Friday, December 18, 2009

If you're wondering why your spec didn't sell this year, relax, spec script sales collapsed in April, sez Nikki Finke:

The wide spec basically died on April 30, 2009. For the first four months of 2009, 8.2% of the specs that went wide to the town ended up selling (16 out of 195). Not a great percentage, but probably to be expected, all things considered. From May through the end of the year, however, sales of wide specs fell off a cliff: 3 out of 178 wide specs sold during that period, or 1.7%.

Basically, "three studios put a moratorium on development spending."

It makes sense. Scripts are the first thing in the pipeline, so if you want to cut costs without affecting output immediately, those $200K vs. $500K deals are easy to cut.

Things should pick up at some point, when execs start getting antsy about having a dry pipeline. When that will happen, who knows. My feeling is that January is going to look better than November, but that's just a gut check.

And then there's this:

According to BoxOffice.com, 2009's domestic cume has already topped 2008's record haul of $9.626 billion from January 1 to December 31, 2008.

At some point studios will realize that they are actually making a profit, and need to continue to make product if they want that to keep up.

I thought this tidbit was also interesting, if you're wondering about the seasonal cycles of Ho'wood:

The Spring selling season is roughly twice as long as the Fall season: this year, there were 21 weeks in the Spring (from the end of Sundance to the week before Independence Day) versus 10 weeks in the Fall (from the week after Labor Day to the week before Thanksgiving).

Labels: Le Quattro Stagioni, this little piggy went to market

2:35 PM

1 Comments:

What is a wide spec?

By  tnt, at 3:58 PM  

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