Part 2: Your Film Financing Playbook

How to get the first 50% of your budget covered.

I wanted to pick up the discussion from last week on a Modern Financing Playbook seeing as that I’ve had a few conversations since then that indicate a thirst for further exploration of this topic.

I realize many of you know me as a former sales agent turned distribution consultant, but for the past several years I’ve been Producing and EP’ing films as well as orchestrating financing for client films and getting my own films financed, so I have developed and honed my expertise in this area over the last handful of years.

I recently sat down and brainstormed a list of financing topics I most frequently get asked about and which I think are most misunderstood, and in looking at that list in front of me I realized how much there is to delve into in greater detail, some of which is possibly beyond the scope of this humble weekly newsletter :)

Maybe it’s time to bring back my Film Financing courses and publish them more in the style of a Playbook? We’ll see! I miss going deeper on these topics like I used to in my courses but just haven’t had the time over the last few years to produce anything new on that front. But I’m re-thinking my approach to that and hopefully will come up with a solution to better serve you in this area.

In the mean time though, I’ll keep floating different topics in this here Substack and you continue to hit me up with questions in the comments section below….

Getting The First 50%

One concept that I’m leaning into more and more these days, especially as I diversify my slate beyond US borders is getting to the first 40-%-60% of budgets covered in generous tax incentives combined with regional soft money and other subsidies, creating a flywheel that solidifies a big chunk of your finance plan.

It’s kind of like low hanging fruit and admittedly is much more difficult to achieve for US productions. Simply put, our tax incentives aren’t as generous and we don’t have the government subsidies for shooting in certain jurisdictions. In the US, maybe we can get to 20%-30% as a starting point in our finance plan, which is better than nothing and still a great place to start.

The next tranche of money to seek out is your equity partners. Who is going to come in with cold hard cash? The debt companies I’m speaking with tell me that with interest rates as high as they are right now, producers need to be leaning more on equity than debt in their finance plans. For example, while you used to be able to rely on up to 30% of your budget in debt for certain projects, it’s just become so expensive to borrow money that lenders want to see more of your financial pie covered with equity investment and come in for the last 15%-20%. As if finding equity wasn’t hard enough in the first place, but that’s where things are are right now due to macro-economic forces beyond our control.

Fortunately equity can come in the form of individual investors but also crowd funding proceeds and even brand deals. I’m looking at all these methods now as alternative ways to bring cold hard cash to the equation.

How about you? How are you faring out there in your film financing journey? Email me at stacey@filmspecific.com or let me know what you think below in the comments.

On that note, I’ll wrap things up for today. I hope you all have a wonderful day and holiday weekend ahead and I’ll speak to you again soon.

To your success,

Stacey

++++++++++++++++