New Money: Celebrating FilmHedge’s 4th Year!
Four years ago, in early February 2020, I was frustrated with the state of film finance and wondering what to do about it.
I had spent the previous three years (2017–2020) trying to get familiar with the space by investing in, or otherwise working with, various film projects and studios. Being a financier on several deals taught me several lessons about the Film/TV industry:
- Everyone in Film/TV loves ‘new money’. Especially when its someone who is putting hundreds of thousands or millions. This, for me, highlighted the fact that there was a real need for new finance players in the Film/TV space — still is.
- Institutional investors need to rebuild their trust with Film/TV as an asset class. Many large private equity firms and investment banks stay away from Film and TV because they don’t understand how it works. By that, I mean the money behind the industry. It’s opaque and there isn’t a lot of data, which is why FilmHedge has collected one of the largest data sets on pre-release Film/TV productions in the world. We’ve been successful in this space because data = trust and trust = more deals.
- That lack of trust is, unfortunately, justified. The Film/TV space is rife with projects that turn out to be elaborate frauds, vehicles for money laundering, the productions are mismanaged, or are vehicles for uncontrollable creatives who sometimes over-spend. For whatever the reason, institutional investors have backed away from the asset class because of negative experiences in the past. But it’s not for lack of interest, they know this can be a lucrative space and many of them want to be involved, they just need partners who can bridge that trust gap. Just recently Netflix itself was allegedly scammed out of $50 million. So, when creatives complain about why investors don’t trust them, unfortunately it’s because there is a spotty history of bad actors (no pun intended) who have come before and soured the field.
Along the way I met my co-founder Mickey Vetter and we decided that we could offer scalable solutions to address these problems and FilmHedge was formed. Our mission remains to improve the way money flows in the industry which will ultimately empower more producers and protect more investors.
By mitigating many of the risks related to the financing of Film and TV productions for investment banks, family offices, hedge funds, foundations, and the like, our company (and those like ours) bring ‘new money’ into this space.
Our thesis remains that this will continue to unlock more capital by making more and more investors comfortable, which will then lead to more deals, and, thus, more opportunity for Film/TV producers.
As we start 2024 we’re excited for where the future is headed for this company. We’ve got new staff, new partners, and new products that we’ll be unveiling very soon.
Thanks for following us on our journey thus far!
Disclaimer: FilmHedge sometimes uses fair-use editorial images in its blog posts to help educate and inform its readers. Unless otherwise stated, FilmHedge does not have any affiliation with the film or television productions referenced in blog posts and does not profit from the use of these images.
