NY Magazine has run a clear analysis on why the attempt to establish Film Future markets failed. Our business is so far from transparent, it is laughable to outsiders. The article articulates how we have no clear & unbiased info on how well films perform and all reporting is done by the studios themselves. To run a commodities market, the public would need something more transparent (like other countries have) and without it court cases would abound.
Such chaos would almost inevitably lead to a call for mandated government-agency oversight of Hollywood accounting, and that, to studio thinking, would be Armageddon—albeit an Armageddon that would be celebrated by everyone who has ever been promised a net-profits check that didn’t arrive. In the space of just a couple of days this month, a jury demanded Disney pay $270 million in damages for wrongfully withholding profits on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, another found that actor Don Johnson was owed $23 million by the producers of Nash Bridges, and Nikki Finke’s Deadline website posted a leaked balance sheet in which Warner Bros. appeared to demonstrate that the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which grossed $938 million worldwide, is somehow $167 million in the red. Given that statistic, perhaps stockholders should inquire whether any studio movies ever realize a net profit, and if not, why the people who run those studios are still employed.
If we are ever going to have a sustainable investor base for our industry, we need to bring the reporting and accounting practices up to the standards of other industries. It’s time that we develop a list of best practices of what needs to be done to reach this goal. I will add it to my To Do List in the meantime.
The NY Times Sunday Magazine has a thought provoking article by Jeffrey Rosen entitled “The Web Means The End Of Forgetting”. It’s filled with lots of good points quite relevant to the film biz in this time of audience aggregation and automized taste curation.
Rosen points out:
The truth is we can’t possibly control what others say or know or think about us in a world of Facebook and Google, nor can we realistically demand that others give us the deference and respect to which we think we’re entitled. On the Internet, it turns out, we’re not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don’t have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in context, there’s nothing we can do about it.
[...]
The NY Times has an intriguing article on the owners of the copyright of “Kiss Of The Spider Woman” who have packaged the film, it’s rights, and various other support materials, and have hopes netting a windfall.
I have always wondered why more filmmakers don’t go the Matthew Barney route and focus first on selling to “collections” as opposed to audiences. The Spider Woman’s team’s approach of going at long after the initial run and sales cycle is another route altogether. As library values decline faster and faster, perhaps all that will be left in the way of hope for some pension-esque fund will be those wealthy patrons and their butterfly collections.
U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton’s decision against Viacom and in favor of Google and YouTube placed the onus on copyright holders to identify specific instances of infringement and then inform websites to remove the pirated content. If the sites do so promptly, they are shielded from liability.
But as Variety has reported, it looks like Congress is going to stop it, and the film business will remain like onions — unable to leverage the future to mitigate risk. We need to find ways to create a secondary market for film investment, so it is far more liquid than it is today.
Cantor Exchange president Richard Jaycobs said in light of the bill reported out by the conferees on Friday, “Cantor is continuing to assess its options for providing risk management and financing tools to the motion picture industry.”
The Hollywood Reporter gives a good industry-centric overview of the film futures issue. Change is going to come.
The LA Times cautions you to “Reblog this at your own legal risk“.
This site could not have been built without the help and insight of Michael Morgenstern. My thanks go out to him.
Help save indie film and give this guy a job in web design or film!
