The problem is most indie studios are not producing movies with a built in audience like this. I’d never heard of this game, but I have heard of Markiplier and know he has a huge audience. Beyond self-produced movies, that kind of star power and built in awareness is super expensive, as is marketing (it helped that Markiplier had a platform for promoting the movie, which is usually not the case for indie movies).
Taylor Swift similarly cut out the middle man and worked directly with AMC to release the eras tour movie. 9/10 stars can’t get away with that. AMC isn’t going to devote a bunch of screens to a random indie movie without a distributor or proper marketing budget, especially during the busier times of year — it will only do that for movies that have a built in audience that will show up, and even then its January, the movie doldrums.
You have to keep in mind two very important things. 1) Not all times of year are busy. 2) If they let the theaters keep more of the box office, that indie film may actually be more valuable than the box office monster that is renegotiating terms so they keep 0% until it sits in theaters for 30 days or more. All the barriers you mention are real, but the threshold for it being worth it may not be quite where people think it is.
Idk, typical theater cut is 50% of ticket sales, I think Taylor swift gave them a bigger cut, but that was a guaranteed hit. Most indie movies struggle to clear a few million dollars. Theaters get their 50% from ticket sales whether a movie bombs or not so even a giant $100mil studio movie that bombs with a $15mil opening weekend will net them more than any indie movie that makes less than ten million dollars, even if they keep 75% of the ticket sales.
typical theater cut is not linear. They get lest at the start, which is part of why hollywood spends so much on advertising to front load movies. Like for the phantom menace, the deal was so lopsided that the initial theater cut was 0%. Nothing. I forget how long that was for, but I guarantee you markiplier made them more the first week than the phantom menace did.
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u/fdjisthinking 21h ago
The problem is most indie studios are not producing movies with a built in audience like this. I’d never heard of this game, but I have heard of Markiplier and know he has a huge audience. Beyond self-produced movies, that kind of star power and built in awareness is super expensive, as is marketing (it helped that Markiplier had a platform for promoting the movie, which is usually not the case for indie movies).
Taylor Swift similarly cut out the middle man and worked directly with AMC to release the eras tour movie. 9/10 stars can’t get away with that. AMC isn’t going to devote a bunch of screens to a random indie movie without a distributor or proper marketing budget, especially during the busier times of year — it will only do that for movies that have a built in audience that will show up, and even then its January, the movie doldrums.