Blowtorch Raises $50 Million to Launch a New Hollywood Studio
Erick Schonfeld
29 comments »
Kelly Rodriques and Paul Schiff are creating a new Hollywood studio from scratch called Blowtorch Entertainment. The company is just launching with a $50 million investment from Ignition Partners, Hollywood individuals, and at least one (unnamed) hedge fund. Rodriques was a partner at Ignition, and before that a digital ad executive. Schiff is the Hollywood producer behind Rushmore, My Cousin Vinny, and Date Movie. Rodriques and Schiff came by my office earlier this week to brief me on Blowtorch.
Blowtorch wants to make cult movies that appeal to college kids. It plans to make or acquire 18 feature-length films over the next three years at about $5 million a pop. (That hedge fund will be providing an additional $40 million a year to pay for it all). “We want to be in the Napoleon Dynamite business,” says Rodriques. As it is making these films, it wants to involve the potential audience to a greater degree than ever before through its Website, where people will be able to help cast movies (we’ve heard that idea recently) or pick the songs for the soundtrack, among other ideas. “It can’t be anarchy,” warns Schiff. “We won’t have a movie at the end of the process if everyone’s vote counts and impacts the project equally. But we still want the audience to participate in some way.”
So in addition to helping to steer the development of each movie, Blowtorch audience members will get a shot at having their own videos shown in theaters alongside the feature films. Here’s how it will work: On the site, which is not much more than a placeholder right now, people will be able to watch additional digital shorts made by Blowtorch, as well as upload their own videos. All the videos on the site will be voted on, and spread virally through Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, and other social applications. The audience-made videos that get the most votes then will be professionally reshot and included in a 5-to-15-minute pre-show collection that will be shown in theaters before each of Blowtorch’s feature films.
Blowtorch has already cut deals with 600 theaters nationwide near college campuses and in urban areas that will dedicate one screen to Blowtorch Nights every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Audience members in the theaters will also be able to vote for the digital shorts as they are watching them through their mobile phones and send links to the videos to their friends elsewhere. So you won’t actually have to be in the theater to be connected to the experience. Vivendi will distribute Blowtorch’s feature-length movies once they go to DVD, pay-per-view, cable, TV, and digitally as well through places like iTunes and Amazon.
The first Blowtorch movie, You Are Here, a film-festival darling that the studio bought, will come out next April. The movie is about LA club kids who talk about one particularly insane night. One idea Schiff and Rodriques have is for one of the movie’s actresses, Bijou Phillips, to solicit video confessionals on the the Blowtorch Website from the audience about their craziest night ever. Then the best ones could be packaged with the film when it goes to theaters.
When the full-blown site launches in early December, there will be three main tabs: Front Row, Entourage, and Studio. Front Row will be the place where people can share videos and vote for them. It is where the popular stuff will be. Entourage will be the place where people can organize their social networks around their media preferences, bring in their friends from other social sites to vote on their stuff, or bring in videos from YouTube and elsewhere to throw into the mix. Studio is where they will submit original videos, and where marketing partners will be able to solicit material as well for their own viral video campaigns.
What strikes me about Blowtorch is that it is a movie company that is thinking like a cable channel. But instead of TV shows, it wants to create nichebusters that appeal to the 18-to-24-year-old audience. “One of the things exciting for me,” says Schiff, “is we are targeting a specific audience and narrowcasting to them on a consistent basis.” He talks about “programming that channel.” But there is no channel per se. It is wherever that audience wants to be—on the Web, in the theaters, on their mobile phones. You will notice, though, that Blowtorch is not creating a television channel. There is just so much more opportunity elsewhere.
haha, $50M for a fresh movie studio. Interesting?
Oh, and in response to: “We want to be in the Napoleon Dynamite business,” … best of luck with that! It was an amazing movie bootstrapped on a slim tiny budget.
The idea of collective intelligence from fans and users? Not too shabby. I’ll give them some credit to this, depending on how well its implemented on the site.
The fact that they already have deals with 600 theaters means a lot. Props to you guys.
The idea’s interesting… the preparation and thinking has been thought out, and to be honest, there’s not as much here to diss as I normally do.
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We can’t wait to start submitting our videos.
Thanx for making our day with this story!
“Rodriques and Kelly came by my office earlier this week to brief me on Blowtorch.”
Are these different people or one person who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder?
Meh. TC is reaching.
Date Movie was one of the worst movies ever (Rushmore rocked though).
Ignition’s moved to funding ‘later stage’ companies with their new fund, but they put 10s of millions into a low budget studio???
HOWEVER, I think this is a great idea and look forward to see what comes out of it.
Interesting idea. I didn’t like napoleon Dynamite much but some low-budget movies often have a much more interesting plot/stories than high budget movies. But, finding enough small budget mvies enough every year to keep the 50 mio usd a good investment might prove not so easy.
interesting.
The name and logo and concept RULE!! Sometimes the winners are easy to spot.
I like this innovative idea where the users can organize their social networks around their media preferences, bring in their friends from other social sites to vote on their stuff.
“Blowtorch Raises $50 Million to Launch a New Hollywood Studio”
Must be a small studio.
Props for wrangling 600 theaters, but it must suck to announce the funding write as the writer’s strike begins.
Good luck competing with the rogues out there … I cant imagine this working in the long term when music and soon movies will be “open source” … better find another way to make money (take a page from the MySQL’s Red Hats etc.)
“…One idea Kelly and Rodriques have…”
finkle, einhorn, finkle, einhorn….
Kelly IS Rodriques…. “Kelly and Schiff” perhaps?
What happens when Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight, etc. outbid them for the titles they’re hot for? Millions can’t compete with billions, but I applaud their efforts.
this post is a mess erick. names mixed up. broken links. aren’t you guys pros or something….?
This is a very good idea, but obviously the proof is in the content. It’s hard to consistently recapture the energy (zeitgeist, if you will) of quirky cult hits. Has anybody able to recreate the Blair Witch Project, Napoleon Dynamite, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or anything like that? Nope, not even the original directors and writers of those projects.
Blowtorch is going to have to spend a lot of time looking for talent if they don’t want to destroy their reputation right out of the gate with content on par with Date Movie. They’re going to consistently find the next Kevin Smiths, Robert Rodriguezes (??), Sam Raimi-s, etc.. (Plural names that end in ’s’? How?)
And consider this: Some of the best college student movies were made by directors who had already directed films that were far more mainstream - The Big Lebowski and Harold And Kumar are good examples. Sometimes directors with one cult hit try to go back to the well and repeatedly come up short - Broken Lizard with Super Troopers is a great example of that.
Anyway, my point is that it’s a really good idea but even with funding it will be very difficult to execute.
I appear to be great with typos this morning.
First paragraph: “Has anybody able to recreate” should obviously be “Has anybody been able to recreate,”
Second paragraph: “They’re going to consistently” should be “They’re going to have to consistently” etc.
Argh! No Edit button!
Genius! $5mm / movie is a big budget.
I love the first wave college, second wave gen pop idea. I also love doing promo nights one night a week at a theatre.
Really like this idea. Maybe this way we will actually get to see some original movies, rather than the typical Hollywood sequel of sequels of something that was once a good movie.
Sounds like great idea, but what happens when most of their movies make no money? Will they start to go down the same route as the big studios or will they go the route of youtube and have a few decent videos but mostly crappy ones with no stories.
I like the idea, but searching for “cult” movies isn’t exactly how it usually works. Cult followings don’t just happen cause some studio makes only low budget movies.
the big image in the post… the link is still borked….
editor, eh?
sounds like Fox Atomic
The first link is broken…! Fix that