Read an interesting interview with Leo Grillo about the details surrounding Zyzzyx Road, the movie reported to have the lowest box office receipt total in history ($30USD). It makes me think we’ll see something significant soon that hybrids the business models of sites like CDBaby and Magnatune and applies them to distributing indie movies.
The story is that the Screen Actors Guild rules required Leo to screen the movie at least once somewhere in order to qualify for a discounted rate from the performers in the union. Apparently Zyzzyx Road was never intended to be distributed to domestic theaters, its whole business case was made around foreign distribution. Leo wanted to avoid the appearance he was ‘four walling’, a term used when a films owners pay to rent theaters to show their picture. The whole plan was the keep the film off the radar until he had done a distribution deal. So he hooked up with a theater in the middle of nowhere and he ran the film unpromoted at 11am. The plan was to have zero people show up but a few did anyway and thus the $30.
What really interests me is that it seems if you take domestic box office out of the equation all the sudden the movie biz looks pretty much exactly like the current state of the record biz. You bet on your talent, make your songs/movie, find distributors and they pay you off (eventually).
This makes me wonder if the same things that are looking successful for indie music could be successful for indie films. Especially things like CDBaby and Magnatune. Could their models be extended to higher bandwidth things like movies? (Or lower bandwidth things like books?)
To a degree sites like Google Video, YouTube, iFilm, etc are already in this space but they’re based around advertising rather then pay-to-play. I think the future is in user submitted videos that meet certain criteria available for a certain amount of free viewing combined with pay to pay, pay to burn and pay to get a DVD in the mail.
Such a site will have the effect of almost killing off cable TV almost right away (<2 years) as most of the programming cable TV lives off moves online. Anyone who can get cable can get high speed internet access down the same pipe and watching TV PVR style is just a way better experience. From the producers’ side it’s just far more efficient to charge per view then to deal with making money sticking 30 second commercials into the product. No more sales force, no more Nielsen ratings, no more advertisers to keep happy.
It’s won’t be all roses however. Just like the music biz, promotion costs will increase. More choice makes it take more money to get people to notice you. It may just become almost impossible to get the number of eyeballs that even obscure top tier cable channels can get today. I think this wouldn’t be as bad as it has been in the music side simply because well production costs are going down, it will likely always cost a lot more to make professional looking video then music.
Leo says there are about 1,000 films a year hoping for a distributor to take them ‘straight to DVD’. That can’t be counting zillions of nanobudget things shot on DV but regardless there are certainly far far more albums produced then movies each year. $5 million is considered a nothing budget in Hollywood but it’s a huge amount to spend making music. The movie game should remain smaller and the stakes higher.
What effect will this have on the content? Time will tell. It hasn’t been long enough to extrapolate much from what’s happened to music.