"Bad Business" - House of Cards and 50 Shades of Gray producer rails against crowd funding movies
The producer of House of Cards, The Social Network and Fifty Shades of Grey, Dana Brunetti has stated his belief that movies should not be funded through crowdsourcing.
Speaking to Randi Zuckerberg at SXSW, Brunetti discussed his work with Netflix and Kevin Spacey on the making of the hit series House of Cards, where he revealed that Spacey originally thought the show would be released on DVD, and described crowdsourcing as "a genius idea that's gotten out if hand".
He was targeted names such as actor Zack Braff and director Spike Lee who have made films funded through an online audience, stating that he felt that was wrong as they both already had access to funding.
"It takes away from little guys and I don't really approve if it," he explained, adding that there were " a lot of other great things on Kickstarter" and that "people have great ideas that benefit human kind" that were more deserving of funding than movies. "They are just bad business."
Of House of Cards being placed on Netflix rather than a TV network, he admitted that it was a gamble but one that he believed would succeed.
"I had been pushing for digital distribution this way," he stated, "I told him [Spacey] that if it didn't work now it would work n five or ten years...we took the risk and it really worked."
Of live content streaming, Brunetti said that it would eventually find its place.
"Theatre is a place where it is really going to start to take off. The problem with theatre is geography. If they start to get more equipped to do live streaming then geography begins to get removed. They have already started doing this with concerts, so why not on broadway?"
He also discussed his views on the evolution of second screen content creation, which he said would become part of the viewing experience of the future.
"At home second screen really works. In a movie theatre it's just a distraction and a problem. The big thing with second screen is giving it to you on all your devices - whatever device has a screen you should be able to watch it on that. The next thing is so that you don't have to stream it, but download it."
The second series of House of Cards began to stream on Netflix last month.