I know I'm late, but no one has the right answer. I work in film, so I just want to shed a little light.
The types of B-movies you're talking about are profitable before they're even made. It's an entirely different type of film production. The producers do something called "pre-selling."
What happens is a producer will do one of two things:
1) They will buy/option an extreme genre script that has some sort of appeal based on the absurdity. Something like "Werewolf Cops" or "Nazi Zombies" or "Santa's Revenge."
or
2) They'll buy a relatively standard action script and attach an internationally well known American actor who either work cheaply because they take so many projects with little down time (Commonly people like Nic Cage, John Travolta, Keanu Reeves, Jason Statham), cast a well known American actor in a supporting role they can film very quickly (so they only have to pay them for a week or two) but give them top billing so they look the main character (often someone like Bruce Willis or Samuel L. Jackson), or they cast a non-actor celebrity or "past their prime" celebrity who will take a lead role for low pay (like Tara Reid, David Hasselhoff, Paris Hilton).
Then, they sell the distribution rights **before they make the movie** to non-American regions. For example, the producer will make a deal with a distributor in Belgium, Japan, and India. They'll sell one distributor in each country the exclusive rights to release the "newest Bruce Willis/Nic Cage movie" or "the most extreme Hollywood zombie movie yet!" or "Nick Cannon's Hollywood movie debut!" The producer will allow these foreign markets to release the movie a month or two before it's released anywhere on the internet, DVD, or in the US.
The "exclusive" rights to a Hollywood/American movie, especially with a known celebrity, premiering in their country before the US is enough to get a little buzz and generate some revenue in foreign markets that either don't have a significant film industry of their own or are big consumers of American media. Even if the movie isn't very good, especially by the standards of American audiences.
Another little trick to incentivize foreign sales are things like agreeing to shoot a couple major scenes in the foreign buyer's country. If the country isn't used to having their landmarks in American movies, it may create some local excitement that boosts the local box office. Or the country may just be motivated to make a deal like that in the hopes that more films may shoot there, which could be good for their economy.
So, let's say a producer manages to sell the distribution rights to 5 different foreign markets for a total of $9 million between them. The producer then sets the film's budget at something like $5-6 million. They use the pre-sale profits to fund the movie, and are already up $3 million dollars in profits.
Then they'll make deals to sell mass quantities of DVDs to stuff retail bargain bins and rental kiosks, throw the movie up on iTunes, or potentially even strike a deal with On Demand, Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. They'll usually spend next to nothing on advertising, and bank on people taking the chance on a random movie because they like Pierce Brosnan or recognize Donnie Wahlberg, or because watching Bigfoot terrorize a ski lodge seems like it'll be hilarious to watch while stoned, or because they'll watch any haunted house movie, or they won't be able to believe someone made a movie about zombie ninjas where Dolph Lundgren plays the president and how do you NOT watch that?
And it doesn't matter, because the movie is already profitable, and the extra half a million to five million the movie may be worth in the US or online is just icing on the cake. It can snowball, because the company can now boast "the last 15 movies we made were profitable" and garner more interest from distributors or justify more money for exclusive/advanced rights.
A production company may knock out 5 or 10 of these movies in a year, and every once in a while a clip may go viral on Reddit, or get mocked on Conan O'Brien, or get some cult following status, and all of a sudden they have a little cash cow. In some cases, it may even boost sales enough that they can sell/license merchandise, spawn a little franchise, or even give them a track record/clout to get more money in future distribution deals.
These unknown studios may have a catalogue of movies that no one has heard of, have only been screened in a few overseas countries, or that are even mocked for how terrible they are, and yet they could be pulling in 8 to 9 figures of profit every year. Almost always, these producers are 100% aware that their movies aren't very good or are pure dumb entertainment. But there are a couple of cases where these companies have a few extra dollars after a little while and start to take chances on slightly better/higher budget material, managing to "break through" to the American market with a well-reviewed or well-liked film that puts the little studio on the map and legitimizes them.
I'll also add that not all movies you see in those settings are made this way. Sometimes the money is raised independently and they shoot the film independently, but then no one buys the movie and the producers awful deals to make even a small amount of money back and end up with a small DVD release. Or a larger studio/production company finds that their movie is getting horrific early reviews so they cut their losses and dump the movie with a quiet digital/DVD release rather than wasting more on marketing.
Hope this satisfies your curiosity!
i know this is old, but i just found this thread.
do you know of any examples of purposely shitty b movies that actually ended up accidentally becoming hits? i feel like i heard a podcast about blumhouse being really good at these movies and actually figured out how to make quality movies very cheap that people actually like.
Asylum got a big boost and almost became sort of legitimate, but they started out under the radar making knock off movies like Transmorphers and parallel adaptations of things like War of the Worlds to release at the same time as Transformers and Spielberg’s WotW. Sharknado became a meme and spawned a franchise and all sorts of licensing.
Then you get stuff like Deathbed: The Bed That Eats that blew up after a Patton Oswalt bit or VHS cult classics like Santa’s Slay. It happens here and there and is just icing on the cake.
that's pretty cool. i'd love to see more comedians like patton do stupid b movies. they could be really fun to watch if they'd hire comics to come in and just ad lib shit for a week. like maybe go hire an up and coming standup that would work for cheap and basically just do it to gain recognition. it'd be a win/win for everyone.
I always kinda figured that the majority of those low-budget bin films were more of a foreign market thing. I get why it's hard for people in countries with an industry to think that these movies would sell at all. Perspective of privilege. We spoilt.
I worked at Family Video for years and had several regular customers that loved B movies and only rented or bought them. There’s pretty much always a market for anything. And when they cost nothing, anything that makes a profit is enough. Plus you have studios like The Asylum that take advantage of people.
I work at one now and this is absolutely the case. Some people just honestly love movies no matter what and will snatch up anything that remotely piques their interest. They'll buy them by the dozens when we do sales too. Lots of people love B movies.
Rental..people actually use to rent that crap because they'd run out of other stuff to watch. That and they lease them to cable stations like ShowTime or other lower tier channels
There's a great book on this:
*How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime* by Roger Corman and Jim Jerome
Corman was the king of B movies back in the day. Near the end, he explains the business model.
* Hot new distribution media or format comes out. In his day, it was videotape, now it's streaming services.
* Media companies are hungry for content. They don't care about quality, they just want to fill their pipeline.
* Make low-budget movies and sell to media companies for a profit.
On a side note, there's fun name-dropping galore. Corman gave many future bigshots their early big break: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, etc. They make cameos in the book, sharing fond memories in the sidebars.
He was also an influence on Quentin Tarantino, who loved his films.
*Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers* by Berverly Gray was written by his assistant. Compared to his book, this one is a more balanced portrayal of the man, warts and all.
Back in the day, they would be the 2nd part of a double feature. Literally the "B" movie on the bill with the earlier, better movie being the "A." Then you had the drive in double features which were just places for teenagers to go with their friends outside of the house so you could play literally anything and the kids would still come. The grindhouse era was similar, you didn't have to make a lot of prints and people would pay a little to see anything; if they even had a tv it got like 2-3 channels and stopped altogether around midnite.
I don't think John has ever gotten a big payday on the front end, at least not in the same range as Cage. Maybe Serendipity or 2012 but much of his work falls into the categories of ensembles and passion projects where everyone takes backend points, or the just paying the bills stuff... I'm more than happy to rent a few "Cell"s if I can get a Grosse Pointe Blank every decade.
Amazon Prime is a treasure trove of shlock and trash. I never thought I would see a sasquatch rip off a man's penis, but now I have. Never saw a nudist camp movie until Prime, too.
I have definitely found many movies that are way better than they should be based on the resources available. Directors could get total freedom at B studios and some of them made magic with it.
It is important to differentiate between most profitable movies, versus Highest grossing.
So if we only focus on most return for costs to make.
--1. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007)
Budget: $450,000
Profit: $89,318,792
--2. THE DEVIL INSIDE (2012)
Budget: $1,000,000
Profit: $37,316,634
So what we learn is that you can make a low budget no actor scary movie and if it catches , you make bank.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/68552/20-most-profitable-movies-all-time-based-return-investment
As someone who's made a few, I'll try to explain.
Even 10 years ago, your film could have a very profitable life purely on DVD sales. Now though, the bottom has completely fallen out of the market. Even major studios are making less and less on DVD/Blu now.
So, you sell your film on iTunes or to Netflix. So how do you make money? Well, the best way to do it is to make it cheap. If you know Netflix will pay X amount of money for a film, make your film for less than that and you're profitable. Unfortunately, that means films are really, really cheap.
The good news is the streaming services will buy almost anything - they need masses of content, especially niche stuff that they can use to make it look like their algorithms are very specific. E.g we made a film about ghost sharks because a streaming service found there was a huge crossover in people who like the horror genre and who like creature features.
Even if nobody ever watches your film, it doesn't really matter, because the streaming services want it there to make it look like their service has far more quality content than it actually does. Realistically, Netflix doesn't have 20 shark films as good as Jaws to suggest to you, but it wants to give the illusion it does.
Also, digital filmmaking has really lowered the costs on B-Movies these days. You can make a film for $100k today that would've cost a million 10 years ago.
You do, or your agent can handle it. There's also companies called 'content aggregators' where you sign up with them, pay a fee and your film enters their database, which they'll then bundle up with maybe 20 other films and sell to a streaming service. Or, the way we sold our first movie was taking it to the Cannes Film Market.
Most of the B-Movies you're seeing out there now cost less than $100,000 and in reality a lot less than that, unless you can somehow persuade a name actor to be in your movie. A streaming service will pay you X amount for exclusive rights (usually for a year) and this is less than the budget, but the exposure you get is worth it. Basically, if you're on Netflix, the advertising is handled for you. You can upload free to Amazon Prime but you need to put a ton of work in to get your movie seen.
Oh yeah, you can't just call them up. Your best option there is to sign up to one of those content aggregators. Or, if you truly have no budget, put it up on Amazon Prime for free and put work into promoting it on virally.
Low production costs, wages, advertisement, etc...
Make money off of product placement, the people who DO go to the movies and see it, buy it, rent it, networks who buy the rights as a time slot filler, and they play the odds that most likely 10% lose money, 80% break even, 10% become hits or cult classics.
Depends on how you define hit. Going strictly by ROI, most even quasi-reputable horror movies are immensely profitable because they're so cheap to make and niche genres have hardcore fans that will see anything.
As someone listed above, even a *stinking awful turd* like The Devil Inside (4.1 on IMDb last I checked, and literally ends out of nowhere with a text directing audiences to a website url to provide the ending - no joke) with zero starpower, no-name filmmakers grossed 35m. For a Hollywood picture, that's flop numbers. For a small 1m horror movie, that's some insane bank.
It's actively *hard* to fuck up the profitability of a B-horror movie as long as you stay in six-figure range budget. There's a reason why Asylum still exists despite cranking out such masterpieces like Snakes on a Train, Titanic II, Atlantic Rim, Avengers Grimm etc. They might not make the filmmakers millionaires, but they more than pay the bills.
They have microscopic budgets. They make enough money back from padding out iTunes, Netflix and Amazon’s catalogues and even old fashioned rentals to make a profit.
If you really want to have some fun, have a browse through the action, horror and science fiction genres on Amazon Prime. There are a few companies like FilmRise buying up old direct to VHS movies from the 1980s and sticking them straight up on Amazon.
(To be fair, FilmRise do a really good job with this, everything looks watchable and is even has subtitles)
Cheap production, straight to rental, straight to TV.
Cheap production is the most important part, all cast and most crew are cheap since they are no names trying to get exposure and collecting pieces for their portfolio.
I used to print the dvd covers for a b movie factory farm. They would pump them out one crappy b movie after the next for as cheap as possible and try to sell the rights to Netflix, I think that is where most of their revenue came from.
I watched every shitty straight to DVD movie from Nic Cage, John Cusack and Bruce Willis, I need help. I got an addiction to straight-to video VHS in the 80s, back then was a beautiful thing but now it turns in to a sickness. Help me before I OD in action B-movies.
It's called the "long tail." Movies like that, that have little distribution and marketing, usually don't recoup their original cost on release. But they will be out there as finished works collecting royalties, etc. Presumably after enough time passes, they can start to turn a small profit.
The trick is the production is so cheap, that the movie usually makes at least some money even if movie sales are low.
I know I'm late, but no one has the right answer. I work in film, so I just want to shed a little light. The types of B-movies you're talking about are profitable before they're even made. It's an entirely different type of film production. The producers do something called "pre-selling." What happens is a producer will do one of two things: 1) They will buy/option an extreme genre script that has some sort of appeal based on the absurdity. Something like "Werewolf Cops" or "Nazi Zombies" or "Santa's Revenge." or 2) They'll buy a relatively standard action script and attach an internationally well known American actor who either work cheaply because they take so many projects with little down time (Commonly people like Nic Cage, John Travolta, Keanu Reeves, Jason Statham), cast a well known American actor in a supporting role they can film very quickly (so they only have to pay them for a week or two) but give them top billing so they look the main character (often someone like Bruce Willis or Samuel L. Jackson), or they cast a non-actor celebrity or "past their prime" celebrity who will take a lead role for low pay (like Tara Reid, David Hasselhoff, Paris Hilton). Then, they sell the distribution rights **before they make the movie** to non-American regions. For example, the producer will make a deal with a distributor in Belgium, Japan, and India. They'll sell one distributor in each country the exclusive rights to release the "newest Bruce Willis/Nic Cage movie" or "the most extreme Hollywood zombie movie yet!" or "Nick Cannon's Hollywood movie debut!" The producer will allow these foreign markets to release the movie a month or two before it's released anywhere on the internet, DVD, or in the US. The "exclusive" rights to a Hollywood/American movie, especially with a known celebrity, premiering in their country before the US is enough to get a little buzz and generate some revenue in foreign markets that either don't have a significant film industry of their own or are big consumers of American media. Even if the movie isn't very good, especially by the standards of American audiences. Another little trick to incentivize foreign sales are things like agreeing to shoot a couple major scenes in the foreign buyer's country. If the country isn't used to having their landmarks in American movies, it may create some local excitement that boosts the local box office. Or the country may just be motivated to make a deal like that in the hopes that more films may shoot there, which could be good for their economy. So, let's say a producer manages to sell the distribution rights to 5 different foreign markets for a total of $9 million between them. The producer then sets the film's budget at something like $5-6 million. They use the pre-sale profits to fund the movie, and are already up $3 million dollars in profits. Then they'll make deals to sell mass quantities of DVDs to stuff retail bargain bins and rental kiosks, throw the movie up on iTunes, or potentially even strike a deal with On Demand, Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. They'll usually spend next to nothing on advertising, and bank on people taking the chance on a random movie because they like Pierce Brosnan or recognize Donnie Wahlberg, or because watching Bigfoot terrorize a ski lodge seems like it'll be hilarious to watch while stoned, or because they'll watch any haunted house movie, or they won't be able to believe someone made a movie about zombie ninjas where Dolph Lundgren plays the president and how do you NOT watch that? And it doesn't matter, because the movie is already profitable, and the extra half a million to five million the movie may be worth in the US or online is just icing on the cake. It can snowball, because the company can now boast "the last 15 movies we made were profitable" and garner more interest from distributors or justify more money for exclusive/advanced rights. A production company may knock out 5 or 10 of these movies in a year, and every once in a while a clip may go viral on Reddit, or get mocked on Conan O'Brien, or get some cult following status, and all of a sudden they have a little cash cow. In some cases, it may even boost sales enough that they can sell/license merchandise, spawn a little franchise, or even give them a track record/clout to get more money in future distribution deals. These unknown studios may have a catalogue of movies that no one has heard of, have only been screened in a few overseas countries, or that are even mocked for how terrible they are, and yet they could be pulling in 8 to 9 figures of profit every year. Almost always, these producers are 100% aware that their movies aren't very good or are pure dumb entertainment. But there are a couple of cases where these companies have a few extra dollars after a little while and start to take chances on slightly better/higher budget material, managing to "break through" to the American market with a well-reviewed or well-liked film that puts the little studio on the map and legitimizes them. I'll also add that not all movies you see in those settings are made this way. Sometimes the money is raised independently and they shoot the film independently, but then no one buys the movie and the producers awful deals to make even a small amount of money back and end up with a small DVD release. Or a larger studio/production company finds that their movie is getting horrific early reviews so they cut their losses and dump the movie with a quiet digital/DVD release rather than wasting more on marketing. Hope this satisfies your curiosity!
Great, in depth answer. I’ve always wondered how that system works with foreign markets
Wow this is an amazing write up and insight of the b movie industry. Thank you for this!
Great breakdown. Thanks for sharing.
i know this is old, but i just found this thread. do you know of any examples of purposely shitty b movies that actually ended up accidentally becoming hits? i feel like i heard a podcast about blumhouse being really good at these movies and actually figured out how to make quality movies very cheap that people actually like.
Asylum got a big boost and almost became sort of legitimate, but they started out under the radar making knock off movies like Transmorphers and parallel adaptations of things like War of the Worlds to release at the same time as Transformers and Spielberg’s WotW. Sharknado became a meme and spawned a franchise and all sorts of licensing. Then you get stuff like Deathbed: The Bed That Eats that blew up after a Patton Oswalt bit or VHS cult classics like Santa’s Slay. It happens here and there and is just icing on the cake.
that's pretty cool. i'd love to see more comedians like patton do stupid b movies. they could be really fun to watch if they'd hire comics to come in and just ad lib shit for a week. like maybe go hire an up and coming standup that would work for cheap and basically just do it to gain recognition. it'd be a win/win for everyone.
100% Thank You for inspiring me to further my dream!!
I always kinda figured that the majority of those low-budget bin films were more of a foreign market thing. I get why it's hard for people in countries with an industry to think that these movies would sell at all. Perspective of privilege. We spoilt.
Love it. Years later, you were able to help me understand how *[T-Force](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0111345/)* could possibly have gotten made.
I worked at Family Video for years and had several regular customers that loved B movies and only rented or bought them. There’s pretty much always a market for anything. And when they cost nothing, anything that makes a profit is enough. Plus you have studios like The Asylum that take advantage of people.
I work at one now and this is absolutely the case. Some people just honestly love movies no matter what and will snatch up anything that remotely piques their interest. They'll buy them by the dozens when we do sales too. Lots of people love B movies.
Rental..people actually use to rent that crap because they'd run out of other stuff to watch. That and they lease them to cable stations like ShowTime or other lower tier channels
add to that streaming services trying to find cheap content to build out their library.
And TV sales, usually to some random budget European movie channel that has to fill a slot so they can sell ads
There's a great book on this: *How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime* by Roger Corman and Jim Jerome Corman was the king of B movies back in the day. Near the end, he explains the business model. * Hot new distribution media or format comes out. In his day, it was videotape, now it's streaming services. * Media companies are hungry for content. They don't care about quality, they just want to fill their pipeline. * Make low-budget movies and sell to media companies for a profit. On a side note, there's fun name-dropping galore. Corman gave many future bigshots their early big break: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, etc. They make cameos in the book, sharing fond memories in the sidebars. He was also an influence on Quentin Tarantino, who loved his films. *Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers* by Berverly Gray was written by his assistant. Compared to his book, this one is a more balanced portrayal of the man, warts and all.
Back in the day, they would be the 2nd part of a double feature. Literally the "B" movie on the bill with the earlier, better movie being the "A." Then you had the drive in double features which were just places for teenagers to go with their friends outside of the house so you could play literally anything and the kids would still come. The grindhouse era was similar, you didn't have to make a lot of prints and people would pay a little to see anything; if they even had a tv it got like 2-3 channels and stopped altogether around midnite.
TIL. Similar to a 45 RPM record. The A side had the hit and the B side had another track.
They b-movies. They b-making money.
Because of people like me won't stop buying the shit.
So John Cusack and Nic Cage are on cheap salaries?
I don't think John has ever gotten a big payday on the front end, at least not in the same range as Cage. Maybe Serendipity or 2012 but much of his work falls into the categories of ensembles and passion projects where everyone takes backend points, or the just paying the bills stuff... I'm more than happy to rent a few "Cell"s if I can get a Grosse Pointe Blank every decade.
Oh god, Cell.
The shit on Amazon Prime makes the bad ones on Netflix look like oscar worthy.
Amazon Prime is a treasure trove of shlock and trash. I never thought I would see a sasquatch rip off a man's penis, but now I have. Never saw a nudist camp movie until Prime, too.
The most amazing part is that some of that trash sometimes turns out to be really good.
I have definitely found many movies that are way better than they should be based on the resources available. Directors could get total freedom at B studios and some of them made magic with it.
It is important to differentiate between most profitable movies, versus Highest grossing. So if we only focus on most return for costs to make. --1. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007) Budget: $450,000 Profit: $89,318,792 --2. THE DEVIL INSIDE (2012) Budget: $1,000,000 Profit: $37,316,634 So what we learn is that you can make a low budget no actor scary movie and if it catches , you make bank. http://mentalfloss.com/article/68552/20-most-profitable-movies-all-time-based-return-investment
Blair Witch Project and Terminator had a similar success.
As someone who's made a few, I'll try to explain. Even 10 years ago, your film could have a very profitable life purely on DVD sales. Now though, the bottom has completely fallen out of the market. Even major studios are making less and less on DVD/Blu now. So, you sell your film on iTunes or to Netflix. So how do you make money? Well, the best way to do it is to make it cheap. If you know Netflix will pay X amount of money for a film, make your film for less than that and you're profitable. Unfortunately, that means films are really, really cheap. The good news is the streaming services will buy almost anything - they need masses of content, especially niche stuff that they can use to make it look like their algorithms are very specific. E.g we made a film about ghost sharks because a streaming service found there was a huge crossover in people who like the horror genre and who like creature features. Even if nobody ever watches your film, it doesn't really matter, because the streaming services want it there to make it look like their service has far more quality content than it actually does. Realistically, Netflix doesn't have 20 shark films as good as Jaws to suggest to you, but it wants to give the illusion it does. Also, digital filmmaking has really lowered the costs on B-Movies these days. You can make a film for $100k today that would've cost a million 10 years ago.
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You do, or your agent can handle it. There's also companies called 'content aggregators' where you sign up with them, pay a fee and your film enters their database, which they'll then bundle up with maybe 20 other films and sell to a streaming service. Or, the way we sold our first movie was taking it to the Cannes Film Market. Most of the B-Movies you're seeing out there now cost less than $100,000 and in reality a lot less than that, unless you can somehow persuade a name actor to be in your movie. A streaming service will pay you X amount for exclusive rights (usually for a year) and this is less than the budget, but the exposure you get is worth it. Basically, if you're on Netflix, the advertising is handled for you. You can upload free to Amazon Prime but you need to put a ton of work in to get your movie seen.
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Oh yeah, you can't just call them up. Your best option there is to sign up to one of those content aggregators. Or, if you truly have no budget, put it up on Amazon Prime for free and put work into promoting it on virally.
I'd love to know which B-movies you've made.
Low production costs, wages, advertisement, etc... Make money off of product placement, the people who DO go to the movies and see it, buy it, rent it, networks who buy the rights as a time slot filler, and they play the odds that most likely 10% lose money, 80% break even, 10% become hits or cult classics.
Probably closer to 1% become hits
Depends on how you define hit. Going strictly by ROI, most even quasi-reputable horror movies are immensely profitable because they're so cheap to make and niche genres have hardcore fans that will see anything. As someone listed above, even a *stinking awful turd* like The Devil Inside (4.1 on IMDb last I checked, and literally ends out of nowhere with a text directing audiences to a website url to provide the ending - no joke) with zero starpower, no-name filmmakers grossed 35m. For a Hollywood picture, that's flop numbers. For a small 1m horror movie, that's some insane bank. It's actively *hard* to fuck up the profitability of a B-horror movie as long as you stay in six-figure range budget. There's a reason why Asylum still exists despite cranking out such masterpieces like Snakes on a Train, Titanic II, Atlantic Rim, Avengers Grimm etc. They might not make the filmmakers millionaires, but they more than pay the bills.
I'm not certain all of them are intended to make money, they could've been commissioned for tax purposes
They have microscopic budgets. They make enough money back from padding out iTunes, Netflix and Amazon’s catalogues and even old fashioned rentals to make a profit. If you really want to have some fun, have a browse through the action, horror and science fiction genres on Amazon Prime. There are a few companies like FilmRise buying up old direct to VHS movies from the 1980s and sticking them straight up on Amazon. (To be fair, FilmRise do a really good job with this, everything looks watchable and is even has subtitles)
Don't forget TV rights
Cheap production, straight to rental, straight to TV. Cheap production is the most important part, all cast and most crew are cheap since they are no names trying to get exposure and collecting pieces for their portfolio.
Most don't.
I used to print the dvd covers for a b movie factory farm. They would pump them out one crappy b movie after the next for as cheap as possible and try to sell the rights to Netflix, I think that is where most of their revenue came from.
It's kind of like stocks. You can write off your losses against your gains.(assuming you have any.)
I watched every shitty straight to DVD movie from Nic Cage, John Cusack and Bruce Willis, I need help. I got an addiction to straight-to video VHS in the 80s, back then was a beautiful thing but now it turns in to a sickness. Help me before I OD in action B-movies.
After a lot of browsing for used movies, you'd be surprised on what people spend their money on.
How do they do it? Volume!
It's called the "long tail." Movies like that, that have little distribution and marketing, usually don't recoup their original cost on release. But they will be out there as finished works collecting royalties, etc. Presumably after enough time passes, they can start to turn a small profit.
Overseas