ABSTRACT
The concept of supply and demand came up repeatedly in conversations with sales agents, distributors, lawyers, accountants and other industry personnel when talking about the challenges facing today’s filmmakers. Technology in the film space used to be quite archaic. There are video clips online of old-style film editing machines the size of refrigerators. Not long ago, Blockbuster Video and other video stores could be counted on for thousands of DVD sales, even for mediocre movies – thus the boom in the “straight-to-video” film market. Also, foreign markets could be counted on to “pre-buy” many films just based on a poster, title, cast list, genre and story idea. A “pre-buy,” also known as a “negative pickup,” is when a distributor (usually, a foreign buyer) buys the movie prior to the movie even being finished.
