Broken Mile - August 15, 2017

[noirjunkie]

The review for this indie thriller just went live, and it looks interesting. Is anyone planning on picking it up? I'd never heard of it before reading the review, but once I did, I ordered it.

(And please, save your "no pressed BD, no sale" comments for someone who cares.)

[Scottie]

I was really taken by the director's letter (featured in the review).

I'm fully aware of the stigma when using BD-Rs, especially since I do authoring as a part of my career and have seen distributors get flack for choosing to go the burned route. The sad fact of the current market is a problem of economics, unfortunately. It means that films the size of Broken Mile (or an older film of mine, Skull World, for that matter), mostly never even make it to Blu-ray, as the cost is simply too much. They will either get DVD only (and in most cases DVD-5 only with next to no bonus features due to the cost difference DVD-9 causes and Redbox only taking DVD-5s), or they go to VOD only.

The minimum order to press a Blu-Ray, from anyone, is 1000 units. The cheapest I've found for that (and I've done tons of searching) is about $2900 US with shipping to Canada ($3600 CDN approx.). Now, lets say you sell most BD units via Amazon at 19.99 each. Amazon takes $8.50 of that sale for their fulfillment, leaving you with a wholesale price of about $11.50 per unit returning to the distributor. Which means 250 units would need to be sold to cover the cost of just the replication. But then most distributors also have to factor in the cost of authoring, QC, shipping, etc. This reduces the margin even more, and means somewhere around 400-500 units need to be sold to break even, or more. If the title were more in demand, and more units were run, then the economics would become simpler. But these smaller films don't have anywhere near that kind of demand.

On a title like Broken Mile, where one company has US (Gravitas) and another has Canada (Indiecan), and Gravitas does Amazon-disc-on-demand as a mandate for 90% of their releases, that would mean two entirely separate releases, one for each territory. So if I pressed for just the Canadian release, at just needing to recoup replication cost (because I do authoring so there is no cost there for me), that means we'd have to sell 250 units just in Canada alone, which is unlikely. The most I'll move is 100-150. And then if I pressed, I'd have 850 units unsold, sitting in boxes in a garage somewhere, and would only make about half my replication money back.

* * * *

The point I'm trying to make is I'm with the fans; I would love to offer pressed discs for these small films, but it wouldn't be a smart financial decision. So I clearly label the burns, make sure they are burned and verified, do them with full artwork, and put the best special edition together I can. They do sell, but it's unfortunate that the die-hard collectors won't touch them. Short of not playing in Xbox One, they have a very low failure rate.

Justin McConnell