This should be a golden era for movie-makers. Everyone has a video camera in their pocket. Distribution is as easy as uploading, and word of mouth about a good movies can spread like a meme on social media. Budding auteurs with good ideas and talent should be able to showcase their ability and land piles of money from studios and national distributors.
And yet, walk into any multi-screen cineplex and all you’ll be able to see is a dozen different kinds of Marvel movies and the 353rd installment of Fast and Furious.
The problem is centralization. Good movies cost money. Big screens are reserved by distributors. And the people who make commissioning and distribution decisions prefer to bet on ideas that have already proven themselves.
“If you’re a filmmaker and you have a good idea, if you’re part of this exclusive group, with the best agents or the best crew, best screenwriter, best distributor, you can make a good movie,” Alveena Khalid, Growth Director and co-creator at Film.io told the Bad Crypto Podcast. “But if you’re not, the odds are not in your favor to really scale your movie and get the same level of attention.”
Film.io is a new Web3 platform that’s trying to decentralize the movie business. Creators submit their projects to the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Fans receive tokens which they can stake and use to vote during the development of the movie from planning the story to choosing distribution options. Instead of depending on a small group of people with pre-defined tastes and a spreadsheet of proven ideas to approve, creators can offer their concepts to a broad audience and keep them involved through the creation process.
The platform is releasing two kinds of tokens. Creators share FAN tokens with future viewers who like the look of their movies, allowing them to vote and stake on projects. As fans place their stakes, they can build their reputations and increase their governance power.
The use of those tokens also demonstrates the popularity and future success of a movie idea. Because investors can see which movies are receiving the most stakes and have the most active communities, they can invest in projects with higher chances of success.
FILM tokens help to build the platform’s financial features through crowdfunding, DeFi loans, and NFT campaigns. The tokens can be used as collateral for delegated CrowdLoans while HODlers enjoy whitelist access to NFT drops, priority access and preferred valuations on project funding campaigns.
Film.io is also offering NFT as a Service. Creators can make and distribute their own NFTs without the challenge of recruiting artists and minting the tokens themselves.
The platform, which is currently in Phase 1 of a FAN Token airdrop to pull in projects and creators, isn’t the first alternative to mainstream movie-making. Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter were created with creative projects in mind. But the addition of a DAO to token-based crowdfunding broadens the decentralization. Not only can fans fund films, they can also vote on their development. It could be the start of a whole new democratic era for movie-making.
