August 29, 2008
Sound familiar? You’re on the brink of finishing the film that has sucked up the last year or so of your life—but you’re out of money. Worse, your investors are tapped out and growing increasingly impatient. If only you had budgeted upfront for those marketing tools you’ll now need to pursue your Holy Grail: a theatrical distribution deal.
Like everything else, films must be marketed—including those with A-list names—so that industry buyers can fully assess their box office potential. As veteran filmmakers know, there can be nothing haphazard in your approach to landing a distributor that will pay you an advance, put up the P&A money, and get your masterpiece shown on the nation’s best art house and commercial screens.
Believe it or not, there are only a dozen or so companies in that league—including Focus Features, Fox Searchlight, Goldwyn, Lionsgate, Miramax, Paramount Vantage, Picturehouse, Sony Pictures Classics, ThinkFilm, The Weinstein Co., Warner Independent, and the Yari Film Group.
And while 530 indie films made it into theaters last year, only 112 (by our count) were released by these key players. Even more daunting, of those 112 films, apparently only 82 were acquisitions (independently-made films purchased after completion). Add to that the fact that more than two thousand new feature films each year are competing for those 80-something slots and suddenly the odds in Las Vegas are looking pretty good….