Excerpt: American: The Bill Hicks Story

Today’s excerpt will take a look at the British documentary American:The Bill Hicks Story.

Documentary that split rights and had a day&date release

Orly first met filmmakers Paul Thomas and Matt Harlock at 2010 SXSW Festival where the film was screening. At the time, it was getting a lot of distributor interest from participating in the festival and though there were all rights offers, the filmmakers opted for a split rights scenario.  The all rights offers were not enough to recoup the steep animation costs for which the filmmakers had personally gone into debt plus the BBC provided initial production funding through a DVD advance and TV acquisition fee totaling $280,000 (this is a NET #, 20% of the gross fee went to their UK rep). However this included $60,000 (again this is a NET # after the fee to the UK rep) for USA DVD rights and it’s this that caused the filmmakers problems later in not being able give a US distributor an all-rights deal, and ultimately led them to handling the split rights themselves.

“At SXSW, we met both Nolan Gallagher from Gravitas and Dylan Marchetti from Variance Films who were both very keen to work on the film. Nolan said that a theatrical would help secure strong VOD placement across the platforms and that a day & date VOD release with theatrical would work best to achieve this. We did consider releasing with a the help of a cheaper theatrical booker but, with one shot to get it right, we concluded that Variance would achieve the best that was possible and so decided to run with their larger fee,”said Thomas.

“We would have launched earlier in the USA, but had to wait for our Australian advance to come through and then we missed the fall slots. Variance suggested avoiding Oscar season, and coordinated with Gravitas for a spring release date of April 8^th 2011, which Gravitas sold in to Warner’s VOD networks and synchronised the VOD date. It was also the first non studio film the company had sold to Dish Network.  Trailers then worked across both platforms announcing the day & date availability in cinema and home pay-per-view.”  The day and date situation did cause some problems with cinemas. “Dylan said that a lot of theaters didn’t take it because of the day&date VOD, which we knew was the risk you take, plus we’ve also had the Hicks factor of a doc about a marginal figure for a lot of Americans. However, the theatrical is what led Warner to place it well across all their platforms and aggressively market it on screen in cable homes.”  First month VOD sales reached over $80,000 at the $6.99 price point.

In regard to day & date, Marchetti has said “almost all of the chains have taken a hard line against any film with a VOD window of less than 94 days, while a significant portion of the independent theaters have decided that for the right film, it doesn’t really hit them in the pocketbook and they’ll tolerate it (supporting it is a stretch)- as long as you present them with a fleshed-out plan as to why people will come to the theater rather than simply stay at home.” With the film’s small P&A, they still achieved $7,000 opening weekend at Cinema Village in NY and reached a total USA gross of $90,589 though they failed to break even. Though the filmmakers took a loss, they note gladly “the theatrical release secured a lot of favorable film press and allowed Gravitas to present a strong case to Warner who gave the film great placement across their VOD and PPV networks.”  The film stayed in iTunes top 10 documentaries for 10 weeks and performed well across the States. Gravitas estimates it grossed $100,000 that first month , and that it will reach $600,000 gross over the next 3 years. “Without the theatrical lead, it’s unlikely we would get anywhere near that figure,” said Thomas.

To find out the whole distribution and marketing details on this and many other recent independent films, read Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul Presented by PreScreen coming in September 2011. Also ‘like’ our Facebook page.