Tuesday, July 01, 2008

I Agree With This Guy

In the business, everyone's heard about Mark Gill's recent pronouncements about the impending death of indy film. Some tidbits:

1. Here's how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year-- generally with budgets under $10 million--maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That's one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.

2. If you want to survive in this brutal climate, you're going to have to work a lot harder, be a lot smarter, know a lot more, move a lot faster, sell a lot better, pay attention to the data, be a little nicer (ok, a lot nicer), trust your gut, read everything and never, ever give up.

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