Oscar-winning director, Steven Soderbergh, has partnered with Decentralized Pictures to launch a $300,000 grant on the blockchain film finance platform. Decentralized Pictures is a crypto-powered film fund. The Ocean’s Eleven director’s production company Extension 765 will offer $300,000 pot money to support filmmakers with finishing funds for English-language feature films or shorts.
Soderbergh told IndieWire that this is kind of an experiment. He wants to see if blockchain film financing really does work. The acclaimed director wants to get up in the grill of this blockchain approach to see if its going to do what its supposed to do. Soderbergh, known for directing blockbusters such as Oscar-winning Eric Brockovich and Magic Mike has past form when it comes to cinematic experiments.
It should be noted that Soderbergh’s 2017 film Logan Lucky was funded through pre-selling foreign distribution rights. His 2018 thriller Unsane had a similar funding model. The director had said that the approach to funding would bring about complete transparency. There is no intermediary. And the money is not passing through anybody’s hands. The people who work for scale to make the film will be able to go online with a password and look at the account. The money is delivered from the theaters.
Decentralized Pictures is working towards bringing a similar level of transparency to indie film financing through crypto. It is calling filmmakers to submit movie pitches, paying the submission fees in the project’s native token FILMCredits (FILM). The submission fees go into a smart contract. It pays members of the DCP community for reviewing projects and completing other tasks and supporting the community. Decentralized Pictures wants to create an evergreen, self-sustaining film fund to support independent artists and artists. It wants to help the underrepresented communities move forward.
