Blog, Biz, Buh

You are aware, aren't you, that there are a selection of blogs here for you to choose from, right? This blog is my "personal" blog which can have any random thought in it at all. The official blog for Pandora Machine is at blog.pandoramachine.com and has pictures from our movies and links to trailers and things. The blog for music (at least in my world) is blog.tyrannosaurusmouse.com and has links to music and such.

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The nonsensical infographic we use to create a business plan. You're welcome.

In any case, I'm going to work out some things in my head now. The movie business is... well it's a simply terrible business. In this Salon article the studio business is basically one that had a 10% profit margin before the collapse of the DVD market, and now has a 6% margin.
And the interesting thing is that so goes the big studios so, in some way, goes us. Now it's true that small businesses tend to run higher profit margins than big ones -- otherwise they couldn't stay in business. But it's also true there's a lot of unpaid labor involved. Most of the unpaid labor is mine, but in our case there is quite a bit done by others. Although not paying people can work for a while it is not sustainable. At some point one needs to get paid.

"The loss of DVDs for our business had created a desperate need for a new area of growth. This was why the international market has become so important a factor in creative decisions, like casting and what movies the studios make."

This is certainly true of the micro-studio. Our domestic sales are maybe a third of our total sales. Sometimes they're as low as just a few percent of the revenue on a movie. North America is very hard to sell to.

The Asylum made 11 pictures last year.  I'm going to go and guess that their budgets are around the $100K mark. I'm sure some of their pictures come up on the quarter-million dollar price point but not all of them. But maybe that's just costs without overhead. I'm just making up numbers now. But 11 pictures. That's a real number. And they can stay in business that way.

I'm thinking 8 pictures a year for Pandora Machine. Whew. That's going to take a lot of work. We're not up to 3 right now. Maybe we should shoot for 6. But we really need to make 8.