$300 Sci-Fi YouTube Video Lands $30m Movie Deal 315
krou writes "A producer from Uruguay who made a short science fiction film and uploaded it to YouTube has landed a film deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House worth $300 million. The film, which shows spaceships and giant robots attacking Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, was made by Fede Alvarez for around $30. 'I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios,' he said. Alvarez is to develop and direct a film based on one of his ideas, but there is no word yet on the writer."
$30 million (Score:5, Informative)
Both articles mention $30 million, not $300 million.
His original post (Score:3, Informative)
Re:His original post (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well worth watching (Score:3, Informative)
Re:About time (Score:3, Informative)
A cgi bonanza with an annoying shakeycam and no acting. Truly original, and exactly what Hollywood needs to renew itself!
Re:PR/Viral marketing? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Alvarez Doesn't Get 30M (Score:4, Informative)
Just like nobody would ever have been stupid enough to screw Peter Jackson over the Lord of the Rings movies [deadline.com].
Gotcha.
I liked this homegrown movie the first time (Score:1, Informative)
I saw it when it was called "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (I know, the film actually did get picked up and finished by a studio, but it started out as a homegrown short)
Re:Alvarez Doesn't Get 30M (Score:3, Informative)
This is basically what Ghost House did to the Peng brothers on The Messengers. They were off the show once the cameras stopped rolling, and the company hired a ghost director to finish the film.
The producer reinterprets the contract or has some sort of magical contractual difficulty with Alvarez if the project is successful.
That won't happen. If Alvarez has a remotely competent agent he'll push for gross points or none at all, which are a cut of the box office before any expenses. Actors and directors learned their lesson from the recording industry years ago and it's pretty common knowledge that a deal net of expenses is worthless. They'll probably pay this guy half a mil and he'll think he won the lottery.
The studios aren't hiring these people because they have good ideas, or even necessarily because they're cheap. They're hiring them because they're small fry and will take orders from their producers. I've seen it happen over and over again; over the past decade we've seen a serious decline in the authority of directors in favor of producers and executives. Take a look at the "In Production" section of Variety or HR lately-- literally dozens of projects in the $30-$100 M range are going right now with a director that has credits as nothing more than a "stunt coordinator" or "second unit director" or a resume in commercial/music videos. These people are hired because they won't cause trouble when the producer wants to completely rewrite the story, and can be fired with little fanfare.
Posting anonymously, SHA1=286a7b5156f6ccc3309fb7da511b3f03d5cf77d9
Re:Here's the video (Score:3, Informative)
It's a joke. Asshole moderators.