Sales Figures for Indie Films?

shutterspeedfilms

shutterspeedfilms

Well-known member
What are the best information sources on the web to find sales data for micro-budget indie films? DVD sales, streaming sales and rentals, etc.?

I've looked at Opus, but they don't seem to really deal with these kinds of low-budget films.

TIA
 
Are you looking for figures on what certain individual films have sold for? If so, it's almost impossible to find such information, since naturally that is strictly between a seller and a buyer.

There are some rough sales projections available for different budget levels on filmspecific.com for all rights sales for different territories, but the numbers are very rough estimates.

Each movie will have different sales projections based on things like name actors, genre, script, director, production value, possible festival wins, buzz, marketing, state of the economy, it varies all the time.

When you say micro budget, what budget level exactly are you talking about? Under $200k? $100k? $50k?

In a nutshell I would say if you want to make a highly sellable film ,you need to have three things in order, cast, genre and budget.
It needs to be a marketable genre, action, thriller, horror etc.
It needs to have names that sell. Not just known faces or semi-celebrities, but actual names that can sell a movie.
And finally the budget needs to be high enough where you can accomodate the stars' salaries, but also low enough where you can either finance it by pre-sales or if pre-sales are out of the question, make it for cheap enough where you will make a profit on it once you sell the finished film.

The last part is by far the hardest to manage.
 
Personally, I think the deal is just to make a great film and see where it goes. Half the indie films out there that have had extreme success (Blair Witch, Tiny Furniture, Paranormal Activity, ect ect I could go on forever) had absolutely no known names (and even had many first-time actors), had micro-budgets ($50 to $10,000), and well, contained no expensive special effects, location permits, or camerawork. In my research, a very good film seems to always at least make back double what was spent, and the real gems make tremendously more. I think many distributing companies out there are very much "over" the whole big-star, big-budget scenario, with companies like Lionsgate, Magnet, Magnolia, and even The Criterion Collection ect ect picking up a bus load of films that otherwise have absolutely no "big" factor. You just, again, have to make a film that obviously will sell to a certain audience; none of that "making the next Kung Fu Hustle in my backyard".

But for general research, IMDB and Wikipedia really seem to be about the best we get to.
 
And then there is dvxuser's own Faith Granger and her "Deuce of Spades" feature. Nobody around here can hold a candle to her. Made for around $40k, it took in close to $200k in just its first three months. Since she also cut traditional distributors out of the loop she was able to quickly start pocketing the cash and quit her job. She never looked back. Its all there buried in the User Film section.
 
BBFilm said:
Personally, I think the deal is just to make a great film and see where it goes. Half the indie films out there that have had extreme success (Blair Witch, Tiny Furniture, Paranormal Activity, ect ect I could go on forever) had absolutely no known names (and even had many first-time actors), had micro-budgets ($50 to $10,000), and well, contained no expensive special effects, location permits, or camerawork. In my research, a very good film seems to always at least make back double what was spent, and the real gems make tremendously more. I think many distributing companies out there are very much "over" the whole big-star, big-budget scenario, with companies like Lionsgate, Magnet, Magnolia, and even The Criterion Collection ect ect picking up a bus load of films that otherwise have absolutely no "big" factor. You just, again, have to make a film that obviously will sell to a certain audience; none of that "making the next Kung Fu Hustle in my backyard".

But for general research, IMDB and Wikipedia really seem to be about the best we get to.
Click to expand...

This post should be titled "What I believed before I actually made a feature film." xD

I'm joking, but then I'm actually being dead serious. o_o
 
BBFilm said:
Personally, I think the deal is just to make a great film and see where it goes. Half the indie films out there that have had extreme success (Blair Witch, Tiny Furniture, Paranormal Activity, ect ect I could go on forever) had absolutely no known names (and even had many first-time actors), had micro-budgets ($50 to $10,000), and well, contained no expensive special effects, location permits, or camerawork. In my research, a very good film seems to always at least make back double what was spent, and the real gems make tremendously more. I think many distributing companies out there are very much "over" the whole big-star, big-budget scenario, with companies like Lionsgate, Magnet, Magnolia, and even The Criterion Collection ect ect picking up a bus load of films that otherwise have absolutely no "big" factor. You just, again, have to make a film that obviously will sell to a certain audience; none of that "making the next Kung Fu Hustle in my backyard".

But for general research, IMDB and Wikipedia really seem to be about the best we get to.
Click to expand...

Of course the goal should always be to make a great film, no matter if you have any names or not. But looking at success stories such as The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity can be deceiving.
For every Paranormal Activity or Blair Witch there are probably a thousand no name no budget indie movies out there, that are probably just as good if not better, but have failed to find any meaningful distribution.

It's true, a great movie with no names can get distribution, but a great movie with great names has a much bigger chance at finding distribution, hell, an awful movie with names has a higher chance of getting distribution than a great one with no names. That's just the way it is.

Big distributors pick up movies with no big names all the time, but often these movies have something other than big name actors, such as big name directors or producers, often they have some major film festival wins behind them. And movies don't win big festivals just because they're good.
Every "indie" that wins Sundance for example probably has at least several hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing and promotion behind them.

Yes, you have to make a film that will sell to a certain audience, hence genre movies are the way to go, but again, if a distributor has to pick between two action movies, one of them has no names, the other one has names, naturally he is going to pick the one with names in it.
 
Are we talking big movies here or just smaller indie movies? There's no resource for this. Numbers are kept close to the chest for a reason. What is it you're looking for answer wise? I have a successful indie film that's been out on DVD for a while, hit Redbox, iTunes, Netflix, etc.

What's the source of the question? What's the reason to ask it? Are you trying to gauge what sort of budget you can handle in the market you're going for?
 
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