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Comment by wr1472 | Hacker News Reader

How about a way of opening up financing to the public? Ideas get pitched, and the public can invest - kickstarter for movies?

We've had fan-fiction, this would fan-financing.

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Yes, it can work. In most cases it works like this - you produce a trailer out of your own pocket and pitch the idea to investors and studios (or studios finance trailer and pitch to investors)... so you'd replace investors here with crowd. Studios bring security to investors because they have measurable projections of what would work what wouldn't and secure channels of distributions. But, tell me how could a kickstarter like project work for high budget projects ($200+ million?)... even low budget ($10-20 million, with or without marketing, however you want to account)? I've never heard of anyone raising that kind of money anywhere online from crowd.

The most I've seen for a film project on Kickstarter is a few hundred thousand.

I think millions are possible, with the right combination of factors, but I also think that someone with that combination of factors would likely have better options for raising money.

So this sounds like a double edged problem - 1. The actual cost of producing films, as you've mentioned already does it really have to cost so much? Technology could help with this but I don't think is the only solution. 2. The financing of the movie - what if some kind of mutual fund/investment vehicle was created that only invested in film productions? look to individuals as well as institutions for investors.

Incidentally Francis Ford Coppola's comments quoted below are quite telling. If we are viewing movies as an art form then the cost (and revenue) generated should be a lot lower. If it is viewed as entertainment then it will be run as a business; making money will trump creativity and artistry every time.

An experiment in this field is "Iron Sky"[1] - while most of their financing (EUR 6.3M out of EUR 7.5M ~ USD 10M) comes from traditional sources, they also tried to raise EUR 1.2M from the crowd. This financing would come in two parts: as investment (900k) and as funding (300k).

They managed to collect 67% of the goal as an investment, and they give no numbers for funding.

[1]: http://www.ironsky.net/site/support/finance/

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