At the moment, I am entertaining the thought of a non-theatrical screening of Serenity next summer. And I would appreciate some input from anyone who has already attempted/accomplished it.

Did you get your licensing through Swank? What kind of experience did you have dealing with them?

Was the pricing structure problematic? How did you deal with that?

What were some of the other issues you encountered?

By having a non-theatrical screening, what were you able to accomplish that would have been restricted by a theatrical screening?

Thanks!

one advantage is that you can control a lot more of the event. food, drinks, technical stuff

disadvantage... people get annoyed its not a 35mm version.

The disadvantage being that you can't advertise it (unless we had some sort of arrangement with Universal saying that if we had to go the DVD route, we could still nonetheless advertise, but I don't recall.)

Whoa! Hold on a second! Non-theatrical screenings can't advertise?!

As in, no print ads in the local paper? Not even flyers posted at the local hobby shop?

Clearly this requires a great deal more research and inquiry.

Thanks, Miranda & b!X

Anyone else?

That's the standard, because non-theatrical rights normally are for things like nursing homes, libraries, prisons, churches, etc., where you just let your membership know.

But, as I said, I don't recall offhand if that's the case for us. Devin would know, but I think we might have had a deal in place this year that if a city was using a non-theatrical venue and needed to use the DVD, it was technically under the same terms as using a film print, and therefore advertising and whatnot was still fair game.

But I don't remember. So Devin needs to answer that one.

Thanks, b!X. When you explain it that way it makes perfect sense -- just not for our purposes.

It's too bad the old forum was lost. I bet most of this info was contained therein. I'm going back and searching the Yahoo group now. There's some comments from 2006 screenings.

Yeah the trick is that the 2006 info might not be relevant if there was something new Devin got put into place for such circumstances.

we werent told of any restrictions on advertising. maybe it was a US thing? i might have to check with Tim next year about that

Sweet!

Thanks, Big D!

Also potentially problematic: if you're charging admission, you may be paying a minimum guarantee vs. a percentage of the gross receipts, whichever is higher, and that could be a huge chunk of change. Just make sure you know before you sign whether the fee is flat or a minimum guarantee.

I spoke to someone at Swank. Man, non-theatrical screenings are a quirky deal.

But the bottom line is that they quoted me a licensing fee of $250 or 50% of the ticket revenue (whichever is higher). That's a lot more reasonable than I expected.

And even though I was griping about the stricter advertising, I realized that we have an e-mail address for almost all of our 200 attendees from this past summer. Sending an "internal e-mail" to advertise is what we intended to do anyway.
Throw in the fact that, according to Devin, we can still post flyers at our local comic shops. It's really not as restictive as I thought.

So I think I may explore this non-theatrical avenue a bit more.

Thanks, everybody!