"Is Cinema Dead - A filmmaker struggle with thousand problems"
I have already told you how we were selling those 100 tickets which I bought in order to promote and sell them on the streets of Sofia. However, 100 tickets are far below 2000 tickets, especially at the price of 10 lv / which is a little bit more than 5 Euro. Just for comparison the average ticket for an art house film in Bulgaria is 3.5 Euro. Basically we were pricing the film as much as the tickets for the blockbusters.
I guess this is the biggest reason why cinema is slowly dying in the format we know it now. It's crazy how difficult it is nowadays to get the attention of the audience. NoOne’s screening was competing for people’s attention with theaters, other films in cinemas, night clubs, facebook and instagram, all of the major network and cable televisions and of course all of the torrent sites and free streaming sites. I am not even counting all of the sport events and cultural events which were happening at the screening date.
This leads me to the conclusion that in order for a film to bring people into cinemas it needs to have an enormous advertising and marketing campaign. I guess its budget has to be at least equal to the production budget if not even bigger than that.
Basically we started to use our Faceook profile as a media itself, posting constantly content, creative content, documenting content, and re-sharing publicity content about NoOne made by Tv's or radio stations.
We managed to bring more than 2500 people that night, but this was less than half of the hall, so I realized that without a massive advertising and marketing campaign the war for eyeballs will be forever lost.
An independent low budget film is by default destined to be far away from the mainstream audience, furthermore a micro budget film is even further away from the chance to get in communication with the audience in the cinema theaters. I believe this is true even if the film approaches those people who fulfill the specific niche which might be interested by the film's content and story.
UPDATE 2019
There is only one solution for this problem, and it is called FREE STREAMING.
This theory was proven after the movie was uploaded for free in Youtube and till this day the movie has been viewed by more than 33 000 000 people.
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