Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska, which will premiere in the YouTube screening room.
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Success for an independent film once meant a national rollout. But averaging the marketing costs, shipping charges, facility fees and other assorted logistical expenses, Price calculated that it costs about $6 per viewer to put a movie into the art house circuit. Given these mounting costs, the money woes now affecting Wall Street and Main Street are starting to affect Art House Avenue as well. With so many limited-release films finding it next to impossible to reap a profit in the theater, the benchmarks of success have in large part shifted to DVD sales.
By releasing The Princess of Nebraska online, and actively encouraging web sites to link directly to the film (see the movie in its entirety at the bottom of this page), Magnolia is focusing on maximizing not venues but viewers. "If you took the 350 independent films released each year and took the median audience, you'd be lucky to find an audience of 25,000 people," Price says. "In the YouTube screening room, the average audience is somewhere near 300,000 to a million people. Our responsibility to the filmmaker is to get people to see the movie; that's a ten-fold increase right there."
The numbers might bear him out. The total box office haul for My Kid Could Paint That — one of the most prominent Sundance acquisitions last year — was $231,000, which represents around 23,000 people. By comparison, the YouTube Screening Room, which launched in June and features four new films on a biweekly basis, has thus far generated a total of more than 12 million views; one of its most popular titles — the 42-minute Sarah Kernochan documentary Thoth — has drawn more than a half million visitors. Those are big numbers for an art house movie, and Price believes that with The Princess of Nebraska, he can eliminate the majority of the film's distribution costs, recoup revenues through sponsorships and expand this target market for the DVD.
For film purists, the idea of watching a movie for the first time through an Internet browser is heresy. For Wang and Price, it's all about priorities. With art house theaters now a rare commodity, and studios increasingly viewing theatrical tours as little more than promotional campaigns for the DVD release, YouTube offers distributors a far more cost-effective strategy for reaching eyeballs and DVD shelves. "I didn't want to spend more money on advertising a film when its original budget is low," Wang said, a week before his online premiere. "I bet you more people will ultimately see Princess ... the trailer is getting more than 80,000 hits [while] the trailer for Thousand Years was probably [only] seen by 5,000." The only thing missing will be the overpriced box of Raisinets.