How do films make money

So when I ask the question how do films make momey, I'm not talking about the kind of films that are in the theatre I'm talking about the ones that are almost strictly online. People seem to spend thousands of dollars on short films or feature films and I don't understand how they make a profit. As far as I know ads are the only thing, but I know there's more to it. So how do big budget films end up making money without contests or box office
 
Give us a few "for instances... " that you had in mind.

Otherwise, VOD and Amazon sales provide some income - but income/revenue isn't necessarily profit.



Okay, first let's back up the truck and establish some clear understanding of rudimentary business terminology.
A) Earnings is the same thing as profit. Profit, earnings. Earnings, profit. Same thing. In your household you would call this savings.
B) Business revenue is the same thing as personal income.
C) Expenses is something everyone seems to understand just fine.

Earnings (or Profit) equals Revenue (or Income) minus Expenses
Earnings = Revenue - Expenses
E = R - E

A film (or any business, large or small) may have revenue less than, or considerably less than, expenses, thus rendering a business/endeavor loss.

Examples: http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?p=347081#post347081
 
It's pretty tough. It is usually just for the love of filmmaking. It all depends on the marketing and promotion. Some filmmakers spend time creating a cool website, attending film festivals, blogs, giveaways/contests, and advertising on the web. After a while, when the views start to add up, you can actually start making money. But you are right, it is a very tough business... A lot of times they just do it for the passion.
 
some people get distribution deals to make a certain film, some people make films to get certain distribution deals, you can earn in anyway, firstly you must establish a route of income, this is your hardest task, firstly you can get Grants from local councils, or film councils etc etc

only problem i find in england is that they always want you to cover a certain topic which is a load of rubbish as thats not the reason I'm asking for the money.

you could also get sponsored by certain companies etc.. look at superman, they got shit loads from sponsors, I think it was extremely high infact.

also you could ask your local companies to help support you, I read the guerrilla handbook and i think the guy went to a brewery and they gave him permission to shoot in their location and shit loads of free beer..but this was in another country..

my new rule is, if i don't try it il never know, even if i sound like an idiot i will ask anyway.
 
How do films make money

By finding lots of people who want to pay to see their film and sell the film to those people.

What Rayw said is true. The real trick is conversion rates and acquisition costs. If your eyes glazed over when reading this, you'll need to add someone to your team who can do this for you. The sale and/or distribution of your film will require more work than it took to make your film.

People seem to spend thousands of dollars on short films or feature films and I don't understand how they make a profit.

Shorts tend not to make a profit. Not to say you cannot. You just have to rise to the level of film selling savant that the majority of filmmakers never manage to achieve.
 
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People seem to spend thousands of dollars on short films or feature films and I don't understand how they make a profit.

Are you suuuuuuure they make a profit? :hmm:

There are tonnes of delusional filmmakers out there, blowing their life's savings on terrible films that will never recoup the money spent.

.
 
So to give an example, say I just made a feature and I am working with distribution, what would I do that would make money

It depends on whether you have something that is sellable. You can sign up for Amazon Create Space or set up your own website that will stream the movie (for rental) or make it downloadable (for buying). If it's really good, you can rack up festival awards and raving reviews, which can help you hype the movie to your audience or get you a sales agent (producer's rep). You can rent a room at the American Film Market (for around 20K, I believe) and sell the movie to domestic and foreign distributors. You can do the same in Berlin.

What is special about your movie, that you want to hype about? We've discussed on other threads about genres that are more sellable. If your movie is a drama and doesn't touch upon a current social/political issue, good luck selling it. What is your audience??? Religious movies sell. Movies with skin sell. (Skin cell? Ha ha!) Horror movies can sell. Sci-fi movies can sell. Controversial movies can sell. Ultra-offbeat BIRDEMIC, SHARKNADO movies can sell.

No money? I'll give you an example. My friend hooked up with a pretty Hooter's waitress and made a 25 minute supergirl movie, for $400. He charged $30 per DVD and sold more than 1,500 of them. After that, he put that and other short "super chick" movies on a website for download. He did pretty well and the process is entirely automated now. The thing is, there is a specific audience for that material. Look up "strong women" or "super strength" sites.

If your movie has an angle, a style, something that catches interest, then you have a chance to sell it. For the record, most indie features do not sell.
 
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So to give an example, say I just made a feature and I am working with distribution, what would I do that would make money
"I am working with distribution" is vague.



There are primarily two different kinds of distributors (AKA aggregators): Ones that will pay you up front for the rights to distribute your film for a specified period of time - and - ones that you pay for them to basically host your film on their servers.

The former may even provide you with a percentage of earnings, but don't count on it.
Any distributor that spends their own dime promoting your film via any media at all is fairly rare and the deals are very tough to come by.
You had better have a d@mn good product.

A d@mn good product.

The latter are a dime a dozen, unfortunately.
They won't spend a penny to promote your film.
Your film will be ENTIRELY dependent upon you to spend your time, effort, and money to promote YOUR film at THEIR VOD website or to buy their DVDs of your film.
Obviously this provides greater benefit to them in the long run than it does you, but you do get a percentage of the traffic revenue from viewers willing to pay to see your film.
The idea is that you're going to need to bring in more viewer revenue than your own advertising expenses - the same boat the former distributors are in: $1 spent on advertising had better equal >$1 in revenue, otherwise you're throwing good money after bad if revenue is <$1 of advertising spent.
Pfft! Ha! Basic business.

This is why you'll see so much blabbin', especially by myself and a few others around here, but mostly me, about how important it is to have a fan base already built up BEFORE production really gets rolling along.

I would safely argue that marketing and promotion are probably more important than the actual film product itself - if - making money is a serious motivating filmmaking factor.

Thus:

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and

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Otherwise, only spend "vacation money" on filmmaking.
People spend a few hundred to a few thousand on a typical vacation and have zero expectations of "making money off it." :lol: That'd be CRAYZEE, right?!
Nah, just throw your money down the toilet making a film you want to see and pretty much no one else does - and call it art.

But if you wannna make money... well, then... you gotta not only produce a product consumers want but you also gotta promote the bejezus out of it or find someone else who will.
And that costs money, too.
And it ain't easy making $1 turn into $2, or even $1.10.
 
wtf! $30 for a 25 minute low budget film?
where did he find all these buyers

Yep, I never saw anything like that. Like I said, know your audience. It also helped that the girl was stunning to look at!

Laraposes.jpg


Most buyers were from two forums, the mandisteele site and superwomenmania.com.

My friend and I followed up the short with a feature version, called THE AWAKENING. It starred the same girl, with that costume, above. We posted a teaser clip and got over 112,000 views. The two trailers, combined, also have more than 100,000 views. The audience potential is there! We hoped it would be a cash cow and we were planning to do a sequel. While it did make a profit (mostly from online DVD orders), the short movie did much better. In the case of this audience, short and sweet is what they liked.

On a similar note, I got involved on some synth forums and sold an instructional DVD, for a synth keyboard. Once people found out I was a filmmaker, they literally asked for me to produce the product! In that case, longer was better. (It ran 3 hours, 15 minutes.) That one was a very nice experience, as it cost very little to make and I sold them all from my regular website. It profited more than any of my films.

In both cases, the audience was known in advance. If you can find a niche, sometimes that's all you need.
 
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Stunning is subjective.. I wouldn't pay $30 to look at her for 25 minutes.. probably not even at hooters if it included beer and wings. :D

Okay, but tell me about something you really like. How much would you pay for your favorite "kick"???? If you saw a concert with an obscure band that you really liked, would the $50 ticket be a bargain? Of course it would be, even though most other people might not think so.

I paid $30 for a rare CD soundtrack copy of SATURN 3. It was worth it, to me, as I'm a big soundtrack fan. This is what I mean about the niche. People paid $28.50 for my instructional DVD and said I wasn't charging enough. There was nothing else like it around.

At first, when I heard what my friend was charging for his 25 minute movie, I wondered who would pay for a such a short. But, then he showed me links to other people selling "fan shorts" who were charging similar prices.. Hollywood isn't delivering a lot of fetish super chick material, so these guys/gals would pay a premium to get something they wanted to see.


Here is the key!

Yes! Another example, though I don't know if it is going to be a big money maker - I recently saw the premiere of MILE, MILE & A HALF. It's a documentary that follows hikers for 25 days on the John Muir trail. Guess who the 180 people in the theater audience were? You guessed it, they were hiking enthusiasts! You can find hiking groups on facebook. It is a culture and my lovely wife is part of it.

My personal niche is horror/sci-fi hybrid movies. Even my crappy TERRARIUM production ended up getting seen around the world. I see the potential in making a better niche product.



I have to get back to the OP's comment:

say I just made a feature and I am working with distribution, what would I do that would make money

If you have that rare sellable movie, people will buy it whether it's on your personal website or at Best Buy. Your audience (niche) will buy it if it's "good" in their eyes.
 
So to give an example, say I just made a feature and I am working with distribution, what would I do that would make money

I've been doing some reading and watching some videos on distribution. Apparently, if you don't have these things secured during development / pre production, you've already lost :(. Don't take my word for it of course, I'm just learning myself.

But if your film is finished, and if you think its any good, then paid Vimeo or other VOD options might be something you want to look at. I say this, because the more I read or watched, the more I realized that distribution deals really mean that you give somebody else the right to sell your movie, and they will pay you "if" they make money. Apparently they never do, and you never get paid. At least that seems to be the story for most filmmakers. Also as scoopicman said, if you think your film has a niche audience, figure out how to tell them about it. A lot of people actually do spend money on DVDs and online downloads, however crazy that may sound.

At least this is the path I'm following. Hopefully I get to my niche during pre-production.
 
I say this, because the more I read or watched, the more I realized that distribution deals really mean that you give somebody else the right to sell your movie, and they will pay you "if" they make money. Apparently they never do, and you never get paid. At least that seems to be the story for most filmmakers.

Getting stiffed happens to a lot of people, but it's not the norm. It happened to my first feature, THE BLACK CRYSTAL. It got international distribution, but the distributor stalled on my quarterly checks for about a year, then went bankrupt. I blame a lot of that on the 1990-91 recession though. Ah, memories. And, look who typed it up...

raedon.jpg


Speaking of the SHARKNADO (my previous post), MEGA SHARK niche - look on the bottom of that paper. Producer of 150 such movies, David Rimawi, was my main contact and acquisitions guy for that company. I liked him quite a bit.


Anyway, the rep for 3 of my other properties gets the money, up front (or part of it within days of the signed contract and the rest due before the movie hits the streets). We had to threaten legal action on one deal. The distributor can't release release a movie that's in arbitration, so they paid right up! Haven't had any other trouble.

A good attorney/rep is easily worth the 20% they get off of each deal. Plus, they make deals that you couldn't possibly have done on your own. Joe Filmmaker isn't going to have access to the 1,300 distributor contacts that agents may have, and most of them won't talk to Joe Filmmaker.

distributors.jpg


And, no, my agent did not provide this list to me and do not ask me for it. Besides, it's old.

If you're just going to stream your movie on Create Space, I think you are going to share much more of the percentage! Didn't it used to be almost half? Still, it's probably a good avenue.

It's been a few years, but I know a few filmmakers whose movies made enough to pay for themselves and fund larger projects.
 
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Getting stiffed happens to a lot of people, but it's not the norm. It happened to my first feature, THE BLACK CRYSTAL. It got international distribution, but the distributor stalled on my quarterly checks for about a year, then went bankrupt. I blame a lot of that on the 1990-91 recession though. Ah, memories. And, look who typed it up...

raedon.jpg


Speaking of the SHARKNADO (my previous post), MEGA SHARK niche - look on the bottom of that paper. Producer of 150 such movies, David Rimawi, was my main contact and acquisitions guy for that company. I liked him quite a bit.


Anyway, the rep for 3 of my other properties gets the money, up front (or part of it within days of the signed contract and the rest due before the movie hits the streets). We had to threaten legal action on one deal. The distributor can't release release a movie that's in arbitration, so they paid right up! Haven't had any other trouble.

A good attorney/rep is easily worth the 20% they get off of each deal. Plus, they make deals that you couldn't possibly have done on your own. Joe Filmmaker isn't going to have access to the 1,300 distributor contacts that agents may have, and most of them won't talk to Joe Filmmaker.

distributors.jpg


And, no, my agent did not provide this list to me and do not ask me for it. Besides, it's old.

If you're just going to stream your movie on Create Space, I think you are going to share much more of the percentage! Didn't it used to be almost half? Still, it's probably a good avenue.

It's been a few years, but I know a few filmmakers whose movies made enough to pay for themselves and fund larger projects.

Pretty amazing jpeg there. Hope those checks are big :)
 
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