Most of you guys want to make films with absolutely no marketing and distribution (I call it MAD) strategy. That just boggles my mind to bits….and pieces. I just want to make a film; who cares who sees it right? Quite a few of you will actually say that, but we both know that’s complete and absolute bullshit. You want your film to be seen by a mass audience. You’ve worked incredibly hard putting in the work from development to pre-production to post-production.
You’re competing in a marketplace with an abundance of content competing for an audience. These people don’t have an unlimited amount of time and/or money so here’s the dilemma; how do they choose from an unlimited supply (a new piece of content is created every second!) of content? They mostly choose the ones with the most awareness. The industry terminology is “tracking”. Studios don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing because it sounds “cool.” They do it to buy an audience (mostly the opening weekend). And as the cost of film equipment decreases, the volume of content increases. That’s just economics 101. That’s also a very important sentence. You might want to write that down…..like RIGHT NOW!
And the multitudes of morons with the “quality rises to the top” statement/mentality are either very naive or plain foolish. You decide!
Update: I would highly suggest you take an internship (or two) at a film distribution company. I did mine at Filmdistrict (some of the most super awesome people in the business).