Getting your indie film onto iTunes

Plenty of distributors talk about putting your independent film onto iTunes.  They wax lyrical about how good they are at it, give estimated timelines .. talk about what deliverables you need .... but if you ask for a single example where they've successfully done it before then you just hear silence.

The reason why is fairly simple - Apple simply doesn't want to work with small distributors .. they want to work with large aggregators who provide a known quality of product.  To be blunt - they can't be bothered working with independent films.     But there are solutions.

Case Study: Estimating Film ROI - Crash (2004)

We often use box office receipts as a metric when we consider how much ROI investors in a film can expect.  Clearly the entire box office receipts don't magically appear in the production company's bank account - but how much does?

There are some lousy distribution deals ... but imagine that you have a non-studio film that distributors really want.  Let's even imagine that the film is successful - it covers the distributor's P&A spend and returns money. What could you reasonably expect your income from the film to be?

There are a few estimates out there - I've always used the 'one third of box office' guideline - so if a film makes $30 million in box office we can expect about $10 million to eventually filter back to the production company.  Clearly this guess has limitations - it won't work for a film that was a hit on DVD but a flop in the theatres.  But it is a start to estimating how much money will be coming in to pay back the production budget - hopefully leaving something over for the investors

But how accurate is this estimate?

The Catwoman/Clerks Paradox

Catwoman is famous as a financial disaster.  It was a film with a reported budget of $100 million(*) - but only generated $82 million in theatrical ticket sales.

Clerks is famous as a huge financial success.  Shot on a budget of only $27k(*), it still managed to bring in about $3.9 million in ticket sales.

Which would you rather have invested in?  There's an obvious answer.
Here's the real paradox - if you were a distributor (or an exhibitor) ... which film would you prefer to be showing?