PARIS — Movie Chainer, a cloud-based app that allows right-holders of films to model and track the legal and financial structure of their film projects, is joining forces with Cannes Film Market’s web platform Cinando to enable members to get a free registration, valid for three projects.
Users who log onto Movie Chainer for the first time will be able to test the app for one project. Past the free-trial, the app will be accessible via a $99 monthly subscription including 10 films.
The good news: there’s no need to be a geek to make it work. Once contract information is filled in, the app automatically generates waterfall charts and comes up with right-holders’ revenue splits for all territories and media.
“What sparked my interest in Movie Chainer is that it fulfills a growing need for producers to find economically-viable solutions: libraries have expanded, the contracts are increasingly complex; while the revenues have not yet evolved accordingly,” said Cannes Film Market’s topper Jerome Paillard, adding that he also appreciates the app as a former producer who faced the tedious task of sorting out revenue share.
Jean-Baptiste Babin, co-founder of Backup Media, which developed the app, added: “The job of producers, distributors and sales agents are getting more complex, but their margins are not expanding proportionally — so our idea with Movie Chainer is to make their lives easier: our users will be able to access Cinando’s updated database of more than 37,000 industry execs to share or retrieve reports and distribution statements in an industrial way.”
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Backup Media co-founder Joel Thibout also pointed out that the app, which the company has been using for six months, was also highly useful to negotiate contracts with agents, for instance to model a backend remuneration.
“We talked to some film packagers who pictured themselves at 2 a.m. at Sundance or another market, trying to reach an assistant and have him or her do a modelization. With Movie Chainer they could do it themselves on their tablets,” said Thibout.
The Backup Media team has been testing the app in the last months leading to its launch and will be presenting it at Cannes.
The website was developed by Philippe de Martelaere, who previously created an app called ArtMemory to help contemporary art players track down revenue share.
The 11-year-old Backup Media Group, a Paris-based film and TV finance shingle, handles investment in non-French movies via B Media Global and film packaging via Backup Films.
