TRE SNABBA: The Great Transition, Industry Stats, and Kickstarter

Every few weeks I write up a quick summary of three trends, news items, or craft insights that impacts the screen industries. I do this for the regional resource center BoostHBG and the original post in Swedish can be found here.

This issue focused on the insights on the future of the industry that came out of SXSW, especially the always excellent keynote presentation given by Amy Webb. I really encourage everyone to take an hour to listen to her discuss the future of the industry and the world around us.

I also looked at some fresh industry stats from the European Audiovisual Observatory which depressingly showed that while progress has been made in equality there is still a long way left before parity. But one of the stats that really stayed with me was that the average writer in the European film industry worked on only 1.3 films during the period 2015-2021. That’s a pretty demoralizing statistic when you think about this as a profession that people want to build a sustainable career around. The numbers were only slightly better for writers in the TV space. The questions that come to mind is why it looks like this, how this work is distributed and how professionals make a living doing it?

The final area I looked at was Kickstarter and crowdfunding triggered by this article from Indiewire. It’s been 10 years since Veronica Mars pulled in $5 million on the platform changed the nature of the game. One thing that I hadn’t considered before was how the explosion of the global streamers might have derailed projects of a similar nature trying to use crowdfunding as their financing method. It will be interesting to see if, now that the streaming companies all seem focused on finally turning a profit and thus tightening budgets, there will be a resurgence.

cough Six of Crows spin off cough