No Investor Will Invest In Your Film If It’s Like This

No Investor Will Invest In Your Film If It’s Like This

I had a client who started working with me to create a film, but was very stuck - mentally, emotionally, and I would even say, spiritually - on the last film he had made before meeting me.

In that past experience, he had come on board as a producer to raise $1.2M to make a film.  He had not had any prior knowledge or experience of producing films at that time.

When he joined the film, there was already a script in place, a director in place who had not yet made features but had made shorts, and two recognizable name actors to star in the film.  Sounds good, right?  What could possibly go wrong?  

Well things had gone wrong.  The film had not made any money whatsoever.  Zilch. Nada. It’s bad enough to make a microbudget film and have it make no money, but to have spent $1.2M and have names and for it to have made no money was a huge and painful failure for him. It took him several sessions to just get past his disbelief that things could really have gone this badly.

So what happened?

As I said, he was not my client when he made this film, and therefore, had never had the advantage of creating a well-crafted pitch.  So when I asked what the film’s genre was I was told: “It’s a sci-fi-fantasy-adventure-romantic-comedy.”  I call this genre-soup.  Filmmakers love to include many, many, many, many genres in their movies and call it being creative. I’ve asked a filmmaker to tell me the genre of their film and 5 minutes later they’re still talking! But what filmmakers don’t realize is that when they speak about a genre-soup movie, the industry just hears “I can’t sell that.”.  Also, once I heard this genre-soup, I knew instantly that the movie was terrible.  And it was.

The movie was absolutely unwatchable.  I had to watch it because it was my client’s film, but I doubt even the actors in the film could have made it through. It was a mess. 

To the producer’s shock, when the film was finished and headed out to distribution, the celebrity name actors refused to promote the film…. I wonder why?

I suspect that most of you reading this are thinking: “If I had a million dollars, I would make a GREAT film that will be highly SUCCESSFUL!” But read on…

This producer is extremely smart, extremely intelligent.  After all, he had been able to raise $1.2M in an industry he knew absolutely nothing about. The problem was that he relied on the filmmakers to know what they were doing when they absolutely did not.  Why would they?  Had they ever been taught the Business of Film?  Had they ever known anything about Marketing? Sales?  Distribution?  They may even have been to Film School, but I can be 100% sure that they didn’t learn anything about the business there either.

So what’s a producer to do?  This true story is that this client is not the only one of my clients who raised more than a million dollars - before they met me - and made a film that made no money. Unfortunately, there are those among us who are so good at raising money that they can land investors with absolutely no idea as to how to have a film successfully make money. 

How can you be sure that you would never make any of these same mistakes? Well, you have come to the right place. Everything we do here at Filmmaker Success is about mastering the Business of Film.  We are the Business-of-Film-School.  We appreciate your talent, your creativity, and your dedication to your craft - now it’s time for you to get paid. And to insure that your investors get paid, and keep working with you on film after film after film.