Film Courage: Can we talk about your two or three most successful movies and then
in contrast your two or three movies that weren't a success?
J. Horton: We're talking financial?
Film Courage: Correct.
J. Horton, Filmmaker/Youtuber/Podcaster: My most financially successful movie in my career
was probably Edges Of Darkness which I did in 2008. It made I want to say it ’96 it was 96
000 in the first quarter when it came out this was in two eight so in Anchor Bay was the U.S
distributor it got a huge DVD release it was in like it was one of those titles at Blockbuster
where most Indie titles there'll be like one two or three this had like rows oh they're rows
six or seven it was all over Hollywood Video and it I I don't think I'll I probably won't
ever have one that does that good again well hopefully I will but that one did really well
and honestly it was just and I wasn't involved in the distribution or marketing of it because it was
all through Anchor Bay and Shoreline was our sales agent but I think it that came down to just it was
the it was the right genre at the right time it was before walking dead or right at the beginning
of Walking Dead I can't remember which but it was like zombie stuff and I did the the sub genre
combining thing so it was zombies it was a zombie apocalypse but it was a story about vampires
trying to survive in the zombie apocalypse zombies are eating all their food so I think that that
mishmash really helped it and it was also it was a very diverse cast at a time when diverse casting
wasn't happening that much at that level and that that did that did well in the documentaries
I did one two years ago called Alien Contactee and to be frank it's technically not one of my better
documentaries it's mostly a single interview we had trouble with the sound it's not the
best shot I didn't have really good b-roll for it but the the subject the interviewee he was
so engaging and he had such a strong following that wants and needs his information that it did
really well it was doing four or five thousand a month for almost a year and this is something
that we made literally for nothing shot the interview with the guy I think I edited it in
six or seven days really quick and and didn't have much hope for it I was kind of I'll see what it
does and it it took off sorry who was the is he an expert yeah yeah his name's Louise Dr. Louis Turi
he's a astrology guy and he speaks he was an alien contact to you as someone that's had experiences
meeting or seeing aliens and he has a website where people sign up and they get his astrology
stuff and he has a pretty big following so one thing especially in the screaming world if you
have a subject or an actor that's going to gain or a influencer that's going to gain a lot of
early momentum for your movie that momentum can carry it to a bigger audience because they're
basically training the algorithm who to show the movie to so if you have a movie Alien Contactee
where this guy has I think he had maybe 10 000 regular subscribers on his website which isn't a
huge number but if you have five or six thousand of them that watch that movie in the first week
and they're all perfectly targeted for him so the algorithm is going to show it the more people
them and that's how things go viral and that it basically went the Amazon equivalent of viral
it did really well did and that was one that ended up getting purged on Amazon but then it
later it got picked back up later and started making money again just not quite as much and
it stayed steady and it keeps getting on new platforms it's doing well on YouTube
really really well and then another one in the Paranormal was the I want to believe it was a
UFO documentary we went to a UFO convention and just like bum rushed the speakers hey can we get
yoga in the corner and shoot an interview for 50 minutes we had one guy that agreed to do a
two-hour with us and that was Nick Pope who he used to be the British shoot I forget this title
something in defense like his he was basically the British Mulder and from X-Files and he would
so he we interviewed him for two hours so he was kind of the the the main part of it and we
interviewed another six people for it but did all the interviews over the course of two days I think
I spent I spent less than a month editing it yeah maybe three weeks and it was a lot of stock b-roll
and then b-roll from the convention but but it turned out really well and that Community I think
was really hungry for a documentary that wasn't all woo-woo and exploitive it was just very like
brass tacks this is what ufology is this is why we believe in it that that continues it was never
one of those that just took off and did 5 000 in a month or nothing I think the most it ever made in
the month was maybe 1500 but it's been out for two years and it's it's stayed there every month yeah
and it's getting on new platforms it just it just kicked off on a new YouTube channel and it's doing
really well so that continues to do great and then narrative wise the the company I was working for
and again I I don't have their books I just have their word for it but the talking dog Movie that
that probably that probably outdid the Edges Of Darkness maybe five or six hundred thousand
and then the ones that didn't do so well what do you think was the difference so
rise of the undead my first one and trap that was my third movie both of those I really made them
in the dark not thinking about audience or any of that I'm just this is the movie I'm going to make
I don't know who's going to watch it or where I'm just going to make it and try to find distribution
and I did but neither of those movies did very well you know rise the undead in the
first iteration of that we never I didn't and I didn't see anything off of it the it was a
we did the deal with York entertainment who was pretty notoriously not great back then
that are not in business anymore and then trap I'm trying to remember who distributed trap
I don't even remember I don't remember rooster but we I didn't make much money from this that
one actually was only with a distributor for about a year and then I talked them into releasing me
from the contract and did self-distribution with it made a little bit and that and trap
was so low budget that I think it actually did eventually make its budget back it was I
think we made it for five but not well not that well but the bigger one that really and the one
that pretty much made me almost quit filmmaking was the campus or it's called death day now ITN
changed the title so that just that one kills me so we we shot it in 2018 and I I'd done all
the other movies and I was basically trying to follow the business plan that AMG the company
I worked for had laid out do a movie for around 50 000 you have these elements keep it low and
it was a single location horror movie it had a mix of zombies ghosts and what do you call it a
stalker/slasher movie it was it was a woman that was dying over and over and every time
she died she would come back in a different horror movie scenario a little death day but which is why
they happy death day which is why the distributor actually changed the title to death day to write
off those coattails but anyway we we finished it off and what had happened was this was right so we
greenlit the movie right as I was Amazon was about at its peak and has this movie was greenlits when
Amazon did their first take it from whatever 15 cents an hour to five cents an hour took it
down and the market DVD it was already shrinking but it shrank really crazy between 2017 and 2018
the market just wasn't there anymore not not it was so the movie came out and I was I was
projecting it at a minimum it was going to make 3 000 a month but I was expecting more
20 000 a month came out it made twelve hundred dollars a month one it made a thousand dollars
a month to 700 month three it was down to four on month four and then I was ah and the other
big problem was I initially I did not go with distribution I was I'm going to self-distribute
this I'm going to do the Amazon thing and then I'll let Filmhub do the other things so I and I
just done the Amazon and it just wasn't going I was God we're never going to make even close to
the budget back and I had all of these investors and people talking about hey we need our money
back so I got a little bit desperate and I need to find a distributor for it and at that point
we'd already released it so a lot of distributors won't touch it so I found a sales agent that could
make a deal with ITN and ITN would take it so I did and the sales agent deal I just I didn't do
my due diligence it wasn't a great deal and we I think the movie made around $30,000 in the first
year and we never saw any of it so I ended up threatening legal action against the sales agent
I got out of that deal and now my deals directly with ITN so I get the money directly from them
but that 30 was already gone and it had already done its two years so it's now it makes about a
thousand dollars or less a quarter and that money you'll just I that I'll never be able
to pay those people back unless I do it out of pocket which I've kind of started to do
but yeah and it was just I didn't I my eye wasn't on the ball I was I was distracted by
some other things and other business stuff and it just it didn't work out
do you think you'll ever use a sales agent again I would never use a sales agent again
never and I'm not saying that they're not good ones or whatnot but I just think that
the market has changed the only reason I even went to that one in the first place was because I made
a huge mistake off the bat if you're if you're going to distribute a thumb if you're going to
self-distribute and use that's what you're going to do stick with it go all in self-distribute if
you're going to do a distributor stick with them stop don't try to pull it Midway unless
something's drastically wrong like honestly if I just would have stayed the course with
self-distribution because I'm sorry I said I was going to do Filmhub but that that's actually not
100 true because film Hub I wasn't really aware of it at that time I I was just becoming aware
of it so if if I just would have held on to that for a year and then done film Hub and the other
platforms and then it would have hit Tubi and I don't know that I would have saw the whole budget
back but I would have saw a lot more than I did but I made the mistake of getting desperate and
going for the sales agent and the distributor and I'm not 100 on the distributor either but
I just I I did it out of the desperation and it was a bad move with the alien documentary where
you went to the convention you said it was pulled off Amazon but then put back on was that because
watch time was low or it's really hard to say so Amazon has a thing they call a customer engagement
ranking and it's what they base how much they pay you now and if your ranking is so under a certain
amount there is a good chance you'll get purged but the other thing that could happen with the
purging is because people going to remember there aren't human beings like watching all these movies
there are algorithms there are third parties that come in and they they they're just scanning stuff
they're looking for certain key phrases or images that will spark something and that's how red flags
get sent up so on the initial pass something might get through that they don't but maybe it'll get
discovered or what they say is they're always looking at audience data so if you have a movie
up and 100 people click on it to watch it and they click off within 15 or 20 seconds chances
are that's going to get that's going to get yanked so I I found on the few that I had purged that it
was it had a lot it had more to do with audience retention is what I would say but I've heard other
anecdotes about stuff got pulled because it was too the nudity was too extreme or the violence or
it was political I've heard stuff that too but for me it was always watch time and to figure out your
retention on Amazon it's it's actually kind of easy because they and their metrics they have your
total amount of hours watched and then they'll have your total viewers and if you just take the
total time divided by the total viewers I'll give you an average of how long they're watching it
you won't get the specific metrics but you can get a ballpark and if you have a if you have a
90-minute movie and your your average watch time is around 10 minutes that's probably not great.