Monday 12 May 2014

Hollywood should embrace crowdfunding

For any movie that Hollywood is afraid to fund themselves, they should use crowdsourced funding. Can't bring yourself to back a Wonder Woman or Black Widow movie? Ask the fans for the cash. Let them pre-pay their cinema ticket price or DVD purchase price and see if the idea has legs. Then, when you drown in all the money, just go ahead and make the movies, would you? Please?

Seriously, someone needs to start a whole movie studio based on the crowdfunding model. Imagine their website as just a list of potential projects, the required budget and the current funding level. Even the backer rewards would be pretty simple to set up. Cinema tickets, DVD/Blu-Ray discs, posters, autographed portraits of the stars or maybe, at very high investment levels, a share in the profits. It would look like any online shopping cart system, except either you don't get charged right away or the money goes into escrow until funding targets are met or the funding deadline falls through. Veronica Mars proved that crowdfunding works to make movies, but also that the existing movie studios are terrible at thinking of their customers as investors instead of wallets attached to eyeballs.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The old guard are still pulling record profits, though.
PPS - So maybe their way is working well enough for now.

No comments: