I got into distribution six years ago after making many short films, music videos and a feature length documentary. My reason for starting the distribution label was to control my films and be able to work backwards. If I knew what a release could actually make, what it would take to get a release onto cable and into major retailers, then I could plan the films we produce in-house around that and we would have a really good shot at turning a profit and making another film. Six years later the plan is working. Apprehensive Films now has full blown North American distribution. We get our projects out to major retail, cable, all the major digital outlets, all the major online retailers and we have international representation. As of last week we just wrapped principal photography on our first in-house produced project that is based on our current level of distribution.
Now that we're through with the introductions I want to talk about an issue I hear coming up all the time. Distributors and Filmmakers complaining about how retail is dead and there is no money to be made through traditional home video distribution. I'll be the first to admit that retail has taken a big hit, but it's definitely not dead. Sure Hollywood Video is gone, Blockbuster lost some stores, Best Buy shrunk their DVD selection, but there is still a lot of open market out there.
There are 33,000 redboxes in the US, there are 4,700 Walmart Stores, 600+ Barnes & Nobles stores, tons of small indie record store chains across the country, thousands of comic book stores. The list goes on and on.
We just had a Halloween themed release that sold over 4,000 copies last month. But only 180 of those went through Amazon.com, the largest internet retailer, 3,000 of those sold units went to a major retailer in Canada. Our release was an indie release with no major talent and no major marketing campaign. But it still was able to catch the eye of major retailers, how? It was timed with a major holiday, had great cover artwork and quality content.
The market is flooded with too many indie films, but you can set yourself apart by making a quality project and coming up with a way to market the project so you don't have to have major stars or marketing campaigns. One of our most successful releases, that continues to sell is Hardware Wars, simply because it was the first parody of the most popular film ever made. Hardware Wars has never had a multi-million dollar ad campaign, but it is arguably the most successful short film of all time.
We're going to be pitching our Halloween release from this year to Spirit Halloween Stores (700 nation-wide) and Halloween City (400 nation-wide) for next year.
We also have been handling a documentary on fly fishing for a number of years and we sold a ton of DVDs to fly fishing shops.
I don't think retail is dead, it's sure not what it was in the hey day of VHS sales, but it is still a very large market I think a lot of filmmakers and labels alike are tending to count out prematurely.
- Jonathan Morken
www.TheGrindHouse.Net
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