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First, I'd want everyone to know that I've submitted this post simultaneously to three film based yahoo groups. I normally wouldn't do this as I realize that many of us belong to more than one of these groups, but I since I've had several people contact me with inquiries about this particular topic recently, I thought there might be some members that only belong to one of these groups that would find this information useful, so if you're received more than one copy of this e-mail, please forgive the duplication.
That being said, I have been spending quite a bit of time lately researching the possibility of a self releasing theatrically on a limited basis, and have gained some interesting insight into both the possibilities and the problems thanks to my conversations with very generous individuals at the corporate offices of major cinema chains as well as independent releasing companies, and producers that have gone down this road before.
The remainder of this post is taken from an e-mail reply to another independent producer who was inquiring about my experience with self releasing a project. I hope you all find it helpful!
-- Greg
The main cost factor in self releasing is advertising dollars. Even if you can work a deal to get your film into mainstream theaters (either on celluloid or digital projection) the first question the theater chain will ask before booking your film is "What is your advertising budget?". So essentially, on any given screen, you're competing against ad dollars of the major players. In other terms, you can have the worst looking, worst sounding, poorly written film every created, and if you're putting more ad dollars behind it than the new "Batman" film, you win and it will be your film booked into the theater.
Assuming you get lucky and find a theater that would be willing to give you a screen, the next factor becomes the format: film or digital.
Film will cost you about $40k to output with a full dolby digital optical soundtrack. Then add about $2000 per screening copy for lab fees and shipping, etc. Not terribly practical for a small independent unless you happen to have budgeted for this in the first place (and assuming you had a nice size budget.) This leaves digital.
The good news is that QuVis (one of the equipment manufacturers and founders of the digital cinema initiative -- www.quvis.com) just last month released a software only digital cinema encoder that is compatible with Final Cut Pro's Compressor software. This software takes your finalized film from Final Cut or any Quicktime movie and creates a complient DCP (Digital Cinema Package). This DCP is screenable on any DCI compliant digital theater... previously there were companies that had hardware DCP encoding which cost about the same as outputting your film to 35mm (around 40k.) This software is priced under $1,000.
The bad news is that there are not many digital screens yet, though the number is growing. To make matters more complicated for the independent film producer, according to Regal Cinema's corporate office (one of the largest theater chains here in South Florida), theater chains have struck a deal with the major studios to help fund the conversion from 35mm to digital projection. Their logic is that since the studio no longer has to pay the $2000 to strike a film print and ship it to the theater, and since the theater has to pay upwards of $100k per screen to convert, the studio will instead pay the theater a "digital projection fee" of somewhere in the range of $1000 to $1500 per digital print sent. This works great for the studio who's saving about $500 per screen on a release, but it means that digital projection is not the cheap alternative that independent film producers were hoping for. Theoretically, once the cost of conversion is paid for, the studios (and us independents) will no longer have to pay this fee.... this still leaves digital projection for independents a number of years away, unless an individual theater is willing to negotiate some other terms.
According to the sources I've spoken with, 100% of the box office on a studio film goes back to the studio for the first two weeks of the run. In week three, the theaters begin to split the box office at 90/10 favoring the studio. Each week the theaters get a bigger piece of the pie until it eventually reverses and the theater gets the majority of the box office. This is why theaters like movies that have long runs. A short run film that only lasts for two weeks makes $0 for the theater.
I have not spoken with the film buyer for Regal Cinemas as of yet, but I suspect that if I were to offer a 60/40 or 50/50 split from first dollar that the theater might waive the digital projection fee, provided we could show a reasonable amount of local advertising dollars were committed to supporting the film in the areas where the theaters were located.
Incidentally, a "reasonable" P&A budget for a "limited release in select cities" (usually five major cities) seems to be around $2 million, or $400,000 per city, which includes TV, radio, and print. If you have that kind of money (which we don't) there's a company called Freestyle Releasing (www.freestylereleasing.com) that handles all of the aspects of independent film releases from striking prints, to buying ads, shipping prints to theaters, and tracking and reporting box office to the trades. Since I don't have that kind of budget, I haven't been able to get a call back from any of the principals, though I have become friendly with one of the gatekeepers.
Best Wishes,
Greg Steiner
Producer/Director
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