To: LegalBeast who wrote (3650 ) 6/24/1999 12:51:00 PM From: Dilution Respond to
There seems to be some confusion about distribution vs. sale. You do not do limited distribution and then sell. You sell the film to someone else who is willing to gamble on how successful it is, not after it has already been determined how successful it is through limited release. If you sell the film it is gone, you get your money, and walk away with no more upside. If it goes through distribution you get a share in the box office. I do not know where the rumor came from on sale of SJ, but that was an erroneous rumor. This has been distribution from the start. As a rule of thumb figure the movie theater gets 40% of the box. Then of the 60% that is left the distributor gets back his promotion and advertising costs and the remains are split 50/50 with the production company and the distributor. So lets say SJ does $5 million in box. 40% goes to the theaters leaving $3 million. Lets say the distributor spends $500K on advertising so that leaves $2.5 million to split 50/50 with the distributor and MVEE. That would be $1.25 million for MVEE. They spent $1.8 million to make the film. Now there are other revenues. Foreign box, and here they have presold about $850K and 20% of that goes to the foreign distributor company they have a deal with so 80% in presold is $680K. There would be all the film costs back right there. But there is upside in foreign box that has not been presold, video tape, pay per view, premium cable (HBO, Showtime), network TV. So I think the odds of losing money on the film is very low. The odds of making tons of money off the film are low too. This is quality filler. A base hit in baseball terms. Low risk, decent-upside-return-on-your-investment type of movie making. This is what G&G were famous for.
