Tint

It made some money and got high critical acclaim. Currently online for free. Check it out: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/

there’s an interview on her site somewhere, the gist of it is while Sita was available for free, the DVD still sold very well. She had to take the free movie down for a month or so leading up to its showing at a film fest (part of their requirements for showing it). While it was unavailable for free the DVD sales dropped to zero. Once it was back online the sales picked up again. interesting, eh?

Joe

In the UK, under the old model, your distributor would manage to book your film into a few London independent screens as a way of buying reviews. This exercise would lose you a lot of money.
We did an internet premiere of “Diary of a Bad Lad” as a one week event on dailymotion.com. The film had over 185,000 views – which was about 4 times their average – cost us nothing and generated some advertising revenue, web traffic, vastly increased awareness and so on. We did not leave the film lying around, but the trailer is viewable on Daily Motion, where it ranks very high in their various charts.
On top of that the week long give-away was a factor in our securing a ‘hybrid-model’ UK & Ireland DVD High St retail DVD contract + limited UK theatrical + a ‘breakthrough’ jointly run web-initiative through which the distributor operates the ‘nuts and bolts’ and we supply the creative content. We retain all other rights.

We even have examples of movies funded by studios doing it (ANGEL OF DEATH). The free model is here to stay.

The fact is – as contrary to common wisdom as it may be – the more a film or tv show or product is out in the public consciousness the more opportunity for sales. How better to get it out there than through the value of “free”?

I think the trick will be for people to slice out a bit of theatrical with this. That will be the last window of release. That is, your die hard, core fans will demand a theatrical screening (using something like withoutabox.com or demandit) and they’ll get them, creating a ROCKY HORROR like experience out of it after all of the other windows have been exploited.

@Jonathan – the “value” is that fans of movies will find themselves socializing more – whether on the web or live, and they’ll discuss these movies. They will embrace and fund the good and teach the bad that this isn’t the type of film they want. There are currently fans out there waiting to embrace a new property and give it “fan value” – meaning, their devotion.

@Dan – they had a pretty good inkling that they had a fan base to work with as well as a legal leg to stand on – it IS a parody after all. You don’t have to make a fan film about Buffy or Star Trek / Wars or whatever. You can make a movie that incites that same feeling within the audience and generates the entertainment value they see.

We want things to change. For too long the distributors have been carving an unhealthy inequitable share of monies from filmmakers efforts. Do I want to tear Hollywood down? No – but clearly showing the studios and other financing entities that there is a dollar or two to be made in a new way, with new financing is not a bad thing. The more people making good films the better the audience for all film will be.

Is free going to be the sum total of that change? No, but it certainly a start toward a healthier,diverse film industry that currently has a deep chasm running through it between huge blockbusters and no-budget productions. With no middle ground, it seems the business may collapse on itself.

So I can see FREE as a way of lowering resistance to getting an audience to see it. But my fear would be killing revenue streams like iTunes, Netflix and VOD in the process. Perhaps FREE and ad-supported (like Hulu) should be saved for the last release window?

To continue on your metaphor, the monster is already out and swatting planes on top of the Empire State Building. Only way to stop it now is to nuke it and the whole city with it.

The only world where “intellectual property” can exist in the way that physical property exists (ie. as a scarcity that can be owned and sold) is a world where there is no freedom. Humans, maybe even all living things, by nature copy everything that can be copied. It has been the reality that artists have had to live with until the first decades of the previous century.

Yet, there is no denying these coming years will be difficult ones for film. And it could be that movies as we know them will not survive. Just like the monks lost their livelihood when the printing press made copying books by hand obsolete. Film is especially endangered because of the cost and complexity of creating the final piece of work. While bands can go on tours you can’t really take a 200 person film crew on a tour of Europe and have people pay to see them.

But people want to watch movies, so the form will survive somehow. Maybe the business won’t really end up changing that much. Or maybe everything changes.