Unknown Nightmare
Crowdsourced Film Funding by the founder of The Film Fund
Highlights
Featured Investor
“I am choosing to invest in Unknown Nightmare because of the proprietary software behind the project in addition to Tom's successful track record in the industry. I have seen Tom's success first-hand with The Film Fund and his expertise in directing and producing his own award-winning films. Having attended screenings of Tom's films and hearing the overwhelmingly positive feedback from other filmmakers, I know this project will be a success! I am excited to be a part of The Film Fund's tight-n...”
Our Founder
Submit a screenplay. Gain Equity. Produce the film.
All you need to do is submit $100 and a screenplay.
Everything is ready to go. Through our partnerships with The Film Fund and ProducerScore, we’re able to leverage a community of over 20,000 filmmakers and producers and patent-pending software.
Independent Film Development is Broken
Thousands of talented writers go unnoticed by the big studios in Hollywood (and let's be honest, even by the smaller ones). The fundamental problem is that there's just too much competition, too many talented writers, and studios don't often want to take a chance on new voices when they already have existing ones.
If they do want to take a chance on reading a stack of new screenplays, how many hours will it take an exec to read through them? Or will it be their intern doing the reading? Or whatever the title of "reader" means, because apparently that's an industry job...
And then, if they do choose a screenplay, how do they project its potential box office revenue?
Our goal is to discover new screenwriters AND source the funding to produce their films.
We're going to do it by sourcing original screenplays and small investments at the same time by leveraging patent-pending software, ProducerScore, and an existing filmmaker community called The Film Fund.
Leveraging AI + an Existing Filmmaker Community
With Unknown Movie, we've created a process that will scale and simplify independent film financing and development.
Our strategy rests in leveraging two key advantages:
- Existing Filmmaker Community: The Film Fund
- Exclusive License of ProducerScore: a patent-pending AI screenplay analysis and box office projection software
What is The Film Fund?
The Film Fund is an online film funding community comprised of over 20,000 email subscribers, and it's also what you could call our sister company. Our founder, Thomas Verdi, started The Film Fund in 2017 as a simpler way to fund short films. It operates via a simple contest format: entrants write and submit one sentence pitching their short film along with a small entry fee for a chance to receive up to $10,000 in funding to help produce their short film. The prize funding comes from the entry fees submitted by the filmmakers with their pitches.
What is ProducerScore?
Sometimes the mention of AI scares the film community. But, we're not using AI to generate screenplays or replace directors, or even producers. What this ProducerScore software allows us to do is this: instead of spending hours and hours reading thousands of feature-length screenplays and choosing the best to produce, we can use ProducerScore, which is trained on an extensive dataset of real screenplays that have been produced and released as theatrically-screened feature films, we can narrow this massive stack of screenplays to the top-performing ones according to the software—the ones that, based on historical data correlating screenplays with box office performance, will perform best at the box office.
This allows us to execute a model where we source both content and funding from our crowd, our community of real filmmakers! Each screenwriter submits a screenplay as part of a larger pitch package along with a minimum $100 investment. We use ProducerScore to narrow down the top-performing screenplays. We then build packages for these screenplays, pairing a director, DP, lookbook, etc. with the screenplay, and we present these top-performing packages to film distributors, and we select one (or maybe more!) with them to produce and distribute. If a filmmaker/producer's package is not selected, they still have equity in the film(s) that will be produced. Our goal is to produce one film, but if a distributor expresses interest in more than one, and we can secure more funding, we're optioning the top ten screenplays as scored by the software.
By leveraging these communities and technologies, Unknown Movie can efficiently develop and produce an independent film that can enter the film market, which we've sized below.
TAM: $7.4B, 2022 Total Domestic Box Office Revenue (All Genres)
SAM: $634M, 2022 Domestic Box Office Revenue (Horror)
SOM: $207M, 2022 Domestic Box Office for Films with Less Than $1M Budget (Horror)
Traction
We've already secured our lead investor, and we look forward to connecting with a new community of investors looking for their big break into the profitable and exciting world of independent film investing.
