Well, because they made an offer on our film that we interpreted as the most favorable offer, but I think in retrospect it was not. In other words, on the surface we thought it was, and we went with it, and now a few years later, now we didn’t look at it closely enough. We didn’t read the fine print. I did but was dissuaded by a couple folks in my team who were eager to get the deal done. Turns out I was right, unfortunately.

The person at Freestyle we were dealing with initially loved our film and was very eager to get us on board, he presented a solid distribution plan.

They’ve been good on the reporting. Some distributors you need to follow up with them every quarter. I’ll give them that.

They inserted a line item which was called “marketing fees and expense.” What that was, basically, was that they wanted a certain set of dollars set aside for their ability to spend money to market the film through various methods. But the issue I had was—there was very little transparency on how that money was spent, when it was spent, and why those choices were considered the most effective. As we get our quarterly reports, it’s just a line item. No real explanation to how they spend it, no report of it—the whole purpose of spending marketing funds is to generate interest in the film and sales but it’s a very obscure process. We have nothing to do with that process as filmmakers, we’re just agreeing to it when they license the film from us. If we agree, it’s totally up to them. It’s not just the decisions. We just have no accountability, and they can just throw a number down and say they spent it. That’s the number one reason why I was suspect of dealing with FDM. I have no idea even now on what they spent the money on. I think right after the deal was made, there were a few phone calls and attempts to do some marketing to get sales and direct it to the film, but I think that lasted for a very short period, never got any reports on how the marketing led to sales. My view—it was a lawyer’s trick to insulate them from giving the filmmaker any money. The film loses interest over time, so they deliberately put in a number [that absolves them from owing you money.] I learned my lesson from that deal, and like most people in business, you pay for your lessons.

Their ability to sell any kind of streaming or TV rights or ancillaries was not good. Their in-house lawyer is a little peculiar and has a way of slowing things down. He sends other lawyers PDFs instead of word docs that are redlined. Which drives everyone crazy. It slows anything down and makes it very difficult to get into the nitty gritty of any kind of negotiation where it turns people off. And that affected one of our deals. It wound up slowing down the signing process which affected our pre-release publicity. Part of their lack of sales is that their marketing material in the B2B was not good—I’ve seen errors in terms of listing wrong cast, using wrong laurels. Didn’t look professional. Part of it is their level of contacts - the person who does sales is not good at his job.

I would’ve cast Zendaya, added a magical armband that shoots lasers, and sold the distribution rights to Universal for an even $5M. What I wouldn’t have done is considered self-distribution… I didn’t have the knowledge or experience—or energy, frankly—to try and get the movie onto all of the many platforms Freestyle did. We’ve had to pick up all the slack we can when it comes to marketing, so, in hindsight, I would’ve studied the subject more and crafted a comprehensive plan for soliciting reviews, interviews, and other promotional opportunities ahead of time rather than learning on the fly.

I would definitely have tried to negotiate the marketing costs. I would have retained some of the rights—hotel rights, airlines, education. I think those things that I personally know that I have a little more chance of getting myself. Part of my uncertainty is that I did talk to other filmmakers who had middling responses, but they all concluded that their movie was out there. It has been available on a lot of platforms for a long time. Of the offers we had at the time, it was a tough time. I don’t think it was an unwise choice to go with them. I don’t really think self-distribution would have generated enough money—there wasn’t as clear of a path to self-distribution earlier. I might now.

Beware of the distributors who insert high dollar amounts for marketing expenses because that can eat up your profit if you don’t keep a close eye on it. They are taking that money back whether they spend it or not. A filmmaker needs to be aware of marketing fees inserted into the contract by the distributor because they’re creating that line item, it doesn’t really exist.