Crowd Funding: The Future of the industry?

Crowd Funding: The Future of the industry?

The term crowd funding refers to the collective effort of individuals who network and pool thier money usually via the internet to support the efforts of other people or organizations. Crowdfunding is used in the funding of citizen journalism, disaster relief and support of artists by fans,political campagins, motion picture promotion and other products.

Crowd funding may affect the big six by forcing these companies to adapt their marketing and development strategies if Crowd funding does prove to be the "future of the industry", this could mean that in the future we see more of the Big six developing film studios with the sole purpose of using crowd funding to appeal to a nicher and more direct audience. This would also mean that financing and marketing may not be a problem anymore since said studio can fund a film by asking its potential audience to fund it and then make a profile of those who funded it, which as a result would make for easier marketing. Furthermore one may suggest that perhaps in the future we may see more of these crowd funded films being bought up by the big six companies to buy out any potential competition (Horizontal integration).

In some ways I believe that this approach to financing may allow creativity to flourish to a certain extent as we will see more filmmakers take more risks with the safety net of the fact that the money is from an audience who would want to watch the film. However one may argue that Crowd funded film may not feature the same quality of film we are used to i.e. big budget spectacles due to the amount of resources these films will have initially. In addition there is the possibility of stagnantatnon since if once crowd source film project may do well, there may be several imitators to cash on the originals success.

Crowd funded films can appeal to global and local audiences by exploring themes that are relevant to said audiences but are not explored in big hollywood films that control most of the market. These crowd funded films serves as an alternative to the stagnantatnon that occurs in Hollywood and allow audience to relate more to these films.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1270411036/the-death-of-superman-lives-what-happened

The Hyperlink above is a link to a successful crowd funded film; a documentary about the cancelled Tim Burton directed superman film. The film originally pledged for a total of $98,000 however the project surpassed its goal and gained $115,110. From this one can suggest that not only has the project met its target but its surpassed it clearly evidencing that there is a demand for this film and that there are people willing to pay to be a part of a films development not matter how niche the film and its audience is.