On Baseline Research Blog is an article entitled “DIY Doing You In” (thanks to @Shanipedia for tipping me off to it). The author, Jeremy Juuso, states:
to have a decent shot at breaking $1 million in lifetime box office, your Q2 specialty film needs to open at better than $15,000 per weekend venue. The bad news is, if you’re engaging in a self-release or service deal, this will be a very tall order, as only 5 such films in all of 2009 managed to open so.
Self-produced distribution, as I prefer to call it, as no one is going to be doing it by yourself, is a time-consuming, expensive, and challenging process. It is also something that is still in the process of being defined. There are a lot of experts any one can hire, but there is no template to doing it right.
What Juuso neglects to mention, that for all the films last year on a DIY or service model, none of them planned to go that approach from the beginning. The age of DIY will begin when filmmakers and their financiers agree that self-produced distribution is Plan A. That is the true game changer — when we all start planning to put it up and out without the support of rights trade to a major corporation.
