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Launching a Theatrical on Demand Campaign: An Unvarnished Look at the Promise and Reality (Hint: Read to the end)

Dan Habib, director/producer of INTELLIGENT LIVES, is the creator of the nationally broadcast documentaries Including Samuel, Who Cares About Kelsey?, Mr. Connolly Has ALS, and many other films. His films have been broadcast internationally, nominated for Emmy awards, and translated into 17 languages. Habib was appointed by President Obama to serve on the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities from 2014-2017.

Let’s be honest.  Most documentary filmmakers dream of having our films projected on big, beautiful theatrical screens across the country, with gorgeous 5:1 audio and packed houses, sharing the experience as one.  

But only a very small fraction of the thousands (tens of thousands?) of documentaries produced each year receive a national theatrical run. As I wrote in a blog last year, my last two feature-length documentaries were self-distributed and had solid film festival runs, extensive college/conference tours, financially successful educational and individual sales, and were broadcast on public television and internationally.  

I never seriously pursued a theatrical run for those films because a) traditional theatrical distribution seemed highly unlikely, b) getting the film into theaters without a distributor seemed daunting and expensive, and c) there were several alternative distribution options to achieve our goals for positive social change.

For my new documentary INTELLIGENT LIVES, we took the plunge: we added a limited theatrical distribution plan onto our established hybrid release strategy as a way to:

• Dip our toes into theatrical release
• Reach new audiences and expand our “Opening Doors” social impact campaign
• Expand the national buzz for the film
• Make the film more attractive to distributors and broadcasters
• Give people around the country a fairly simple mechanism for hosting screenings and discussions of the film, and;
• Maybe even bring in some revenue (more on that later). 

We decided to simultaneously release and self-distribute (for now) a robust INTELLIGENT LIVES Education Kit (containing the film, five short companion films, and extensive educational materials) concurrent with the event theatrical campaign—a decision that has paid off, as you’ll see below. 

Building an outreach and distribution team.

I worked with a wonderful national outreach strategist, Lisa Smithline of Cultural Front Productions, who had worked successfully with Tugg and Gathr, two of the major “Event Theatrical” (Tugg’s language) or “Theatrical on Demand®” (or TOD, Gathr’s language) companies on other projects.  Lisa and I also worked with consultant Jon Reiss of Hybrid Cinema, who has extensive experience in event theatrical.  Jon helped us make many crucial early decisions about our overall distribution strategy. We also received key early input from Jeffrey Winter and Orly Ravid at TFC when we came on board as a TFC “Conspirator.”

We spent months researching our options and went with Gathr largely because of their filmmaker focus and support. The model for TOD is similar to other event theatrical platforms: a person or group of people need to step up and host a screening in their community (Gathr calls them “Captains”) and then they need to do the grassroots work to make sure enough people reserve tickets in advance in order to ‘tip’ or ‘greenlight’ the screening. That ticket number can range from a few dozen to close to a hundred, depending on the minimum cost charged by each theater. There are other costs that are factored in before a screening tips, including the DCP rental and delivery cost, and virtual print fee (VPF).

We are now three months into our Gathr TOD campaign, and the film has screened in 60 theatres across the country to date (which includes 16 theatrical screenings as part of a  traditional run in a Pacific NW chain), with dozens of other communities holding screenings using our Education Kit.  Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

For successful TOD, as for any hybrid distribution strategy, you have to create buzz, credibility, and take financial risks.

Like nearly every other filmmaker, we spent lots of time and money pursuing film festival acceptances, with mixed results.  Although we weren’t accepted by the “game-changing” festivals like Sundance or Tribeca, we were given primo slots in 20+ fantastic festivals including Ashland IFF, IFF Boston, Bentonville, & Cleveland IFF.  Our film stars and our Executive Producers (Chris Cooper, Marianne Leone Cooper, and Amy Brenneman) traveled to many festivals and special events with us. These fests helped us create strong social media buzz, generated news stories and local reviews, and gave us a credible collection of laurels for our website, poster, etc.

Our publicist, Emma Griffiths, counseled us to take a financial risk and 4-wall a NYC theatrical week, assuring us it was the only way to get national reviews. It’s not cheap (10K and up) and we never expected to recoup our costs.  But we were able to line up two underwriters who cut our costs in half.  We’ve heard that the NY Times declines to review about half the films that open theatrically in NYC, and we fell into that shunned half. But we received a wonderful review in Hollywood Reporter, and more reviews and articles in Salon and a dozen or so other trade publications.  Our Rotten Tomatoes score holds steady at 88% Fresh from critics and 100% Fresh from the audience.

Just before our NYC run, we released our trailer on Facebook and it went viral (at least by our measures), with 300K+ views and 5,700+ shares to date.  We brought on social media consultant Sheri Candler who helped us create and execute a serious but affordable strategy for paid and organic social media.

You need to reach A LOT of people for a successful TOD campaign: Develop a network of outreach partner organizations. 

All of my film work touches on disability rights and inclusion, and over the past 10 years we’ve been building alliances with national partner organizations that have overlapping interests.  We strengthen and refine that network with each film, and we are partnering with more than 30 Outreach Partners for INTELLIGENT LIVES. More than a year before our launch, we held a daylong national strategy summit in Washington, DC with the leaders of these organizations, and during part of the summit we briefed them on the concept of a TOD campaign.  Discussions at the Summit led to the name and content of our “Opening Doors” impact campaign.  We had commitments from these organizations to regularly share updates about our project with their network – expanding our reach to millions of people, without paid advertising.  Many of our TOD “Captains” found out about the film through these networks.

Make it easy and fun to host a screening.

If you assume that people will start hosting screenings just because your film is listed on the Gathr/Tugg website, THINK AGAIN! You need to recruit, support, and nurture screening Captains each step of the way.

As a team, we spent about 80 hours writing and designing our Host a Screening PDF Toolkit and a wide array of related images and resources.  Lisa Smithline, Sheri Candler, and Gathr staff helped us determine what assets needed to be created, and shared examples from other films with us. Probably the most important team members on this front are our freelance designers, who created the PDFs and images we share with all TOD hosts through this Dropbox folder.  

We created a 2-minute host-a-screening video that emphasizes the impact of live screening events, and briefly walks them through the hosting process.

Gathr also launches a Screening Captains Facebook Group for each film.  Lisa has been actively engaging the Screening Captains every step of the way.  She is continually answering questions, pointing people to resources, and having one-on-one conversations with Captains by email, messaging, and phone.  Lisa spends an average of 20 hours a week on communication with Captains, which often includes moral support and cheerleading. The Gathr team also monitors the FB group and weighs in as needed.  Don’t underestimate how much guidance your Captains will need to successfully host a screening, as this process is likely to be new to all of them, and it can at times be confusing.

Find theme months or other organizing strategies to build enthusiasm.

We set up our campaign so Captains could start hosting TOD screenings on October 1, 2018 – the start of Disability Employment Awareness Month.  Our Outreach Partners heavily promoted the film beginning in mid-August (it’s best if Captains have a minimum of 3-4 weeks to tip a screening), and we also created a Facebook ad campaign, targeting people that have either visited our website and/or expressed an interest in disability rights and special education.  These efforts seem to have worked – dozens of theatrical screenings occurred in October. Some other distributors, like Richard Abromowitz, have opted for a much more narrow time frame, engineering  successful one-day screenings of films.

Make in-person pitches at every event and festival.

My fulltime job at the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire (a 501c3 non-profit) is to make documentary films, as well as travel and show/discuss the films at national and regional conferences, universities, and school districts. The screening/speaking fees we charge make up a significant portion of my project’s annual budget. During the Q&A after these screening events and festivals, I always try to tell – and if possible, show – the audience how to host a screening of the film, pointing them to the Host a Screening page on our website. I explain how easy it is to host a TOD screening in just a few clicks – and emphasize that there is NO financial risk for them, but they do need to rally their community to reserve tickets.  I also tell them how to host a non-theatrical screening using our Education Kit.

“Tipping” will make the screening happen, but selling out will make you money.

One of the misconceptions we had for our TOD campaign was that if a screening ‘tipped’ (i.e. enough tickets were reserved to greenlight the screening), we would make money.  Not so fast…tipping just means that enough tickets were reserved to cover expenses.  

As of this writing, we’ve had 46 TOD screenings around the U.S., with an average audience of 82 people per screening. Not bad turnout numbers, right? But most of those ticket sales went to cover the base expenses, so our average net income is $150 per screening. When screenings barely tip, our net profit may be $20-30, or in some cases even result in a small loss (after Gathr takes their cut of every screening that ‘tips’).  Gathr will tell you that selling out screenings is how you can make real money through TOD.  That’s true! One sold out screening netted us about $1,000.  But from my point of view, it’s just not very easy for Captains to sell out their screening, and many take an understandable breather once they’ve ‘tipped.’ We are working on more incentives (beyond cheerleading and peer pressure) to get them to keep pushing until they sell out.

So overall, we are not making a ton of money through TOD, but we are not losing money either.   And most importantly, we are getting the film seen by more people, while also collecting names and email addresses through the Gathr platform and expanding our film’s reach into new communities all over the country. And film Captains are usually flying high after their screening, excited to share photos and anecdotes from the discussion. Many expressed interest in purchasing our Education Kit and continuing to promote the film in their communities.

The numbers.

So, what’s the upshot? I’ll give you some real numbers and you can be the judge.

$6,900:Net income from Gathr screenings from October 1, 2018-December 31, 2018. The estimated box office gross for that time frame was $44,000, and the major expense by far is the costs charged by the theatres. Note that this does not take into account the up-front costs like the master DCP creation, the cost associated with the design of our Host a Screening materials (about $1,000), or the cost of our outreach consultants.  Keep in mind that many of these expenses will be incurred in any sort of hybrid release strategy.

$36,800: Net income from Education Kit sales from September 1, 2018-November 30, 2018 (which represents an average of $16,000/month in gross sales through our Institute on Disability Bookstore). These kits are being used to host dozens of screenings in non-theatrical settings like schools, universities, community centers, places of worship, etc. Education Kits from my previous films have been used for thousands of screenings across the U.S. and internationally.

$160,000: Our project’s income for my speaking/screening events around the country tied to INTELLIGENT LIVES during our current fiscal year (July 1, 2018-June 30, 2019). At almost all of these events, I also sell the film’s Education Kit, as well as related products, and in many cases, I also can reach attendees with follow-up communications. 

1,514: The number of names and emails we’ve accumulated to date (via the Gathr ticket sales platform) from the people who have attended TOD screenings, bringing our e-blast list to more than 22,000 people.

So, you might be thinking, would I do this again? The answer is…probably. Our TOD run has strengthened our position for expanded distribution. Our plans include:

• Transactional VOD and an individual DVD
• National broadcast (we are close to firming up a deal) with limited streaming rights
• Partnering with an educational distributor to reach additional markets, like public and university libraries
• Language translations and international distribution and sales.

But next time, I’d do some things differently:

• Produce a promotional ‘Host a Screening’ video before we go live with TOD (see this strong example from filmmaker Laurel Chiten of JUST ONE DROP).
• Make it clearer to prospective Captains that there is a mechanism for Gathr screenings to also serve as fundraisers for a local organization.
• Create strong incentives to sell out the house as soon as a Captain initiates a screening.
• Explore corporate sponsorship to subsidize some of the tickets for each show to lower the tipping point and enable more low-income people to attend. 

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have follow-up questions!

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admin January 14th, 2019

Posted In: case studies, Distribution, DIY, Marketing, Theatrical

Tags: DIY, Gathr, independent film, social media, The Film Collaborative, Theatrical, Tugg