For those of you who don't know this, I co-produced a Kannada movie two years ago which was directed by my friend. The movie tanked in theatres and I lost 90 percent of my investment. But it was a one in life time experience
We release in during corona on YouTube and the movie crossed 8 lakh views.
links
https://twitter.com/gokulnk/status/1318585740758974464
youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRVxgBrvd7g&t=5171s book my show - https://in.bookmyshow.com/bengaluru/movies/idam-premam-jeevanam/ET00071887
learnings
- Everybody else gets a salary, producer is the only one who has a real skin in the game.
- Starting a movie is easy, completing it is hard. Project management in IT is much easier compared to planning/executing a movie.
- No need to FOMO. If you are ready to invest money, there will be a lot of opportunities.
- You rarely realise the effort of so many people that goes into the making of a movie. True team work. Lot of coordination required.
- Better to create a distribution channel in advance. If possible try to sell as many things as possible as early as possible to reduce possible losses. Especially if you are a fresher.
- It's a positive black swan kind of scenario. Make sure you can keep producing movies without making losses. One hit is all it takes to give you huge ROI. But we need to make sure that we are in the game and not eliminated.
- There are too many rent seekers and custodians. They have a huge power over you as they can stall your next movie. When you tell them you don't give a fuck because you don't care about doing a next movie, they loose all power over you.
- Preselling of movie tickets before the shooting starts can be a game changer. Allowing partial rights to movie revenues can be huge. There is a lot tech can do. Atleast OTT platforms are solving some of these.
- Budgeting for marketing is very tricky. Very difficult to calculate the ROI. You don't spend enough there are chances that a good movie fails because of it. You spend a lot on marketing. But if your movie is bad, it will fail anyways. So you are burning extra.
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