How do short film makers make money

One tip I can give you. Vimeo OnDemand How they will help you? Vimeo, by virtue of its name-recognition and user base, is perhaps in the best position to make a major impact in the film distribution game. I spent eight thousand dollars.

What’s the average cost of making and selling a Hollywood blockbuster?

From a distance, the movie business might look pretty glamorous. Celebrities and producers glide down red carpets, clutch their Oscars and vacation in St. Barts…just because they. Monney public can be fickle, the industry is in flux, and just about any movie is an extremely risky investment, even a film starring big name actors and actresses. Major studios and indie filmmakers alike now spend much of their days looking for new sources of revenue, because ticket sales are no longer the be-all and end-all for films. This is in part because it costs far more to make and market a film than it .

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We use cookies to improve the services we offer you. By continuing to browse this site, you consent to keep them in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Edited by Nataly Bogorad. Are you a new filmmaker looking for a profitable career? If you are, then you must have considered making your first short film to kick-start that dream. And while it might seem like an impossible job in the beginning, it is not actually hard to achieve and with a website like YouTube, you have a chance to reach an audience at any part of the world.

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This is an article I have wanted to research and write for a long, long time. I finally had a moment to sit down and crunch the numbers — I hope it helps in the understanding of Hollywood economics. Almost as long as there have been movies, Hollywood has relied mpney huge-scale productions to bring in the big bucks. The Extra-Terrestrial As the films have grown, so too have the spoils on offer. Hod starting point for working out the final costs of releasing a movie is to look at how much it cost the studio to shoot the film i.

This includes…. Budgets have been rising in recent decades, well above inflation. In the following ten jakers this rose to howw The information available online is how do short film makers make money a mix of true figures which have leaked koney educated guesses by industry experts.

The studios often try to hide the true cost of a movie, in order to make themselves seem thriftier, smarter or more in control than they actually are. I performed a quick check for the 29 blockbusters I have inside data on compared with their budgets listed on Wikipedia.

Some of the other costs involved in making and releasing a film include…. To give you a little more detail and context, below are some notes on each how do short film makers make money the main cost areas…. Judging the correct number of prints and units to manufacture is a key part of the planning done by the studios. If they order too few then cinemas and stores will have to turn away customers in the all-important first few weeks of release.

If they over-order then their costs increase and they are left with annoyed cinema owners and large quantities of unsold units. Giving these people a share of the income is a good way for the studio to hedge against poor box mkers performance and it also defers the moment they have to pay up.

On the flipside, studios have got rather good at using creative accounting techniques to show that they made a loss on paper in order to get out of paying such fees. Fortunately, Hollywood is rather good at squeezing every penny out of a movie, ensuring that mkers target customer is given many chances to pay monry see it. Movies may start in cinemas but they are far from the only place they earn money.

Each stage at which a movie reaches a new type of platform i. Of the 29 Hollywood blockbuster movies I studied, 14 generated a profit and 15 lost money.

Note: The following discussion of profit uses this formula: all revenue received by the studios from a particular movie minus all costs they internally attribute to that production. The smallest movies within my dataset i. Would you have made a smart investment? And I am sure this is a fairly low return for that kind of cash. The only problem is — how do you spot the hits? Hollywood currently employs the smartest, best informed and most profit-focused people in an effort to exclusively make profitable movies and yet half of their movies lose money.

In fact, their combined best efforts only produce a 3. Yes, but only by a very small margin. The average Metacritic score i. Similarly, IMDb audiences rated the profitable films an average of 6. However, we can say that, yes, movies with the biggest marketing budgets do seem to gross the highest amounts mqkers the box office. Added to this, studios are less likely to make missteps on their home turf as they can be on-hand to scrutinise everything to a greater extent.

Well, it depends on which part of the process you look at. Below you can see nake origin of revenue and costs for the blockbusters in my dataset.

As you can see, the majority of the money collected at the box office does indeed come from countries outside of the US and Canada. However, studios spend a higher proportion of their marketing money in North America. This could be for a number of reasons including the higher cost of advertising in America, the temptation to spend more in the country which studio execs actually live in and because the US is often the first place a movie is released and the media enjoy reporting on huge opening weekends and decrying massive flops.

Together, they mean that only 12 of my 29 movies made money at the domestic box office, whereas 20 made money at the international box office. Alongside this, the ddo at makerx domestic theatrical market were much worse than internationally. So Hollywood looks to the international market with glee because…. Q4: Is there a rule of thumb for guessing which Hollywood blockbusters are in profit?

They reached this conclusion by studying the full financial records of the movies they were involved with and also checking their hypothesis with independent professional film financiers. Using this rule, I was able to correctly identify all of the profit-making films and correctly identify ten as loss-making, however, this system incorrectly marked five loss-making movies as being profitable.

Not as reliable as one might have liked and way below the accuracy the BFI found when the rule is applied to smaller fulm but certainly interesting. So there you have it — a rather long mooney The biggest question some readers may have at this stage is — how did he get this data?

I was also helped by a few well-placed friends in the industry who were able to makerrs in the blanks and confirm the shlrt of some of the data points.

I am completely confident that the information in this article is a true representation of how these Hollywood blockbusters make money.

The purpose of this site is educational and my sole intention is to momey explain how our industry works.

In the past, I have been contacted by lawyers for various companies, trying to prevent the sharing of key data points relating to their business. So far, I have makf to avoid lawsuits and also to avoid having to take any articles down, but if I were to offer the full mke as a download or details of how to do the same piecing together I have then I suspect I would get the wrong kind of attention.

So, if you want to know any more about these movies, please add your question in the comments. Very informative and great info as. Thank you, Stephen for some scintillating reading. When is someone offering you a book deal? Great work Stephen — thank you. And related to this can you demystify the roles, contributions and compensation for these various kinds of producers? Very helpful. Re the query hkw books sinceour volumes Global Hollywood and Global Hollywood makkers are more recent than the one.

They are also available in Chinese, Turkish, and Spanish. Stephen, please, please put all of this marvellous stuff in a book. Thank you for this amazing work! Can you clarify here? Thanks. Marketing and avertsing are not included, save maybe for the on-set photographer and a publicist who shows moneey around the set. This is particularly important for fillm like tax incentives, which almost never include publicity and distribution costs when calculating how big the budget is.

Both have a reasonable claim to be correct. The budget is a real document moneh in pre-production which covers the cost of physically making the film. Before internet streaming as we know it now, Pay Per View Fklm was commonplace, in hotel rooms and on encrypted mony and cable channels. As VOD has grown up, the newer services have become their own new window but the old way of accounting for the older services were retained.

So strictly, the idea of digital delivery of video on demand to the viewer appears within three windows! Just two questions about the average costs graph: 1. Instead of being included in costs? The opacity occurs for a number of reasons but most are to do with hiding embarrassing or unattractive practices, because they can and because there is no benefit from being open. Wow Stephen. Scary stuff. I want to break down the costs and show how they differ between products. Thank you Steve for your informative article.

The research that went into it must have been enormous as it covered so much of the movie business including distribution. I was really interested in the DVD sales figures and the overseas theatrical markets as the advertising would be. Thank you for your info!!! Michael L Edwards. Can you say the swing on that?

Stephen, thank you for your informative detailed article. This is the sort of thing the internet would ideally be used for, instead of widespread trolling.

Keep up the syort work. Thank you for the shott and the analysis you have performed. The real numbers are never released, nor should. Nobody in the industry pays those numbers. At the end of the day, the important numbers and analyses come from what the windows revenue figures are and their relationships. As filmm profits… do magicians reveal their zhort Hey Adrian.

Glad you found it useful. This allowed me to compare the true cost to that of the public figure in this case from Jakers. Hi Stephen, thanks for the excellent analysis. Do you have any data to support or contradict these numbers?

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It was pretty humbling. How can i pickupp aa financer for a film. Now I was like I was doing a product launch. Having no experience at all, I went straight to producing and bypassing all the time consuming and money od nonsense. FMF Resources December 12, at pm. The workshops should also aim at providing guidance to students. Sanket P. I would constantly be adding things to it as we move forward over the months and years. I wish these could be shown to every new class coming into every film school, and then again right before graduating. I suppose my main issue with these videos is that they seem to solely focus on the quickest way to get money in the bank, rather than any craft at all.