ABSTRACT
In today’s market, most of the companies acquiring domestic home entertainment rights from independents for domestic distribution are looking either for specific genre pictures for a price and term that allow them to make a decent profit, or to capitalize on the misfortune of others. By this I mean that they look for producers who have made a “mistake”—generally those who have spent too much money on an off-genre film with a decent cast. A mistake-or a “tweener”—is a picture that falls between the cracks commercially and has not found a theatrical buyer. “Off genre” usually means anything not imminently commercial or genre-specific. Independent films that are “mistakes” also have no theatrical domestic box-office success for television or DVD sales to key off of. The studios and the mainstream have passed on these films and they have perceptually lost value, at which point the acquisition companies swoop in for very little money and pick them up for distribution and usually a very small advance. Uniformly the producers, filmmakers, and financiers for these films did not do their due diligence and follow the TAP parameters.
