Institutional Information

As our film is a short film that we're creating ourselves within our local area, we felt it unnecessary to need the aid of a production company in the making of the film. However, in order for our film to be seen by as many people as possible, we decided that it would be necessary to have a distribution company. This is mind, I've set out to find one that will fulfil our needs as an independant film company based in the UK.

After looking at some of the big distributors such as Universal, Lionsgate, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. it became clear that independant films are not of interest to these companies due to the small amount of income they would bring to them. Therefore, when looking at distributors for our film we would be looking at smaller distribution companies that aim to mainly just promote inside the UK. As a result, I will be looking at smaller distribtution companies that like to distribute independant films, and I will look at:  Icon films, The Independant Film Company and Metradome Group.


On their website, Icon Films says: "Formed in 1999, Icon Film Distribution is one of the UK’s leading independent film distributors generating in excess of £150m at the box office" which tells us, from the first look, that this company would be a really good company to enquire to due to the calibre of the work they do. From looking at the titles of the films this comapny has distributed it is clear that the genre of our films fits in with the other films they have distributed, namely Paranormal Activity, the Butterfly Effect films and The Grudge 3. With Paranormal Activity as a case study, it is clear that they are an effective distributor (even though they teamed up with a bigger distributor) as the production of the film cost around £9000, but making a huge £119,042,762. 

The Independant Film Company, however, says that they specialise "in the development, financing, production and distribution of independent feature films" which puts our film, being just a short and not a feature, at the botttom of their list of potential films. However, if they were to agree to distribute our film, one of their main ways of distribution is by sending  their films to film festivals. Some examples are What We Did On Our Holiday (starring David Tenant, Billy Connally and Rosamund Pike), The Falling (starring Maisie Williams and Maxine Peake) and Starred Up (starring Jack O'Connell, Rupert Friend and Ben Mendelsohn). Starred Up had a budget of £2 million, however, it has so far made £31.1K in the US and from this it seems unlikely that the film will make much of a profit, if any. 

Metradome Group says "Metrodome is a fully integrated rights management and distribution business which provides its industry expertise to maximise revenues for producers of film and TV content across all distribution platforms in the UK" and this puts it as a good contender to distribute our film. From examples it is clear that Metradome specialise in distributing DVDs, and one example of theirs is The Gatekeepers (2012), which had a production budget of $1.5million, and in box office has made $2,408,503, which shows it has clearly made a large profit.

Overall, from this research I think it's clear that the institution that would be best for the distribution of our film is Icon Films, with big distributional partners and the ability to distribute films that go on to achieve "the most profitable film of all time" (Paranormal Activity).