PRODUCTION CONFERENCE
PRODUCING FOR THE PRE-SALES MARKETPLACE (9.15am)
Mark Damon
CEO & Chairman, Foresight Unlimited
“The pre-sale market is not exactly a guarantee of getting a picture funded.”
“The problem today is that you need to get a deal with an American distributor that will guarantees you a wide release – without that, it’s difficult to make pre-sales.”
“There’s not an actor in the world today who can get bums on seats – except for Leonard DiCaprio. It’s all a conundrum – filmmakers want stars, but stars don’t guarantee a box office hit.”
“Even if you put up escrow money for an actor, they’re not guaranteed to star in your film.”
“In the pre-sale business five years ago, we would anticipate a picture would do about two thirds of its budget in overseas pre-sales, but today, that’s not the case.”
“More and more we are looking towards film funders who need to put their money to work and feel that this is becoming an interesting way to invest. That’s one change we’ll see in the future.”
Alison Thompson
Co-President, Cornerstone Films
“Amazon Studios has been busy buying themselves into the prestige film business.”
“We learned the best way to secure talent is to work with them behind the camera. We’re currently working with three director / actors. That’s the way to secure your onscreen talent.”
[Regarding Brexit] “It is really bad news for the movie business all round although none of us quite know what’s going to happen. We’ve taken advantage of the various media and subsidy funding available. No one quite knows what’s going to happen moving forward though.”
“One thing that really upsets me about Brexit is that the number of EU movies imported into the UK will decrease. The choice of movies available to us will diminish.”
“The currency exchange has fluctuated over the years and impacted most of us for better or for worse. I don’t find a lot of people talking about the exchange rate these days.”
“We are still trying to figure out what the future of our business is and how we can reinvent the model moving forward.”
“I’m optimistic about the future because the finance model has to change and it’s becoming less reliant on an element of pre-sales.”
Paul Bales
Partner, The Asylum
“Generally speaking, Western films don’t work anywhere outside of the US.”
“We’ve had to become much more frugal with our budgets.”
“Our philosophy has always been ‘we won’t make a movie until we know where at least 50% of our budget is coming from’ - that can be challenging.”
“There are still various types of opportunities for pre-sales. For some reason, ‘crappy’ movies will always sell somewhere.”
“Even though no one is watching linear television anymore, everyone is watching Netflix.”
“My advice for new producers is start a YouTube channel. It’s a low bar way of entering the industry. If you’re good at it, you’ll get noticed. The quality of your content doesn’t even have to be high either.”
“All of our films have been made with a list of impressive talent because we were getting involved in projects that were semi packaged already.”
Paul Hertzberg
President & CEO, CineTel Films, Inc.
[About financing models] “We’ve tried to intermix pre-sales with getting equity and having movies that have a chance of being successful – primarily, those successful films are genre films.”
07.11.2017 | American Film Market Dailies's blog
Cat. : PEOPLE