Here’s the Chain Reaction: Create. Form a Community. Publicise/Market. Do it Again.
News today broke that Nolan’s Oppenheimer has passed the $500m mark. Interesting things with its financing. The film cost $100m which is low by Blockbuster film standards.
Dark Knight Rises cost $230 million. According to Film site Collider it says Oppenheimer’s marketing budget was between $65 million and $100 million.
It’s this that’s worth spending some time on. Lets split it, say $80M. That’s an insane amount of money to be spending on marketing and publicity. Almost the equivalent of the film. But this is near standard. Promotion is the magic bullet.
For the film to make a healthy profit, it needs to break $400m. The rule of thumb is that a film makes twice its production budget. So you need to push for it to be seen, and being widely distributed. That’s posters, events, newspaper adverts, merch and some innovative marketing e.g. Barbenheimer.
And if it’s good ( opening week) it picks up its own momentum and forms that chain reaction.
As a business you can see why the film/ documentary business is vicarious for particularly for new film makers. Everyday I read copious stories around histories, and according to publishers the market Black and Brown people that could, should be turned into films, is opening up.
Today, In the Voice Online, media entrepreneur Chadwick Jackson launches a short course filmmaking class to tell untold Caribbean stories. We must wish him well.
Filmmaking is a hustle: beg, borrow, try what you can to raise enough money for a crew, otherwise shoot as an indie ( low budget) with guerrilla marketing — try anything to be seen. That means websites, social media feeds, and a dollops of luck from the story gods.
Remember Kony 2012 — a 30 min documentary that defied new thinking that no one would watch a film for more than 5 minutes in 2012. In five days it racked up 100million views. I remember it well and blogged about it https://viewmag.blogspot.com/search?q=kony
Stories are a deeply intrinsic part of societies. Easy to tell. Difficult to get traction. Novelty factors help, Zeitgeist is appreciated, before something else comes along. Yep I’ve been there. Yet this thinking shouldn’t detract from the goal to see greater investment in ambitious storytelling. The kind that resonates with primary audiences and can travel outside of it.
There’s a market for the icons and iconic events: Kwame Nkrumah, Yaa Asentewaa, Rawlings coup. The story of Kwame Nkrumah and the count down to the first African country to finally win independence from Britain. Imagine the backroom tension, deals, and state craft battling with the Brits, and Americans, and his own officials. Americans?
Nkrumah was dye-in-the-wool socialist — a threat to new capitalist systems. I was in school in Ghana during Rawling’s coup and vividly remember what it was like. Ghana’s own Top Gun pilot who’d had enough. And as for Yaa Asentewaa — think as a mental note the Woman King but different scenes as a Queen leads her forces against the British.
But the nub is this; to inform, turn around attitudes, it pays to have a strong story production centre. Several territories would argue they do, but often they’re wall-gardened. A more robust philanthropic or otherwise agency system working in communities is required, where aspiration is rewarded, even when a film is unlikely to match Blockbuster status.
Couple of years ago we launched the Applied Storytelling lab — an opportunity to create innovative projects and films, to bring communities together and to publicise. I’m thinking more ambitious projects please.
