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website New Platform for Theatrical Distribution - Kickstarter for Showtimes

Nate North said:
People don't know this somehow, but the way KISS rose to popularity was this. The label bussed in crowds of attractive women, gave them all front row seats, and just told them to scream exitedly no matter what happened. Then radio stations would give away tickets to make sure plenty of real people were there, and they sold the rest through tv ads. That's how a guy who learned to play 8th notes on bass became a billionaire. Trump wanted to appear like a real estate mogul, so he paid people that owned skyscrapers to simply hang a sign with his name on it. He doesn't own the building, just gave them a check to allow him to post a misleading façade.

Fake it till you make it works like anything else. It works if you have enough money to make it work. I'm simply pointing out that while I consider this a shit strategy, it does work if you step on the gas hard enough. Of course, everything does.

My interest though was more in a scenario where indie filmmakers who produce something people actually want to see could at least have an inroad to a venue. I understand that this corporation isn't doing anyone any actual favors. None of them are, lol. For example, Mad God took 11 years to make, and while it's not great, it's brimming with individuality. As a stranger, I would have bought a ticket to a local theater to see it, just to support that kind of effort and initiative.

But yeah, I'm interested in hearing from these people as well. Is this also a potential profit center for organizers as well? Like if you have a big social media Prescence in Chicago for example, say 400,000 area followers, and you want to throw a weekly showing of "The Room" or "Rocky Horror" for people to throw popcorn at, would this be a viable way to do that with clicks on a website?
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YES! That's EXACTLY it. We are focused on finding groups of people with shared passions and enabling them to create communal experiences around films they love. The Rocky Horror/The Room approach is a perfect use case. And if you have 400k followers, we should talk offline. :) Last thing - in terms of "not doing anyone any favors": we have built this platform to solve a problem that we experience, and lots of other people do as well, just like Uber or Google or FilmForward. We all have other jobs (for now). Movies are a business just like everything else, and we take a cut of the ticket price so that we can pay our bills doing this rather than something else. But it's as close as I can see to doing something for the love of the game while not bankrupting ourselves.
 
Nate North said:
Ok, so something that might be missing from the math here is the affordability and targeting of modern ads. In my 2019 film that was shown in local theaters, It was hard sell, and it worked out, (kind of, recouped hard costs). Here's what I did. I placed about 1100 dollars in facebook and adwords ads, and called up the local news stations. Here's the relevant bit. You can now target those ads almost block by block. Not quite, but you can drop a pin on a map and say focus my entire advertising budget in this 3 mile radius. So if you took a film with a strong trailer, and like I said, they're about to get a lot stronger on average, across the board, and then dropped say a grand into an area very close to the showing, you might get some traction. I got around a third of a million views across the ads, each one of which was a condensed version of the trailer. Production was good, and it was something of local interest that didn't require a long trip to get to. So via this hyper targeting, we returned the investment.

I'm just noting this because so many people forget that you can inform a third of a million people about something with a grand. It does factor in to the viability of a service like this. If they were smart, they'd just integrate it into their service package, and start optimizing the placements via the kind of advertising experience that a company doing 200 of these a year could get, and no one indie filmmaker ever would.
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Dude, you're sharp. Yes, that is precisely our advertising plan. For the free level, we will be advertising the app itself in a radius around each participating theater. That will draw people to participate in voting and nominating. If you want your specific movie advertised, including the trailer, we will do that for a fee, and also use the app itself to notify all app users within range of the theater that a new indie in a genre they have previously liked is now available, etc.
 
On this site we get lots of posters that never return which is how this ended up in discussion and assumptions before you returned. I could have just asked how it worked but I am jaded by the hit-and-run posters so thanks for sticking around and explaining! 📽️😎
 
indietalk said:
Here's a coincidence. The app screenshot shows the cinema right down the street from me. 😲

So you nominate a film. Let's say I nominate my own as that's why they posted here for self-distribution. I pick my cinema and my time. Now I have to spam social to get people to vote for it to play. People may not have any issue with that and will want to support. So let's say the votes meet the threshold and the film can play there. Great! But what next? The email about how many tickets I need to sell? Does this service help sell to the people that voted? Do I now have to contact all those people to ask them to buy a ticket? Is there something in the app that lets me contact them with the push of a button? Or is it like starting all over again, first the poll, now the tickets?
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Good questions. As I said above, everyone puts down a credit card to be able to vote/reserve a seat. Once your movie has been nominated, you do get reminders to share/invite people, but again, no obligation. If you vote for a movie that loses, you are automatically invited to buy a ticket for the winning movie instead (but it's not automatic).

Are you in Brooklyn? We ran 6 beta shows in Cobble Hill last year. It was great.
indietalk said:
On this site we get lots of posters that never return which is how this ended up in discussion and assumptions before you returned. I could have just asked how it worked but I am jaded by the hit-and-run posters so thanks for sticking around and explaining! 📽️😎
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Any time! I love talking about this. :)
 
indietalk said:
So the model is similar to kickstarter. The vote is the pre-purchase to fund the screening, the number of seats is the goal, and seeing the movie is the perk. Money is returned if goal is not reached. Kickstarter model but not funding a film, seeing one. That's pretty damn cool. Thanks for the clarity.
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I updated the thread title to clarify. Thank you!
 
indietalk said:
On this site we get lots of posters that never return which is how this ended up in discussion and assumptions before you returned. I could have just asked how it worked but I am jaded by the hit-and-run posters so thanks for sticking around and explaining! 📽️😎
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Yes, you seem cool OP person, sorry we were a bit "overenthusiastic" about vetting you. lol. Lot of fakes, opportunists, minimum effort hit and run types out there, and we all get a bit jaded. I'm usually the worst of the bunch, lol.

Anyway, this all actually sounds pretty cool. I'll keep it on the radar, as it's quite unpredictable at this point when I might just suddenly release a feature.

I haven't given it any thought, but just to seed the idea, setting up a system geared towards short film anthologies grouped by genre might be cool as well. Concert films might be cheap rentals for event planners. I'd go watch live at Pompei with a crowd of screaming people. Sounds fun.
 
Nate North said:
Yes, you seem cool OP person, sorry we were a bit "overenthusiastic" about vetting you. lol. Lot of fakes, opportunists, minimum effort hit and run types out there, and we all get a bit jaded. I'm usually the worst of the bunch, lol.

Anyway, this all actually sounds pretty cool. I'll keep it on the radar, as it's quite unpredictable at this point when I might just suddenly release a feature.

I haven't given it any thought, but just to seed the idea, setting up a system geared towards short film anthologies grouped by genre might be cool as well. Concert films might be cheap rentals for event planners. I'd go watch live at Pompei with a crowd of screaming people. Sounds fun.
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Thank you and no worries! There’s a lot of riffraff out there. We’d love to get whatever you make into theaters. We’re collecting movies now and will release to the public once there’s enough to make it a real voting contest. :) And yes, we plan on creating DCP files of collected shorts by genre or by creator so we can hit 90 minutes runtime for the theater.
 
No, he's probably one of the best short film animators out there, but keep in mind, short film animators aren't celebrities. You can get them on the phone any day, and I expect he'd love to see his work on the big screen. Also, if you have someone who's highly regarded in their community, a headliner, it could help get a lot of people onboard, especially for something kind of niche, like a local screening of indie shorts.

He's not on this site, but I expect you can just email him. I'd take the tac of giving him a tax free spot, as a loss leader to attract others. I don't think Steve needs minor income anymore. That video for example generated about 90 grand in youtube revenue I'd guess. Hard to say. I mentioned him because I think the audience would have a great time watching some of his films, and you'd get a lot of other animators buying spots in the lineup just for a chance to meet the guy. I'd pitch him something like "you get the full take for your part of the show" and look at it as an investment in upping your profile and satisfaction rating with filmmakers and viewers alike. You could pull in 18 other short animators and handle them normally, and it could be pretty close to your default template financially, with the added bonuses I mentioned.

I've personally never had any issue getting into a conversation with animators or indie filmmakers. Up to about the 10 million dollar level, you can just contact them politely, no sales pitch, but industry pro to industry pro, and most of them are very nice people who will be glad to speak with you. The trick is to just be a normal, sane person that wants to have a conversation that makes sense. They always seem so relieved when I've made it 4 minutes into the conversation without saying anything like "I carry a picture of you around in my wallet". On today's internet, sane people really stand out.
 
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I think this can work for live concerts (not show live, previously recorded of course)... but seriously. Perhaps you guys can even work this angle.

 
I agree, it could be a solid idea. I actually thought a bit about this thread. It's interesting for a reason that hasn't been discussed yet.

Theaters have been in trouble for a long time. You've got this venue, with a pretty expensive setup, ready to go for any of 100 possible purposes, and I think they are in decline not only from Hollywood accounting's incessant push to take every last cent of everyone's profit everywhere, but also from a lack of creativity.

I think this company is interesting, because it's creating some of the infrastructure necessary for theater owners to begin turning to a more diversified income stream. Concerts, party films like Rocky Horror, classics like Shawshank. There's a lot of possible angles to kind of rebrand the physical theater experience into something that's essentially a whole new business model. Maybe more centered around communities than driven by a central business hub that takes an unfair share of profits by brute force. (see the 1960's monopoly case against the studios as they tried to basically mount a hostile takeover of all theaters)

They got stuck in a rut, when things were easy, and they didn't have to improvise. That's not really working any more. Still, look at it from another angle, and it could all work out. It's not that people don't want to go anywhere anymore. They just have a lot of options on where to see a new studio film.

A little outside the box thinking could go a long way for this waning industry with billions in idle hardware and venues. I feel sure that there's still a market for social viewing, I just don't think it's the same market it used to be. This concept of creating a route for smaller organizers to retask theaters to more targeted events might be just what the physical cinemas need to change with the times.
 
Nate North said:
I agree, it could be a solid idea. I actually thought a bit about this thread. It's interesting for a reason that hasn't been discussed yet.

Theaters have been in trouble for a long time. You've got this venue, with a pretty expensive setup, ready to go for any of 100 possible purposes, and I think they are in decline not only from Hollywood accounting's incessant push to take every last cent of everyone's profit everywhere, but also from a lack of creativity.

I think this company is interesting, because it's creating some of the infrastructure necessary for theater owners to begin turning to a more diversified income stream. Concerts, party films like Rocky Horror, classics like Shawshank. There's a lot of possible angles to kind of rebrand the physical theater experience into something that's essentially a whole new business model. Maybe more centered around communities than driven by a central business hub that takes an unfair share of profits by brute force. (see the 1960's monopoly case against the studios as they tried to basically mount a hostile takeover of all theaters)

They got stuck in a rut, when things were easy, and they didn't have to improvise. That's not really working any more. Still, look at it from another angle, and it could all work out. It's not that people don't want to go anywhere anymore. They just have a lot of options on where to see a new studio film.

A little outside the box thinking could go a long way for this waning industry with billions in idle hardware and venues. I feel sure that there's still a market for social viewing, I just don't think it's the same market it used to be. This concept of creating a route for smaller organizers to retask theaters to more targeted events might be just what the physical cinemas need to change with the times.
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Seriously, you should be our spokesman! This is exactly how we are pitching the company, and why we are getting traction with theaters. Historically, it was an "automatic" business. As a theater owner, you set up the space and the studios did everything else - determine the content, run the advertising, balance your screen commitments, etc. You had very few decisions or investments to make, and there was basically no need or incentive to innovate. The confluence of streaming and the pandemic blew that model wide open. So now we are looking at thousands of real estate locations that are purpose-built for one specific experience, and that cannot easily switch to something else. So we are providing them with a new way to engage and build audiences, and wean themselves off a constantly tighter grip from the studios. It's been really interesting to see which circuit owners get that and are willing to jump in vs. those that are like deer in the headlights.

If you know any investors, we are raising cash! :)
 
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Well, I'd certainly look at an offer if you sent it. I'm certainly interested in the concept of democratizing the big screen.

I see a lot of possibilities with something like this, but simultaneously, it's going to take some boots on the ground research to get it going. Some things that seem like they will work won't and some that seem like they won't work will.

If theaters had beer and wine licenses, it would probably be a slam dunk.

There's also a set of other options that could ease going into this.

In example, you could hire someone like me to build you a template ad, something you could replicate with different names for every show in minutes. Post that on youtube, with the name of the city, area, theater, etc, and those would come up top in searches since people don't name videos after individual locations very often. One ad burst at the outset would get your promo automatically ranked well against pinpoint search terms such as "The Abercrombie theater in Scranton Pennsylvania" One free channel per venue, an automatic find for anyone who searches that name. It works, I did it for something once.

This is about 3 things in my opinion. The bottom line financial numbers, obviously (how much does swan song ask for a showing of song remains the same?). The resistance from theater owners, as you mentioned, and how the advertising is handled. If you got the first two issues firmly in check, I think you could spend time optimizing the final cog, and end up with a profitable formula.
 
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