THE END IS NEAR! IS THERE A NEW BEGINNING?

Each year, the cost to produce a film decreases and the quality of the filmmaking increases.

And incredibly talented young people are pouring into this market as they seek ways to express themselves; show their creativity; and have their voices heard. They want to right a wrong and help raise awareness about a subject. This year it is estimated that more than 25,000 Indie films and shorts will be produced. Compare that to the 600 or so major motion picture studio films that will get into theatres via big studios. And these little films are all getting financed from Indie investors, from $100K to $15 million per film. There are investors out there that love film, filmmakers and the causes they support. The content gets made but it sure isn’t being treated as “king”.

Those 25,000 films are now competing like crazy to get into film festivals so they can be shown and hopefully bought for distribution but the film festivals are all losing money as they battle with the physicality of showing more and more films. There aren’t enough theaters. There aren’t enough scale and ticket sales to support showing all of the films being submitted. Film festivals are struggling. The sponsors that support them aren’t happy either because they want to buy massive audiences and they want their media to be accountable.

Small studios are all losing money as the cost to release and market a film goes up. The New York Times charges the same amount of money for an ad that supports a film that is shown in one theater as one that is in wide release. Small studios are struggling or shutting down. See this indieWIRE article for an obituary. So distribution isn’t “king” anymore either. There are probably less than 500 theaters in all of the US that will show a great Indie film to consumers and that number is decreasing daily. Newspapers are also struggling and shutting down. Being a media lord isn’t all it was cracked up to be, is it? The ecosystem doesn’t work anymore. Less and less Indie films are being bought for distribution. That is a bad and sad outcome.

And if you can believe it, every film that is shot in digital still needs to become analog and be made into film at a very high cost. Think about that. We shoot a film in digital. We then make it into film: Put it into a metal can; put cardboard around it; put it on a plane and then a truck; and deliver it to a kid who will then put it into a projector to show to people in a theater. Trains, planes and automobiles sometimes all to show a film about how to save our environment! Shoot me now, please.

And TV network acquisition budgets have been cut to the bone. Big players such as HBO, PBS and Discovery are all cutting their acquisition budgets and show less and less third party produced content. And when they do pay, the monies are not significant. And now the DVD industry is starting to show its age. And when a Netflix pays, it is a small up-front advance, if at all.

Soon investors and Foundations will start to shut down their investment into small Indie films and works of nonfiction because “if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it - did it fall at all?”

This business, this industry for Indie and nonfiction films just broke down. It is official. It is done. It won’t ever come back in its original form. Trust me; I have seen this before in my media lifetime.

Look to innovators and attackers to go after transforming efforts in this space. No one has broken the code yet on how to make, distribute and “monetize” digital film for the benefit of the filmmaker and the causes that they support.

Look to this space soon for info on my plans to make sense of this mess.

As Howard Beale said, “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore!”