Packaging and financing feature films is becoming increasingly challenging, a panel of experts told Winston Baker’s inaugural Film and TV Finance Forum in Venice on Friday afternoon. “Theatre has gone from difficult to very difficult,” Benjamin Kramer, co-head of media finance at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), said during a panel discussion titled “The State of the Industry: Financial Conditions.”
Still, “there are a lot of TV shows out there at all different budget levels…even $30 million movies,” Kramer noted. Star Immortalgram, nyadand The Revenant. He added that funding and funding levels will always “depend on the filmmaker, on the cast, on whether it’s based on a major event”.
Kramer’s comments came in response to a question from panelist and Italian producer Lorenzo Gangarossa (secret meeting).
“The feeling in Europe is that there are a lot of films in the theater field, say 10 to 20, that are no longer being made,” the producer shared. “There’s no financing in the U.S., or there seems to be less financing available, so I’m getting calls now from films that I never would have had access to because they were… just to see if there was a European model that could be built.”
Some of these projects could indeed tap into European funding if they qualified as European films. He explained that “most European films are funded by TV pre-sales” and that major broadcasters are required to spend 80% of their annual content budgets on local fare. “Now, if you qualify as a local film and you can co-produce it with three or four European locations, you qualify as a national film there.” Putting projects together in this way “isn’t going to be easy,” he said. thing,” but Gangarosa said it’s “a suitable business model” for films with the right cast and/or “European blockbusters.”
Cramer replied: “We do look for some drama on the other side of the Atlantic.”
The CAA expert then outlined the reasons for the challenges with theatrical films: “It’s all because of the impact of them not performing well in the one-time pay window,” he argued. “As a result, independent dealers who have no output are not going to buy as much product. They also find themselves facing greater challenges in terms of drama.
Fremantle global theater executive Christian Vesper agreed, sharing some insights from a conversation he had earlier in the day. “We just had a meeting this morning with a large global distributor who is interested in one of our films,” he said at the Winston Baker event. “The first scene takes place in China, [the distributor] It’s like, “Can you add some local language before this so people know they’re watching a movie on a service that’s in their language?” That’s not a note when you’re working with a filmmaker. This is a requirement.
CAA’s Cramer said his team has heard similar things, “initially driven by the platforms and then driven by theatrical distributors who are educated on those platforms” and even “like horror films, action films Or an unexpected movie like a comedy.” He continued: “The feedback we keep getting from these different touchpoints is: The audience has to have a clear idea within the first three minutes of what the movie is about. If it’s a horror movie, within the first three minutes there’s Something terrible – quite literally, because otherwise, on the platform, it would be easy to switch to something else, and if it’s a comedy, there’s your comedy scenes, there’s your jokes.
Kramer concludes: “Whatever it is, make it clear so you don’t have a slow building process. It’s hard to say to a filmmaker: ‘Your script is great, but just put the script on page 20 Just put the scene on the second page. “But we got feedback that it felt a little like you were just making widgets.
