By Marc Schiller
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” distribution, few people have an answer to the question: “How does this new approach to distribution make more money than the 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 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 = Revenue
Treated separately, none of these elements (Community, Data, Content Bundling, and Dynamic Pricing) will bring financial success on their own. 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 traditional alternatives.
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.
There’s a certain watercooler betting-pool mentality that accompanies the box office results of movies, as though their success were completely encapsulated in a single opening weekend’s results. This despite the fact that everybody knows Hollywood accounting is particularly slippery, that budgets never reveal the accompanying marketing costs of films, that foreign market revenue is increasingly important to the success of many films, and that ancillarly sales can be a primary rather than secondary revenue stream. Nonetheless, we seem to equate box office numbers with whether a film worked, whether it’s worth anyone’s time, and whether it’s going to ruin somebody’s career or save it. 