$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."
Re:Well worth watching (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's a big studio viral hoax.
PR/Viral marketing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only one who thinks that the whole situation was setup as a viral marketing/PR stunt? Maybe I'm just naturally distrustful of Hollywood.
It is easier to sell tickets to another run of the mill Sci-Fi movie if it has a story like this behind it.
300 bucks cant have licensed that OST (Score:1, Interesting)
Shouldn't youtube silence the vid? Plenty other vids get silenced for using copyrighted music, and this one obviously i've heard before. PRobably in 28 weeks later. not sure.
Re:Putting the "Fiction" back in Science Fiction (Score:2, Interesting)
A hobbyist would probably aim his audience towards the locality upon which the film is made. (Meaning, if he's in Uruguay, he's going to make a film for Uruguayians).
I am sure you meant:
he's going to make a film for a reasonable amount of money.
I am pretty sure a trip to New York or Tokyo would have blown his $300 budget.
What about Shane Carruth? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well worth watching (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, I clicked one of those hoping that the media had thought the attack was real, War of the Worlds style.
Too bad.
not really (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree on the he should be recognized, but disagree as to how. I'd rather guys like this were able to make a feature length film and completely bypass the normal hollywood cash skimming, over paid "star" paying and story altering facets, to just skip the whole bloated budget and higher cartel DVD and ticket prices MPAA thing and do for movies what the indy music artists are doing skipping affiliation with the RIAA crew.
If he can do this for three hundred bucks, maybe that means a full feature length movie can be done for under one million and not cost hundreds of millions. He still gets paid, but it would be all his and his crew then, not 99% going to middlemen and overpaid so called "talent", and consumers/watchers can get good films legitimately to view at much more reasonable prices.
The music is from 28 days later (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:$300 is not the real price (Score:3, Interesting)
So why isn't the time you spend blasting virtual monsters worth $100/hr, since that's how much you could hypothetically make as a prostitute? Because you aren't a prostitute, just like you aren't a Saturday barista?
But in any case, that's only your opportunity cost for not doing anything productive. The fact still remains that your time spent playing video games is worth $0. Nobody is going to pay you to do it.
And for the ultimate point that is relevant to this discussion, which is the cost of making a film: Even in the unlikely event someone wanted you to do it for some gamer reality TV series, and you do it for free anyway, then the dollar value that appears on their balance sheet for getting you to play video games is still $0/hr. Not $8/hr, not $100/hr. $0.
I hate the internet ( and you ) and slashot (Score:1, Interesting)
WTF? All of these comments and not one person has discussed *HOW* he did it? This is fucking slashdot! You people are supposed to be engineers, scientists and geeks. You are supposed to care about the how and not so much about the why.
Something is broken.