Kickstarter CEO Wants to Make Your Passion Project

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2014

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kickstarter has crowdfunded more than $1 billion worth of projects in five years but CEO Yancey Strickler says it's just getting started.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business.
0:06.1	I would say that it's easier to swindle a German investor or a dentist from Palm Springs
0:11.2	than it is the internet.
0:12.8	Kickstarter is only five years old, and already millions of people have donated more than a billion
0:17.8	dollars to fund all kinds of projects.
0:20.7	That includes movies, but some say Kickstarter can be a place where unsuspecting fans make bad financial decisions.
0:28.1	Co-founder Yancey Strickler disagrees.
0:31.1	But first on the news banter, is Tom Cruise still a bankable star?
0:35.5	Stay tuned. It's the business from KCRW. I am joined by my fellow
0:43.6	banter and colleague Matt Bellany of the Hollywood reporter. Hello, Matt. Hi there. So Matt, we don't
0:49.5	know the exact numbers right now, but it certainly looks as we are sitting here that whatever edge of tomorrow, the new Tom Cruise movie from Warner Brothers, is going to make at the box office will not nearly be enough, really, to cover a very substantial budget.
1:04.0	Yeah, I mean, with a movie that's in the $175 to $200 million budget range, you've got to get to $6, $750 just to kind of consider that a profitable movie.
1:14.8	And it's very difficult to do that if you don't have that big opening weekend.
1:19.2	Yeah, and of course, a lot of people, I think, a lot of listeners sometimes reach out and say, well, I don't understand the numbers.
1:24.3	And the thing to bear in mind is just very roughly, if a movie gross is
1:28.1	$500 million, the studio is going to get half of that. And they're spending whatever the budget of
1:33.2	the movie is, let's call it $200 million. And they're spending another 100 in a walk, $75, $100,000 to market
1:40.3	the movie. So getting back half of $500 million obviously is not nearly cover the cost of it.
1:47.2	And on top of that, these movies are not made just to break even. These are movies that are
1:51.5	supposed to be mighty, mighty rivers of revenue that float other problems. And in this case,
1:57.1	since this is a Warner Brothers movie, I will mention blended, the Adam Sandler,
2:01.4	Drew Baramore movie that just completely tanked. A movie like that should be not a big
	...

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