Straight to iTunes
Ed Burns - actor, writer, director and saviour of Johnny Drama - has a new movie, and it's going direct-to-itunes. Rather than try and distribute the indie movie nationally, Burns is focusing on screening the movie in festivals, but distributing it to the masses with a four week exclusive deal on iTunes (probably US only for now).
According to Burns, "Purple Violets is probably the best film that I've ever made. It's a small, talky drama, dramedy, and there's absolutely no audience for the film, theatrically, I'm sad to say. We got a couple of half-assed theatrical offers, but the last couple films I've done I've done that and, you know you do all this publicity and then the movie's released in New York and LA, and maybe Chicago and San Francisco, and if you're anywhere outside of those four major cities, your audience can't find it. So, we're gambling and we're gonna be the first film that is released exclusively through iTunes. It'll be available for four weeks exclusively, and the idea is we'll promote it the same as you would a theatrical release and we'll see what the numbers are. If the attendance, if the downloads, which we expect to be a much higher numbers than the attendance, I think it'll be the way I would go in the future for small movies like this. You know, and then we'll do more festivals than you might normally, so you can hit kinda smaller markets for the theatrical experience, but for everyone else it's available, kinda like what people do…"
24th Sep 2007 - Tumblr