How Movie NFTs will change the Film Industry
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have already begun taking over multiple of the most important industries such as the art industry, the music industry, the crowdfunding industry, even the fashion industry but now, the NFT-mania has officially seized in entertainment threatening and disrupting the Film Industry.
And this hasn’t started yesterday as much as the people think, way back in 2018, 20th Century Fox released limited-edition Deadpool 2 digital posters to promote the Ryan Reynolds superhero spoof. When a movie-goer purchased a ticket, he or she received a code to redeem one of four original pieces of art created for the campaign.
As the NFT hype of early 2021 seems to be endless, many sectors are examining opportunities to capture some of the value that has been dumped into digital art and collectibles NFTs.
Fans were willing to pay for a limited-edition DVD that came with exclusive extras such as cover art, cast interviews, director’s cuts, blooper scenes, and merchandise. NFTs can now help to bring back many dynamics that once worked, but the weaknesses of centralization forced them to be forgotten.
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Movie NFT Marketing
NFTs offer a Strong Value Proposition
The creative sector has big difficulties regardless of music, photography or film, creators take so little that success seems impossible. They take a small portion of the big cake that corporations seem to enjoy.
Some people think that this is VERY unfair, so people are looking for alternatives to the big recording studios. NFTs bring a strong value proposition to the table as an alternative source of revenue and digital-native audience engagement – Hollywood is under threat.
NFTs are a great way to finance the project and build a fan base that will watch the film once it’s released. Just one example is the animated series “Stoner Cats” which raised $8.4 million at the end of July in a sale of NFTs (which grant holders the exclusive right to watch episodes), selling out in just 35 minutes.
“All these actions have a domino effect: they influence other major players in the industry to give NFTs a go, while budding artists and creators get even more inspired to explore this new exciting medium,” said Alex Salnikov
What I’m actually buying? What about the rights?
If you’ve been on NFTs for a few months now, you may remember the collection with unreleased “secrets” from Quentin Tarantino’s iconic 1994 film Pulp Fiction that went up for auction: each NFT was linked to these pages from Tarantino’s original handwritten script of the film that reveal new information about the story’s development process.
Well, this doesn’t end very well…
Although NFTs are based on the blockchain and we can move with certain anonymity, neglecting the legal aspects can lead you to the ruin.
Production company Miramax has sued director Quentin Tarantino over his non-fungible token or NFT collection based on Pulp Fiction. The lawsuit, filed yesterday in California court and noted online by attorney Mark Jaffe, says NFTs don’t fall under Tarantino’s reserved rights for the film. Miramax accuses him of violating the company’s copyright and trademark, and it’s demanding a halt to the upcoming sale.
Tarantino’s NFT collection is supposed to include blockchain tokens associated with high-resolution scans from his original handwritten screenplay of Pulp Fiction, plus a drawing inspired by some element of the scene. But Miramax alleges that Tarantino’s limited contractual rights for Pulp Fiction — including interactive games, live performances, and other ancillary media — don’t cover NFTs linked with the film’s screenplay.
Each NFT transaction is registered on the blockchain, so each token contains its own record of who first minted it, each sale, each price and each owner. In most cases, purchasing the NFT confers no real-world ownership, in terms of media or copyright. If the seller wishes to throw these in as a bonus, they can, but they can’t be guaranteed in secondary sales.
That’s why people say: “You only have bragging rights”. But this is not a problem, let’s think why most people would like to buy the Monalisa? You think that it’s because they really like the piece or because they want to say that they are the owners? …
Movie NFT Marketing
Want to be successful? Learn from the other’s success
“Every major production company is looking into using NFTs to drive fan engagement and find new revenue lines. The licensing arrangements for films are complex so it’s taken some time to work through the proper ways to implement, but we expect once that’s resolved NFTs will become a big part of the fan experience for movies,” said Wes Levitt.
These type of quotes try to remember us how early we are, we are here before the masses and each day is more exciting than the other. The experts are saying that we still have a long way to go before we see a massive adoption but in the meantime we already have successful projects, and not one we have multiple.
In my head it’s hard to understand what is coming and that’s why I am more bullish than ever!
Let’s review the successes of this industry together:
Indie industry first-mover Kevin Smith took the plunge in April, announcing he would auction off his upcoming horror feature anthology “Killroy Was Here” as an NFT.
“Whoever buys it could choose to monetize it traditionally, or simply own a film that nobody ever sees but them” Smith noted, saying that the NFT auction for Killroy was essentially a high-tech version of what he did in 1994 when he took his debut film Clerks to Sundance and sold it to Miramax.
Additionally today, Smith is expanding his cinematic View Askewniverse into the Cryptoverse with Jay and Silent Bob’s Crypto Studio Crypto.JayAndSilentBob.com – an NFT gallery showcasing and selling art featuring the cult movie stoner duo.
Regular Drops will be built around the Smokin’ Tokens, featuring 3D art that will commemorate a different Jay and Silent Bob movie every month. Audio from Crypto Studio co-owner Jason Mewes calls you a “non-fungible f***” while also identifying the color of your Smokin’ Token: green, orange, yellow, or purple. The three Platinum Token packs come with all four colors of the Smokin’ Tokens, along with an exclusive Platinum Token that grants the bearer a Crypto Cameo in Smith’s next film, Clerks III. Also in the first drop: a Killroy teaser NFT, which showcases 3D comic book and actual footage for the first movie ever sold as an NFT (which will happen in Drop 2).
Smith is teaming with Semkhor, a media and technology company focused on digital content production and distribution. Over the next several months, Semkhor will be releasing NFTS in conjunction with Heavy Metal, Dylan McDermott, Marc Antony, Robert Whitman, and Gerardo. Phantasma, which Smith is also working with, is a blockchain for content distribution of NFTs, Gaming and dApps that is fast, secure and decentralized.
Jennifer Esposito’s plan is more ambitious. The Summer of Sam and The Boys actor is planning to make her directorial debut with the indie feature Fresh Kills, financing the movie through a combination of NFTs and a first-of-its-kind public offering to sell shares in the film. Investors who want to back the project, described as a mob story set in Staten Island seen from a female perspective, can buy securities in Fresh Kills, Inc. which will be floated on digital stock exchange Upstream.
The IPO target is $3.5 million, which will go towards funding the $3.9 million Fresh Kills budget. Additional financing will come through the sales of NFTs linked to the project, including unique digital work created by award-winning artist Gala Marissa, executive producer credits or walk-on cameos for fans.
The Fresh Kills offering is structured so that Upstream investors will be at the front of the line should the movie make money and receive a 110 percent payout on their investment before other shareholders in the film receive any dividends or returns. After the payout, the investors’ preferred shares will convert to common shares representing 25 percent of the copyright in the company/film. The remaining 75 percent will be owned by the Fresh Kills production company (including the writer/director and producers) and Horizon, with the proceeds being distributed in a typical indie film backend structure allowing talent participation derived from the producing company’s shareholder interest in the film.
The service premiered with Zero Contact, a low-budget thriller starring Anthony Hopkins and Aleks Paunovic shot largely over Zoom in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Vuele auctioned off various NFTs connected to the film, including ones that allowed fans to be digitally edited into the film alongside Hopkins, though only in the NFT version of the movie, not the one planned for wide release.
VUELE was created through discussions with Rick Dugdale, President and CEO of Enderby Entertainment. He and Cameron Chell have been talking about the impact of blockchain on the film industry for years. The more they looked at the distribution of digital content and the use of blockchain in doing it, they came to the conclusion that films in Hollywood had all the characteristic traits of great potential digital collectibles.
Diehard fans have consistently proven that they will go to great lengths to acquire exclusive memorabilia connected to their favorite actor, film or franchise. That is why they implemented a direct-to-consumer model. VUELE allows filmmakers to forge deeper and more personal connections with fans.
Stoner Cats is what Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher call a new model for watching a cartoon TV show about a group of weed smoking felines.
“At Stoner Cats, we believe that storytellers deserve an outlet where they can be valued and supported without having to bow to the machine of big media,” they write on their website as part of their manifesto.
Stars on the show who voice the cat characters include Kutcher, Chris Rock and Jane Fonda. The Ethereum cryptocurrency co-founder Vitalik Buterin also voices a character in the show, as well (recently, he has played a sort of Crypto for Dummies type teacher on Kutcher’s Twitter account).
Movie NFT Marketing
Decentralized Video Platforms
VideoCoin and Theta share some common goals. The streaming markets are extremely centralized in a small handful of large companies, including the cloud storage firms that host the videos. Decentralization offers the opportunity to redistribute some of the control, which would be to the benefit of smaller filmmakers and studios. Furthermore, the use cases for these platforms isn’t limited to movies and TV and can be extended to other genres such as sports, concerts, and event-driven broadcasts.
“What’s happened is the industry has stumbled into the most important enterprise use case, the one IBM has been describing in millions of dollars of advertising. Crypto has seized upon that same technology and now it’s turned into a new kind of gold rush. It’s interesting that companies like IBM couldn’t understand what they had.”
Of course, all of this assumes that there’s a market of eager fans willing to buy NFTs for the opportunity of owning their favorite media title and new swag. When considering the market for movies and TV shows, there was an established market of DVD collectors that existed before streaming came along, so it seems plausible that fans with a propensity to collect would wish to re-engage.
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Establish stronger connections with your audience
The film business has been hidden behind the cloak of distributors and has never been able to establish a one to one relationship with movie goers. Early day theatrical and exhibitor releases, to movie rental and Big Box chains, to today’s streaming services are built on the backs of Hollywood’s intellectual property owners who “own” the fan relationships.
Mitch Chait, co-founder of GFT says, “The big blockchain opportunity for all IP owners is the ability to engage and exchange value directly with customers.”
“This is just the beginning or the courting stage of these newfound relationships,” says Chait, “IP owners can now target and engage their customers directly, through a fully disintermediated value chain, driving efficiencies on their end, which enables their ability to give more value with greater frequency and delight to customers.”
With this model, studios can redirect promotional and marketing spend directly into the pockets of fans. The emergence of super-fans can be attributed to value driven promotions that include NFT’s born from rare snippets from a popular film, to premiere tickets and soon to be released films. Legendary filmmaker Joe Dante (Gremlins, The Howling, Trailers From Hell), has created a series of NFTs to influence fans to connect and engage with new productions.
“The future for IP owners is bright, as more money, data, transparency and connectivity to fans occurs, today’s friction from middleman will become a thing of the past,” adds Hudson, a GFT co-Founder, and an ex-Warner Bros promotions and marketing executive.
WOW! I just saw that I have reached 10,000 followers. I want to personally thank each and every one of you for allowing me to keep waking up every day and doing what I love!
— Jose Delbo (@Jose_Delbo) January 10, 2022
Envolve to become better
Judy Lindsay is encouraging filmmakers to sell digital collectibles, such as artwork or sections of the film’s score, to raise money for new productions: a twist on crowdfunding. “NFTs are going to be the friends and family that fund all of our films from now on,” Lindsay says. “I think all my films are going to be fully funded by NFTs.”
I expect to see very very soon TV shows and movies start leveraging on NFTs to distribute unique digital content and experiment with add-ons like experiences, physical goods, and exclusive content. Further down the line, I expect to see things like TV screenings in metaverses, NFTs changing as the series evolve, on-chain voting for the future of characters, and many other things.
This is an industry that has a lot to figure out yet with NFTs but in the near future, hearing that a movie is going to be released as NFT is going to be common.
Stay around and disrupt together!
Movie NFT Marketing
Summary
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