In order to better understand financing of our film, I’m going to be looking into a similar type of film to the one we are making called The Lighthouse. The Lighthouse is a horror movie made in 2019, however it is A) set in the 1890’s, so it is close to when our movie is set, and B) was made to look old, using film cameras to give it an older grainy aesthetic, and C) was a relatively low budget movie like ours is. The Lighthouse was, as previously stated, released in 2019. This means it had all the modern cinema tricks available to it, so we don’t have to worry about using outdated tactics studying this film. Overall The Lighthouse was a low budget film, costing around 4 million dollars to make. I know you may think “4 million dollars!?!?!? That’s more than I make in 10 years! How could that be low budget?” To that I say 4 million is NOTHING compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars spend on massive block buster movies like the avengers. This film was produced and distributed by A24 Regency Enterprises RT Features. Marketing from this movie was relatively small, but still did quite a bit. In order to make people aware of The Lighthouse, a trailer was released along with an emoji pack, 2 separate poster designs were sold, and the star actors did press talks about the film. I think a similar marketing strategy would benefit our film, given the success of this one. And when I say a success, I mean a success. Even though it was a small indie production, The Lighthouse made 13.5 million dollars, over 3X the cost of making it. That’s why I think emulating its marketing tactics is a good idea, because clearly they work. I would also like to follow their exhibition strategy, because that is also what made them that 13.5 million. The Lighthouse was showed at film festival, then had a theatrical release. Now it is sold as a DvD, and can be bought on amazon, target, redbox, etc. If we show our film at a film festival, hopefully we can secure a distributor (who I will talk about at a later date). Now that I’ve studied this case of a successful film similar to our own, I have a general idea of the cost of our movie and what to do with it. I will go into detail about this things using research on our film, but for now at least we have a ballpark cost of our film.
Sources:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7984734/fullcre (Links to an external site.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighthouse_(2019_film) (Links to an external site.)
https://cinematicslant.com/2019/10/18/the-lighthouse-marketing-recap/ (Links to an external site.)
Film Project 