depends on us.

If you want to make films for the rest of your life, you not only need to help increase the pool of capital for such creative practices, but you also have to make sure that the money behaves in a smarter fashion than before. You can’t expect people to just do something because it makes sense.  Knowledge rarely influences behavior. To make change, you need to create a system.  That is the next step.

Right now, we can improve the knowledge base, and it is time we focused on the investor base.

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Truly Free Film

Staged Financing MUST Become Film Biz’s Immediate Goal

Each day I become more and more convinced that staged financing could be a cure to much of the Film Biz’s ills.  Staged financing?  What?  Is the phrase not exactly center of your conversations right now?  Why not?!! Whatsamattawidyou? Don’t you know a good solution when you see one?

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Truly Free Film

Get Ready For The Indie Film Investment Deluge!

Let’s celebrate!  The prospects look good for a lot of smart money to be available again for appropriately budgeted indie films.  The key now being the “appropriately” part of the equation.

The days of Machiavellian moves to maximize an limited audience art film’s budget seem thankfully over — and as sad as I will be to seem some friends’ films become obsolete, I smell another golden age brewing.  Filmmakers and investors seem to have both embraced the “less is more’ ethos.  Expect may more films to be made in the lower than $5M bracket, and far fewer indie works in Mark Gill’s former sweet spot.  The large indie finance companies of 5 years ago, had to make films at higher budget levels in order to justify their overheads and salaries.  Those companies have crashed and so did the silly models of $20M art films.

The Film Biz is coming off two consecutive extremely robust film markets.  Toronto 2010 saw almost 30 deals close during the festival.  Sundance 2011 exceeded that mark.  Surely there were quite a few deals done post market too (I have not seen any reports to track this; let me know if you know any).  Coming off of two years where the prudent would not expect anything for US rights, this an exceeding positive change.  With a well produced and well positioned films, investors can reasonably hope to recoup — and then some.  Now the challenge for producers will be to be disciplined enough not to allow the budget creep to return.

There are other factors, beyond the sales market itself,  that heighten my optimism.  The

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Uncategorized

It’s Agreed: Now IS The-Time-To-Invest-In-Film

Or rather, the NYTimes wants everyone to think so, and hell if I am going to be the one to disagree!

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Issues and Actions

Lack Of Transparency Limits Film Investments

NY Magazine has run a clear analysis on why the attempt to establish Film Future markets failed.  Our business is so far from transparent, it is laughable to outsiders.  The article articulates how we have no clear & unbiased info on how well films perform and all reporting is done by the studios themselves.  To run a commodities market, the public would need something more transparent (like other countries have) and without it court cases would abound.

Such chaos would almost inevitably lead to a call for mandated government-agency oversight of Hollywood accounting, and that, to studio thinking, would be Armageddon—albeit an Armageddon that would be celebrated by everyone who has ever been promised a net-profits check that didn’t arrive. In the space of just a couple of days this month, a jury demanded Disney pay $270 million in damages for wrongfully withholding profits on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, another found that actor Don Johnson was owed $23 million by the producers of Nash Bridges, and Nikki Finke’s Deadline website posted a leaked balance sheet in which Warner Bros. appeared to demonstrate that the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which grossed $938 million worldwide, is somehow $167 million in the red. Given that statistic, perhaps stockholders should inquire whether any studio movies ever realize a net profit, and if not, why the people who run those studios are still employed.

If we are ever going to have a sustainable investor base for our industry, we need to bring the reporting and accounting practices up to the standards of other industries.  It’s time that we develop a list of best practices of what needs to be done to reach this goal.  I will add it to my To Do List in the meantime.