So I just watched the new Prey movie. It was great really enjoyed it. It came to streaming directly (Hulu for US), no theaters , no ticket prices, heck you didn’t even have to pay any money to rent it or buy it.
My question is, how does it make any movie if I didn’t have to pay any money to watch it.
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It can generally work one of two ways:
* Someone can make a movie that they maybe want/hope to be in theaters, but no one wants to buy it and put it in theaters (marketing movies and putting them in theaters is what “distributors” do, if you ever hear that term). If no distributor wants it, they can then sell it to a streaming service. In that case, it’s almost always a flat fee to the producers of the movie which hopefully at least covers their costs of making the movie and maybe some profit too. For a movie like Prey, likely tens of millions went from Hulu to the producers. So Hulu pays and then it’s up to Hulu to hope that they get enough interest in the movie to create increased subscriptions or people not cancelling that were going to cancel or from ad revenue to cover that cost (and hopefully make a profit).
* The other option is that the streaming service is involved from the beginning and is part of financing the making of the movie itself. Netflix has been doing this a lot. In that case it can be more complicated at least as far as how Netflix might be paying out to any other producers. If Netflix is putting up all of the money, then it’s not even an issue. They are just hoping what they spend makes enough people want to have Netflix subscriptions to help cover their spending.
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