Business Strategies For Creators And Filmmakers — Houston Howard [FULL INTERVIEW]
Film Courage: Can you explain why a movie does not make business sense?
Houston Howard, Transmedia Author/Speaker: It’s such an interesting question and an interesting model when you talk about the movie industry and the film industry and the reason. It’s interesting because Hollywood’s always existed in this bubble because it was always so difficult to be able to create entertainment and technology wasn’t democratized so not a lot of people could make entertainment. Whenever entertainment was made, whenever a film was made it was a very special rare thing and a lot of that defied the rules of economics in the rest of the world. Now it seems that in a commoditized market there’s so much content that when you look at just the business of filmmaking it doesn’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people. If you go out and talk to a lot of investors they’ll tell you that the economics of the industry just doesn’t make sense for them where you put up a lot of money in especially say like a independent film venture you put a lot of money in up front you don’t see any return for a long time. There’s no incubation model that you see out of Silicon Valley or even just a startup business. It’s a big crazy roll of the dice you put a lot of money in and just hope and pray that a bunch of people show up on the same weekend…
