by Voyage | Aug 7, 2014 | Audience, Entertainment Business
Last week, Voyage announced the latest film we’ve produced, Valley Uprising: Yosemite’s Rock Climbing Revolution–an in-depth documentary about the history of thrill-seekers climbing Yosemite’s treacherous granite cliff faces. Soon after the announcement, we received a pretty interesting email, which brought up some questions about Voyage’s project selection process–Why would we spend money on such a specific-interest documentary? How could we ensure we broke even on marketing a project with such a relatively small target audience? After all, rock climbers and adrenaline-junkies are such a small and specific part of the overall moviegoing audience…isn’t the goal to reach as many of the “4 Quadrants” as possible? As with any other film we’ve helped develop, we’re very excited for and confident in Valley Uprising’s success. But this email created an interesting opportunity for us to debunk several myths about the industry, financing, and what makes a marketable project. Plus some details about how smaller films get financed—and many of them can be applied to non-documentary film projects as well. So if you’ve been burning with some of the same questions, now’s as good a time as any to clear up a few misconceptions you might have about the niche filmmaking process! Misconception #1: Producing a niche film will put you into debt A financially successful film can be measured in not just its total sales, but rather more accurately in its percentage of return on investment, or “ROI”. Of the top three genres with the highest returns on investment, two may surprise you. The first on the list is horror—less surprising, since many low-budget horror flicks like The Blair Witch...
