BIG STARS WON'T SELL YOUR GENRE MOVIE
If Your Movie Sucks!

And even if you DO have big stars in your indie movie? Distributors still won't pay for them. They'll offer you no higher a royalty than the other director who had a lower budget and no stars+. This is how it works.

Remember how Hollywood used to hue and cry over "Piracy" killing the movie market?* Remember when theaters used to run those idiot announcements, featuring some poor but sincere shmuck asking people not to pirate movies so he can keep working? "I just wanna keep working."

The joke there, and most of the audience knew it, was that Mr. Set Designer wasn't going to find work anyway because the Union-busting Big Studio folks who made his PSA were shipping his job off to Budapest or Romania.

"I would shoot in the Czech Republic over the States any day. There's no unions here, so the dollar goes a lot farther. You can film with kids without the same kind of strict regulations and hassles you get in the U.S."
- Eli Roth (CABIN FEVER, HOSTEL)
JoBlo.com, August 31, 2005 Interview

DVD sales are down as much as 25% for some studios. O' Whotta mystery! Do these benighted numbskulls not understand the correlation between lousy theater box-office and lousy DVD sales and rental?

Currently in production is a movie based on the game BATTLESHIP*. Battleship was and is a board game for kids. They could make a war movie, but no, they are making a movie based on a game where your ships remain static and you plug their holes with plastic. You think that's bad? They are making a View-Master movie. A freaking movie based on the View-Master^ toy!

Watch for SLINKY: The Movie, next. Seriously. They think there is an audience for this? They can't see the difference in audience potential for View-Master and a toyline and popular long-running cartoon series like TRANSFORMERS? REALLY?

These days, the Horror Thriller model in Hollywood is to put out crap, made for cheap, and make profit on the low return. What they actually get in addition is audience disapproval. What they actually get are genre fans who distrust them. Genre fans distrust Dimension Films and are learning to distrust Lionsgate. The top executives at companies like Paramount, Lionsgate, Universal, and Disney, are losing their jobs over making such stupid decisions. The Weinstein Brothers are about to lose their own company for the second time in two years. And yet, they are being replaced by people who are following the same formula and wonder why it isn't working anymore.

It must be someone's fault. It can't possibly be Failure of ... the MEME!

The Meme
The Horror Thriller meme is over 40 years old. The Horror Thriller / SciFi meme says that your movie must have big stars. It was wrong when it was invented. Hitchcock proved it in the 1960s (in PSYCHO he killed off his big star first. The studio had a fit) and so did Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Spielberg proved it in the 1970s (JAWS had zero big stars. They became big stars because of JAWS.) and so did Tobe Hooper with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, George Lucas with Star Wars, Ridley Scott with ALIEN, Wes Craven with THE HILLS HAVE EYES, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, William Friedkin with THE EXORCIST, John Carpenter with HALLOWEEN and so many more. Spielberg proved it again in the 1980s with POLTERGIEST, Craven with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, John Landis with AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, Joe Dante with THE HOWLING, and so on.

It was proved still again in the 1990s with THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR, THE FACULTY, and so many others. By the 1990s, Steven Spielberg was so big his name could sell a movie, so he didn't care if he had big actor names or not (though JURASSIC PARK had no A-list actors at that time. Samuel L. Jackson became big because of JP and PULP FICTION). And if you want to talk about big budget features with big stars that tanked, oh man! SPHERE, THE HAUNTING, MIMIC, THE RELIC, END OF DAYS, the list is extensive.

Onward to the 2000s and hit movies starring nobodies like AMERICAN PSYCHO (Christian Bale became a star because of this movie), IDLE HANDS, GHOST SHIP, SAW, EQUILIBRIUM (Christian Bale again. Miramax tried to kill it, still a hit), FEAST (Miramax tried to kill it, still a hit), DESCENT, SPIDER-MAN (Sam Raimi wasn't A-list until this. Is Kirsten Dunst A-list yet?), 28 DAYS LATER, HOSTEL, RESIDENT EVIL (Milla Jovovich's first major starring role). And of course, there was - and is - a huge number of genre movies with big A-List actors that tanked utterly.

The meme and the reality, decade after decade, have never been compatible.

So put it to rest. And while you're doing that, put this other one to rest: Your genre movie must have SEX. Follow the link to find out why Sex Won't Sell Your Horror Movie.

What Sells
Two major factors will sell your genre movie to the fans.

One is someone and something they've never seen before (so if you're still dry-humping NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, ALIEN, or SAW, you lose).

Two is fan recognition. Genre fans are more apt to go to a movie made by a director, writer, or producer (Stan Lee, Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, J.J. Abrams, even a freaking composer or SFX man), than they are for a star. Celebrities are pretty much on the bottom of the list unless they've really established themselves in the genre like Dee Wallace, Lance Henrickson, or Robert Englund.

Writer, Director, and Producer, Eli Roth understands this. When he made CABIN FEVER, he relied solely on audience appreciation of his movie. Once that was established, then he could sell his second movie, HOSTEL, featuring a bunch of nobodies (Eli understands that Big Stars won't sell your movie - although he still thinks sex will do it), and the fans plus more audience would turn out. With HOSTEL II, Eli discovered that there was such a thing as Over-hyping your movie. He didn't discover that right away. First he committed the fan taboo of promoting his movie TO Horror Thriller fans by saying,

"Right now the R rated horror film is in serious jeopardy. Studios feel the public doesn’t want them any more, and so they are only putting PG-13 films into production. The only way to counter this perception is to get out there and support R rated horror."
- Eli Roth

Eli Roth Says R-Rated Horror Films Are in “Serious Jeopardy”

Eli Roth Reacts Badly To Hostel II Failure; Says R-Rated Horror In Serious Jeopardy

From an audience's perspective, the only way to counter the studio perception that the public doesn't want R rated Horror movies, is to make Damn Good R rated Horror movies!

Horror Thriller fans don't give a god damn about R rated movies. What we want to see is horrifying, thrilling movies i.e., we want to be scared and entertained! If you are trying to promote your movie by raving on and on about your pissant "R" rating, which more often than not features a quick tit shot and someone dropping an F-bomb, big freaking hairy butthole deal! What fans want to support is not a stupid freaking rating, but a good Horror Thriller movie!~

*The Music and Movie industry is tied together and both are out of Hollywood. The two sleep with each other every night, so let's talk about music piracy.

Piracy didn't kill the music industry either, although the music industry needed killing and the Internet did it - but from a new business model that the old industry didn't forsee.

In the old days, musicians would take tapes and records they paid to have recorded and pressed, around to various clubs, selling their music out of the back of their car. That's the way M.C. Hammer did it and he wasn't the only one.

As hundreds of recording artists can attest, the Hollywood music industry was one big theft organization, stealing from the performer. When performers realized that they could make more money selling their music online via iTunes, Amazon, hell even MySpace, they stopped worrying about the mythical fat recording contract: The likes of breaking even once you were actually signed, was akin to winning the lottery. When Napster came onto the scene in the early 2000s and gave away free music that didn't belong to them, the recording industry was in an uproar, but very few recording artists said anything. In fact, besides Metallica#, Dr. Dre, Garth Brooks, Sarah McLachlan, Christina Aguilera, Blink-182, and Alanis Morissette, I can't think of any established recording artists who complained. Only the first four artists I mentioned were big at the time.

Metallica Lauds Napster Ruling

Now circle back to movies -

If You Don't Pay, You're Not A Distributor
For the last few years, many indie distributors, even semi-majors, won't pay a cent for your low-budget indie movie. They want it, they want to distribute it, they will only pay royalties, tie up your rights for the next 5 years (or indefinitely if you are that big a sucker), and insist on making all advertising (and even editing) decisions. Yet they won't actually pay the indie film maker.

Why?
The indie film maker already assumed 100% risk just by making and finishing the movie. The distributor tells the film maker that the movie is good enough that money can be made off of it. Of course, if the distributor REALLY believed they could make money from your movie, they'd pay you an advance. So why would a "distributor" want your movie for nothing?

They don't think they can sell enough of it. Let's assume your movie has hit a few film festivals, it's done well, truly the audience is there for it. Your distributor won't pay because either
A. They don't have the capital! They really aren't connected as they would have you believe. They may have contacts to Best Buy, Walmart, and the like, but they don't have an ACTUAL business relationship. In short, they've got nothing.
B. They want to pad out their catalog of titles. The more titles they have the more they have to offer the likes of Blockbuster cable, Crackle, Dish, Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, etc. A large catalog, like a good resume, can help a distributor land a contract. But a large distributor catalog, like a good resume, does nothing for the people within it. Your previous employers gain nothing by being on your resume. Indie film makers gain nothing by having their title on a list of titles. In fact, be careful of your distributor's contract, because they may even want to charge back (charge you) for appearing on their catalog, as if that was some form of advertising.

Having your movie appear as a title on a distributor's catalog does nothing for you and your movie, it only serves the distributor.

The marketing shift that came to the recording industry is now hitting the movie industry and its name isn't piracy.

I truly hope Universal and the rest get their shit together with this major re-organization. I'm logically skeptical, yet hopeful. Seriously, who among us DOESN'T want to see good movies again?