Scorsese’s Hollywood Producer fights to save indie films with NFTs

Cue your best baritone movie-trailer voice… annnd ACTION!!!… “In a world where superhero franchises and insignificant sequels threaten independent filmmakers… only one thing can save them… N. F. Teeees”

That’s the view of Martin Scorsese’s go-to Executive Producer, Niels Juul. And, being behind some of Hollywood’s most recent blockbusters including The Irishman, Silence, and Michael Mann’s 2023 Enzo Ferrari biopic, he’s clearly no stranger to the ins and outs of Tinseltown.

But as impressive as his IMDB profile is, he’s quite frustrated with how the current monopolisation by the big four streaming platforms (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Apple TV) is jeopardising the “cultural agenda of the world”.

Speaking to YahooFinance’s The Crypto Mile, he voiced his concerns:

“Even though I’ve worked with Netflix and Amazon, the four big streaming players are only focused on hunting for the greatest market share… so the decision-making of what content audiences can see is in the hands of just four companies.” He continues “Ironically these companies are setting the cultural agenda of the world, so content creation has become a monopoly… not only a financial monopoly but more importantly, and more scarily, a cultural monopoly.”

Some of Hollywood’s greatest cultural achievements have been ‘indie films‘; American Beauty, SE7EN, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, The Graduate, The Blair Witch Project, Black Swan (I could go on – seriously the list is impressive). Even Star Wars started life as an indie film. We’ll return to this later.

Indie films are essentially the ladder that’s given rise to the world’s best Directors; David Lynch, Kathryn Bigelow, Darren Aronofsky and Michel Gondry.

And it’s precisely the threat of tomorrow’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest likely being rejected by the big four’s “cultural monopoly” that’s worrying Niels:

“A lot of producer friends of mine with amazing material and great scripts of movies of the type that would get made back in the day, like Kramer vs Kramer, or the Usual Suspects… that today they have an incredibly hard time getting made.”

He cites the studio overheads being “just too big” for them to waste time or take creative risks on sub-twenty million dollar movies. As a result:

“the independent movie finance market has dried up considerably over the last five or 10 years… the studios started only concentrating on big Marvel franchises… the independent film market got demolished, almost.”

And this is why, as he says, “there is a big need for disruption into the film financing model.”

During his quest for disruption, a friend suggested he check out NFTs. And after seeing how NFTs and BlockChain technology is disrupting other industries (music, art, finance etc) he quickly realised  “this could be a new way of financing movies and a way of creating a community that could rally around a movie.”

This has led Neils and a collective of partners to form NFT Studios, a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), that will (and already is) harnessing the innovations NFTs and blockchain technology enable.

As the NFT Studios site says “NFT Studios is pioneering the ways in which films are developed. Our mission is to bring creators closer to the audience than ever before utilizing the bleeding edge technologies of Web3.”

This mission to create ‘decentralised filmmaking’ can ultimately streamline the production process while simultaneously giving more creative license to content creators.

The site further explains: “The DAO structure of NFT Studios will allow community engagement like never before, with members participating in governance votes in order to shape and create the movies they want to see, as well as receive perks for holding NFTs.

The ‘perks’ they speak of, are where it gets really interesting. Tokenisation and fractional ownership enabled by NFTs could not only help fund filmmaking, but it also has the potential to revolutionise the entire industry.

One of the many opportunities would see NFT buyers essentially becoming producers, who help fund films while also receiving a profit share in perpetuity. And not just from the film, but lucrative merchandise too.

As I promised earlier, we only need to look at Star Wars for proof of how well this rights ownership model can work. It’s said that while negotiating his directing fee in 1975, rather than George Lucas take a higher offer of $500,000, he settled on his original $150,000 fee on the proviso the merchandising and sequel rights remained with him. And in 2012 he sold LucasFilm to Disney for $4.1billion.

While another Star Wars may be unlikely, film collectables are already an established and booming market estimated between £245million – £330million.

The advent of NFTs will now not only provide undeniable proof of ownership to owners, but those original owners can embed fractional ownership into the collectables they sell. Thus generating perpetual income from every secondary sale of their once-owned rare collectables. Imagine the even bigger offer Disney would’ve made if George Lucas had this compounding opportunity in his 1975 contract. 🤔

As Neils says “that is what’s exciting about crypto, it offers a new opportunity, a new way of not only revolutionising the way things are financed but actually also moving the agenda a little bit culturally in a way that is not just being about the bottom line.”

We’ll have to wait and see if NFTs will be the kryptonite to the powerful superhero franchises. But if NFTs help save the independent filmmaking world from cultural armageddon, that’s a triumph we’ll take.