Deep inside an oil refinery, a serial killer gets ready to pounce on a police detective risking her life to entrap him. You see everything from the killer’s perspective, with the full creative power of Alfred Hitchcock inspired by avant-garde Italian cinema techniques.
And so goes a pivotal scene in Hitchcock’s film Kaleidoscope. There’s only one problem: Kaleidoscope was never made.
In fact, if Hitchcock hadn’t funded the production of Psycho when the studio executives refused it a few years earlier, that quintessential horror classic may have been one of the best movie ideas not made.
But shouldn’t a creator’s sole responsibility be creating, with no pressure to consider how funding will work out, let alone provide it themselves? The movies never made because of lack of self-funding make the answer a resounding yes.
What’s more, some near-misses with treasured and innovative screenplays underscore studio heads’ shortsightedness from a screenwriter’s perspective, too. No less than the likes of Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects show this amply. Turned down largely because of their non-linear plotlines, both eventual classics could have easily become just two more of the best screenplays never made.
While Pulp Fiction’s screenplay was turned down in one case for being “too demented”, the screenplay isn’t what’s really crazed. Rather, it’s always letting a centralized few choose what movies are made and hardly letting fans and creators call the shots at all.
Although the frustrated screenwriter’s murder in The Player is an extreme and fictional act, its figurative similarity to what happens in the real world of Hollywood just hits too close to home for comfort.
Entrusting Your Love of Film to Flights of Fancy
If Robert Zemeckis’s Romancing the Stone hadn’t been made beforehand, Back to the Future—an obvious instant classic now—may have been one of the best movie ideas not made. In the case of this blockbuster, multiple studios gave exactly opposing reasons to reject it, too naughty for some but too tame for others.
Such sharp subjectivity shows the established movie industry’s all-too-frequent preference for conformity over originality, too. For example, it would be hard to imagine filmdom without Quentin Tarantino, but if it weren’t for a party invitation that led to Reservoir Dogs, his finished work might not have ever gotten started.
But even then, what if potential directors don’t happen to live in the “right” zip codes? Considering that Hollywood is just one small part of a much larger country and the world, the right question seems more like when than if.
With odds like that, how many great movie ideas not made could have been?
But Hollywood Is Good at Picking Out Successful Movies, Right?
With more than 110 years of history, you’d think the American movie industry would usually know what people really want and then greenlight films accordingly. However, 80% of movies lose money, with the many losses outweighed by returns from a few big blockbusters.
For that matter, what does Hollywood's monopoly mean for filmmakers who have great ideas and potential mass appeal but who simply lack the right venue, resources, or connections? Unfortunately, the answer is a wealth of great movie ideas not made.
Hollywood’s long history of exclusion underscores such lacks. A UCLA report states that in 2020 only 20.5% of directors and 26% of film writers were women, with only 25.4% of directors and 25.9% of film writers representing all minority groups. While progress has been made recently, much of it has been ascribed to the pandemic, a huge event but a one-off all the same.
In short, Hollywood makes movies people enjoy, but not enough of the right ones to please a greater possible fan base and creator pool.
But you’re in luck.
The first completely in-house Hollywood film may have been In Old California in 1910, but there’s a new, more democratic sheriff in town, and its name is blockchain — movie industry bigwigs take note!
Going Where No Good Film Can Be Ignored
So how does Film.io’s innovative blockchain platform do it? By letting fans — and not just established filmdom’s finaglers of finance — drive its ecosystem.
Specifically, fans earn FAN movie tokens by staking their tokens in the projects they support among the platform’s treasure trove of selections. Film.io allows users to stake FAN movie token rewards in the projects they support and want to see get the greenlight, by assisting in unlocking the projects’ unique market-validated ‘Go Score.’ We are putting the power of what gets made into the hands of the fans.
At the same time, Film.io makes sure that creators’ masterpieces stay out of the greatest- movie-ideas-not-made category unfairly, as it rewards creators of a wider variety of backgrounds more fairly and more purely for their creativity than Hollywood’s sometimes misguided movie machine usually can.
So, how does it work for creators? Film.io liberates creators with equal access to a fair and unbiased blockchain ecosystem, where they can gain market validation and build an audience for their projects.
Creators will be provided a proof of originality timestamp via the company's patent-pending VaultLock® technology, or what the Film.io calls “Proof of Originality.” The Proof of Originality is an immutable entry in the blockchain that can be used to support ownership of a creator’s project based on when they first submitted their idea.
Through Film.io’s blockchain, film creators can thus find secure ownership and robust development of their ideas, within a community of aficionados literally staking their crypto and love of film to make the creators’ visions successful.
Not only that, writers, producers, and directors can share their projects as they build a motivated and collaborative fan base, connect with other industry professionals, and be discovered by companies who acquire content.
Behind the scenes, Film.io’s process is fueled and protected by the super security, transparency, and community only a decentralized blockchain film solution can provide.
Film.io will be the world’s first open and inclusive entertainment industry platform designed to connect creators, fans and film investors to define the future of film.
We do not want to replace Hollywood, but merely advance efficiency and inclusivity. We intend to complement the traditional studios by providing diverse and market-validated content while also encouraging change to Hollywood’s existing exclusivity ethos.
Film.io and its groundbreaking decentralized film financing platform stand to free movies and their makers from “old California” and lead them to a new world of classics that could have never been made without them.
Who knows how many original, compelling stories can be told with Film.io’s revolutionary blockchain movie industry platform?
