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
