Part 2: Sales Estimates, Pre-Sales
+ The road to MIPCOM is paved with great potential
In my last newsletter I gave you Part One of my take-away’s from the AFM webinar on Sales Estimates & Pre-Sales to finance your film, and today I’ll finish that up with my last two points.
The Road To MIP
But first! I’ve been knee deep in MIPCOM preparation and all signs are pointing to a very active market. Which is a huge relief at a time when I’m pretty much looking exclusively at international and alternative funding strategies for my series slate, and not even attempting anything traditional or US-facing at this point. It’s all about the new models.
I’ll have a lot more to say on this after the market but in the mean time I wanted to give you LAST CALL for MIPCOM Submissions Service… if you have a developed or completed unscripted series or in special cases scripted, email me at stacey@filmspecific.com if you want help taking your project to market. And if I don’t feel I can help, I’ll always point you in the right direction as best I can.
Part 2: Take-Away’s
OK and not back to feature film sales estimates and pre-sales….
• The value of estimates from a reputable sales agent and why or why not you may be able to get them - here’s the deal… generating thoughtful sales estimates for your film is a bespoke process and requires a lot of work on the part of the sales agent. So they are really only motivated to do them for films that they are eager to represent and which are total no-brainers for them. In other words, it’s not a throw-away exercise so when you cold email a sales agent about getting estimates for your film, don’t be surprised if you get ghosted. Also don’t be surprised if you do get estimates but they are not what you expected. Sales agents are first and foremost concerned with their reputations so the upstanding companies will err on the side of being conservative vs. selling you on hopes and dreams.
• Sales estimates are a valuable component of a financing plan as they are the collateral that gap lenders will lend against - specifically they are lending against the unsold territories. And any lender engaging in gap will only lend against the most trustworthy and credible estimates and companies they’ve had positive experiences with in the past. So buyer beware that not all estimates are created equal and sales agents are incentivized to be as accurate as they can in the process of creating estimates.
• And finally, believe it or not there are downsides to pre-selling your rights to finance your film in that if you are in a position where you still need to raise a large chunk of equity, it diminishes investor upside as finished sales are where they recoup from and if you don’t have any territories left to sell, where will they see their money back from?
And that wraps up my Part Two take-aways!
If you want my thoughts on the first AFM webinar in the series on How To Utilize and Secure Debt and Gap Financing, you can check that out here.
What questions do you have so far on all this? Hit me up in the comments section below….
Look forward to hearing from you!
Stacey
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