A glut of movies is jockeying for theater screens, and the once-bullish market for “indie” movies has lost some of its core buyers, so now indie films are hitting the web and trying to figure out how to make a buck:
Offering art online rarely earns a creator much up front, but it boosts the odds of broad exposure. With no need for old-fashioned film prints, going on the Web is cheap and quick. And directors can get instant feedback from online viewers.Mr. Wang’s “Princess” was made with the $200,000 the director had left over after delivering his traditionally released film “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” under budget.
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On YouTube, which is offering “Princess” on its new Screening Room channel for professional short films and features, the movie will generate revenue from ads on the site. But Mr. Wang says the bigger payoff comes in viewership. Last week, before “Princess” was available, the trailer had been viewed more than 80,000 times. In theaters, the same trailer would have been seen some 5,000 times, the director estimates.
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Director David Modigliani spent roughly three years making the documentary “Crawford,” a portrait of the people living in the adopted Texas hometown of President George W. Bush. The movie was first screened for the public last spring at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. But as “Crawford” went on to get accepted into more than 30 other festivals, no solid offers came in that would land it in theaters or on television.In late August, the director struck a deal that made “Crawford” the first film to make its debut on Hulu.com. A joint venture of NBC and News Corp. (which owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal), the seven-month-old Hulu primarily streams familiar TV shows and movies, such as “Saturday Night Live” and “Men In Black,” and offers tools that let viewers post these videos directly on their own blogs, Facebook pages and other sites. Since going up on the site 10 days ago, “Crawford” has been the top movie and one of the most-discussed videos on the site, says Hulu, which doesn’t release the number of views its videos generate.
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His agreement with Hulu was brokered by B-Side, an Austin company that runs the Web sites of some 200 film festivals. Using email addresses and other data gathered from festival goers, B-Side organizes screening events around the country where movies are shown for free as a way to drive DVD sales. Now, with films like “Crawford,” B-Side is applying that strategy to the Web.Hulu didn’t pay anything up front for “Crawford.” Instead, the company shares revenue generated by the six advertisements that run at various points during the 74-minute film. Neither Hulu or B-Side will say how much that amounts to, but B-Side only expects it to cover the company’s initial expenses on the film — a few thousand dollars. At a time when interest in politics is running high, B-Side is banking on a return from selling “Crawford” on DVD, offered online for $19.99. The director has no investors to pay back. He used his credit card and used tax-deductible contributions made through the Austin Film Society for the movie’s $100,000 budget.
Back-end revenue sources have long been key to recouping the high costs of producing and promoting films for theaters; in 2007, the specialty divisions of major studios spent an average of $26 million to market a film, up from $18 million the year before, according to the MPAA. By contrast, movies using the emerging online-only model don’t have to recoup on that kind of marketing push — but it’s still unclear how they’ll fare without it.