Little Johnny to be released on-demand
Instinct Entertainment’s animated film Little Johnny The Movie will premiere at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, with a simultaneous on-demand release for the duration of the event.
“We have had great success in the past following traditional filmmaking and distribution models. However, we don’t believe that the concept of launching with a national, multi-screen wide release is the right way to go for every film. So many great, new Australian films are withering and dying before they find their feet. For Little Johnny The Movie, we are setting out to gently nurture the film and build the audience gradually before expanding the number of cinemas it plays in,” said producer David Redman.
Redman said that the VOD release (through http://site.dynamoplayer.com/, at a price of U$4.95 for a 24-hour access period) is not necessarily related to the film’s budget.
“It’s more about how we financed the budget. By financing the movie privately we were able to keep the distribution rights together and this makes a worldwide VOD release contractually possible. On traditional financing structures you’d have to licence the VOD rights with other rights territory by territory. As modern audiences, especially online, don’t really see the world that way and view things globally we financed the movie in a way that made a global approach possible,” Redman told Encore.
“We feel any film, irrespective of budget, could be trying to structure their financing so that the distribution process, like the production process, takes advantages of digital advancements to make the process more streamlined and efficient and reduce the number of parties involved in going from content creators to content consumers. As always marketing is key to finding an audience irrespective of the way the audience consumes the content but we wanted to treat the cost of production and the cost of distribution equally and bring these two activities closer together financially. The studios and bigger independent production and distribution companies like Relativity bring these two types of investments together so we felt we could offer investors a better structure if we tried to do the same – albeit on a much smaller level,” he explained.
Instinct’s previous comedies Strange Bedfellows and Charlie and Boots were box office hits in 2004 and 2009, but for Little Johnny The Movie, the strategy is to first target audiences who embrace comedy but may not be regular cinemagoers, and then spreading interest in the film worldwide, online.
“The simultaneous VOD release is to quickly build a large audience so that we can strategically plan how to build a wider release. We will be using technology to build word of mouth to compliment the traditional method of giving away tickets for preview cinema screenings.”
Directed by Ralph Moser, Little Johnny The Movie explores the life of the ‘real’ boy Johnny behind the popular Little Johnny jokes. The producers are describing it as the “feel wrong, guilty pleasure, comedy of the year”.
According to Redman, the company will start discussions with exhibitors on how to build the national audience for the film, instead of relying on the opening weekend for a national, multi-screen release – but without the support of a studio marketing campaign.
“The next step may be a national cinema release. Alternatively we would consider limited ‘special event’ seasons in regional cinemas or arts centres, following the model of the touring live stage show or comedy circuit,” explained Redman.
The DVD could be released in time for Father’s Day next September.
