
Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’ - zeristor
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53099283
======
koolba
This is the same strategy as getting on the NY Times best seller list by
literally buying lots of copies of your own book[1].

The key innovation is realizing how cheap it would be to make it to the top
with nearly every theater in the USA closed.

[1]:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-
how-you-buy-your-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestsellers-list/)

~~~
teach
I "participated" in a less nefarious strategy. In 2010, when the collection of
short stories "Machine of Death" was about to be released, the editor Ryan
North asked us not to pre-order. Instead, he suggested that we all wait and
purchase the book on the same day from Amazon.

The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which
certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it's a
superb book.

(Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".)

~~~
vmception
> Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day
> from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that
> day.

In my instagram marketing last decade thats what we did.

While others were imagining that people "buy likes", or actually were dealing
with bots, we were doing this for our clients.

Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is
currently private, and all the followers to a private profile get queued up,
you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. when you
unprivate the account, only like 100 of them get approved to follow you at
once, so it adds up like a currency you can spend whenever you want. to mass
approve you have to toggle private and unprivate over and over again, or
approve the requests yourself or via API. either way you can only pull a list
of 100 or so at a time, but you can keep them in the "requested" pool forever
until convenient.

So you can grow an account with like a few hundred followers to a hundred
thousand+ real followers very quickly.

But engagement is more important for the utility value of the account, and so
you can also post an image with all the hashtags and location tags while the
account is private, and let your new followers begin engaging with it. And
then unprivate the account and even more new followers begin engaging with it,
and then it becomes the TOP image in the hashtag.

In prior versions of instagram it would also be in the activity section in a
large web of followers of followers.

For myself I have used one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts
to slide into the DMs of local women. In general on dating apps, women are
funneling people to their instagram profile to ignore them. If you have a
popular account its a night and day difference. I don't even attempt to match
with them on the dating app, I just message them on IG straight away from the
popular account (30K+ followers). Real dates and intimacy off of that, even in
San Francisco. Skips the queue.

~~~
paulryanrogers
So this is a strategy to meet women who value popularity first and foremost?
Sounds like a lot of work to "skip the queue".

~~~
keeganpoppen
not to mention that you get what you deserve wrt. the outcomes / kind of
people this attracts. honestly, seems like good matchmaking to me-- shallow
meets shallow.

~~~
koheripbal
If it works for him, that's his business.

No one asked for your judgements.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Well, by posting on HN I suspect he's seeking more social currency via
upvotes. That is judgment in a sense.

EDIT: Forgot 'posting'

~~~
ReactiveJelly
I'm glad the culture of Instagram has finally trickled up into HN

------
ascar
While reading this I wondered how they ended up at a box office of $25,488.
Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first
in box office?!

If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually
paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all
money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings.

The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 seats [1]. 425 Seats * 5 viewings * $12
a ticket actually ends up at $25,500 or $25,488 if they did not report 1
ticket for whatever reason. As "any money they make off seats goes straight
into their pockets", I suspect they simply sold the tickets of the 425*5 seats
they rented for a flat fee for $12 a seat to themselves and reported that as
Box Office.

[1] [https://whbpac.org/general-information/](https://whbpac.org/general-
information/)

~~~
reaperducer
_Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the
first in box office?!_

According to the TV news this morning, yes, they did buy all of the tickets
themselves.

Which kinda makes the "$0 Budget" headline a little iffy. $0 to make the film.
But $26k to achieve their goal.

~~~
pmiller2
It seems more like $0 to make the movie and $26k for distribution. Do
traditional movies count distribution costs in their budgets? Hollywood
accounting is weird....

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting)

~~~
mattmanser
Read the article, the GP is wrong.

They paid to rent the cinema (small fee), then "sold" themselves the tickets.
So their expenditure might have been $26k, but their income would have been
$26k. In reality, I assume no money changed hands. It's almost more fun to
imagine they sold each other one ticket at time handing the same ten dollars
back and forth between themselves.

They held 5 viewings, making roughly $5k per viewing.

------
sgp_
I spoke with Eric a few months ago to help give a few pointers when he was
considering the idea for this movie. He saw some of the media surrounding
"Monero Means Money," our film that we put together from idea to theaters in a
week. I explained how I cold called theaters who were very willing to show
unusual movies at this time while they have essentially no revenue.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewky/how-a-random-
guy-m...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewky/how-a-random-guy-made-
the-2-movie-in-america-for-dollar1000)

For us, getting a movie on the charts was more of a logistics challenge than
anything, and I assume it was the same for him. Congrats to Eric and everyone
else involved for topping the charts!

------
DevKoala
I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market
to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture.

How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?

~~~
manjalyc
I would say the most important part, and where every company has shot
themselves in the foot is the need for an account. With Zoom you can join
meetings with just a link/code, and while it may seem trivial to us thats a
huge plus for nontechnical people.

That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with
relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck
of timing & advertising is what pulled it all together.

~~~
cecilpl2
This is exactly it.

In March, when everyone suddenly wanted to do group video calls with their
friends and family, most of whom are nontechnical, we settled quickly on Zoom
for ease-of-access. Of all the options, it was the easiest one for me to get
my parents into a family call.

You message someone a link, and they click the big buttons until they are in a
call. No account, no confusion. We had 100% success rate on getting people in.

Also, it's asynchronous unlike something like FB messenger or Facetime (ie it
doesn't push you the meeting, you can pull it at your convenience).

~~~
foobarian
This was another annoying feature of Meet. The meeting organizer is special
and needs to be connected to let people in.

------
leoc
One vaguely related thing is the 1953 jukebox hit, "Three Minutes of Silence"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs)
which delivered on its promise. (It doesn't seem to have a WP page yet. Does
anyone know of a WP-friendly source of information on it?)

Here's a Spotify playlist of various (apparently) silent tracks, useful for
inserting pauses/silent intervals into Spotify playlists as (AFAICT) there
isn't any other way to do so.
[https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fN5YP4n8aGCSS4j3MQoeo?si=...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fN5YP4n8aGCSS4j3MQoeo?si=EKLr6Wl6Q5283j3btyMt-A)
.

------
david_draco
Movies with similar concepts, which were surprisingly good:

\- Searching (2018,
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/))

\- Unfriended (2014,
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/))

~~~
geoffreyy
\- Unfriended - Dark web (2018,
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/))
aren't you thinking of this one instead? I've seen it and it was pretty good.
When I saw your comment I was like, no way it was from 2014.

~~~
jccalhoun
I think that is a sequel to the one from 2014.

------
parsimo2010
"So they pay a flat fee to the theatre..." "In that sense, "we made a slight
loss" on the movie, Mr Tabach said." Oh, so it's _not_ a $0-budget movie.

I suppose they probably get at least that much value in free publicity from
articles like these and us talking about them online. Now they can pitch their
next project as coming from the brilliant minds of chart-topping filmmakers.
Bravo to some guys that figured out how to game the system a little. I hope
enough people rent the movie to get their fee back.

~~~
Jedd
> Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie.

Note that the movie's actual production cost / budget was indeed $0.

In order to then get to the top of this particular list on IMDB - by showing
the movie in an actual cinema - that bit cost some small number of $'s,
according to TFA.

~~~
parsimo2010
In strange Hollywood accounting you're right. But it's a fact of real life
accounting that you can't take a loss on something that cost $0.

------
ant6n
It seems like it would be possible to hack the charts during normal times. It
may involve renting a stadium, designating it a movie theatre and playing the
movie 24h straight (then every 10K seats could create 10k seats * 10$/seat *
10 showings per day = 1 Million $ in revenue).

------
hirundo
Demonstrating Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to
be a good measure."

------
ARandomerDude
The only thing worse than a Zoom meeting would be paying to watch other people
in a Zoom meeting.

~~~
allarm
There’s nothing wrong with Zoom meetings. It’s a great product, if not the
best. Their politics is a different story.

------
swanson
Reminds me of the great "Nathan for You" episode where Nathan creates his own
film festival so that he can award his own movie a judge's prize.

------
gumby
This is quite brilliant, and also instructive. They saw a corner case and took
advantage of it.*

But when you're starting a company this is a danger: you might get some
initial traction but is your growth all in a corner case? This is almost a
restatement of the "early adopter" cohort in "Crossing the Chasm".

Dominating a niche isn't alway bad BTW -- FB's niche was college students, who
could evangelize and grow the overall market.... though notice that FB is
pretty much nonexistent in that niche today.

* I mean this in a good sense: "exploit" and "take advantage of" often imply something shady.

------
quickthrower2
To take to the next level, get some VC welfare. Buy the tickets with
MoviePass, and order the popcorn on Grubhub, and catch an Uber home.

------
peter303
Anyone dream about a Zoom meeting yet? Since I have seen a hundred zooms since
the lockdown, I recall seeing one while dreaming.

------
row_number
A couple of German film Students recently made an Instagram web series [0]
based on video calls in Corona times (subtitled).

[0]
[https://www.instagram.com/curfew_calls/](https://www.instagram.com/curfew_calls/)

------
ansible
Spoiler alert, they talk about significant plot points in the article.

------
chaostheory
Not on the same level but this is semi-Blair Witch genius

------
iamyourcattle
does anyone hav a link to see the movie? thanks in advance

------
flak48
TL;DR Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0
production budget movie at a local movie theater on June 10th.

Which turned out to be more money 'earned' than any other movie in the US that
day, allowing them to top the charts as the highest grossing movie.

Edit: whoops, looks like I may have misunderstood and they probably didn't pay
that much, as replies to this comment are pointing out

~~~
shaftway
Did it cost them that much? I think it wasn't clear on that point. It looks
like they rented the theater out for a fixed fee (since they have connections
to the theater let's say it was $100). Then they can sell tickets and they get
to keep the money for selling said tickets. So they sell tickets to themselves
for $25,488. According to the theater that's the profit for the movie, and
they're only out of pocket $100.

I suspect the $25,488 was so low to keep it believeable.

~~~
geoelectric
either that, or the "ticket revenue" from selling out a full theater was
~$5100. Average theater seats about 2-300 people, so ~$20 a ticket (not sure
of the per-ticket price, but it was the premiere after all) works out at 250
seats.

------
bitwize
I thought four-walling was a conspiracy theory invented by racists, incels,
and Russian bots that is supposedly what Disney did in order to boost the box-
office figures for that totally amazing, legitimately groundbreaking movie
about Captain Marvel.

