Thursday, June 4, 2009

What are the odds?

Last year 724 movies were released in the US. That's equivalent to almost 14 movies that open each weekend. According to all my pals in distribution, that's too many movies. Way too many movies. As a result, there's been a conscious effort to scale back among the major studios.

Of the 724 movies, almost one-quarter (171 movies) were released by the top 10 distributors in 2008 (Warner Bros., Paramount, Sony, Universal, Fox, Disney, Lionsgate, Fox Searchlight, Summit, and Focus).

Realistically your script is vying for a spot among the 724 or if you're targeting a larger budget movie, you're competing for one of the slots among the 171 movies that get made.

Countless more are in development. Countless more are spec scripts. I read somewhere hundreds of thousands of scripts are written by aspiring writers each year! That's a lot but it is also not terribly specific. So let's say for argument's sake 500,000 spec scripts are vying for 171 slots, the odds are 2,924 to 1 that your spec script will make it or 904 to 1 if you go the indie route. Sobering statistics, aren’t they?

Unique voice. Flawless script. Connections. Experience. Tenacity. Luck. All these factors need to come together in a perfect storm, it would seem, to get your script made. 

This is why my current project is a novel. I am vying for a spot among the 172,000 books that are published in the US, which is 230 times more than the number of movies that are released each year. 


Punchlines
How long would it take to...
...stop caring? Not long evidently.


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