Amazon Studios: Amazon.com Invades the Movie Business

We all know about amazon.com. You’ve been shopping there for years along with the millions of others who use their service daily bringing them an annual revenue of around $24 billion. What you may not know is amazon.com has decided to go into the movie business by creating Amazon Studios. This is big news for a few reasons. First of all, the amazon.com revenue is roughly twice as much as the most successful movie studio, making it a powerful force to be reckoned with and big enough to be a respected player in what is one of the world’s most difficult to enter closed societies. Amazon Studios has already put together a deal with Warner Bros., the current box office leader, to produce film projects developed by Amazon Studios via their unique website. In addition, Amazon Studios says they are seeking other industry partners to help them produce feature films. The speculation from industry watchers is that Amazon Studios is trying to gain control of content that will be distributed on their already operating “on-demand” distribution service. You can go to amazon.com right now and watch movies for a small fee via this system, but a good portion of that fee goes to the movie studios that produced those films. Once Amazon Studios begins producing their own movies they will no longer have to share in that revenue and can begin to build an entirely new revenue stream for their already enormous bottom line.

At the moment, Amazon Studios is essentially a screenwriting and filmmaking contest.  Anyone who has a screenplay can submit their work to Amazon Studios via the website for free.  The catch is you then give up the rights to that work for 18 months.  But that’s not all, you also leave your work exposed to anyone and everyone in the world to look at and rewrite if they like.  That’s right, anyone who has access to the Internet can read your screenplay and if they like, submit a rewritten version to Amazon Studios.  In addition, any filmmaker who likes your script can use it to make what Amazon Studios calls a “Test Film” which can be basically any kind of screen interpretation of your material, ranging from stick figure drawings to, story board animation, to a full scale live action production.  The stated goal is to develop material by using a worldwide network of feedback providers.  Of course, filmmakers don’t have to use a screenplay from Amazon Studios to post their film projects.  If they have a completed movie that’s over 70 minutest long they can submit that project to the Amazon Studios system as long as they are willing to give up rights to that work for 18 months.

If that all sounds like a bad deal to you there is some good news as well.  Each month Amazon Studios will award $20,000 to two screenwriters and $100,000 to one filmmaker.  And at the end of the year they will award $1,000,000 to the best movie and $100,000 to the best screenplay.  In addition to these large cash awards, the Amazon Studios Development Agreement guarantees even greater financial reward if the movie or screenplay is picked up by Warner Bros. or some other studio for production.   

These are great prize numbers and it’s absolutely free to enter this contest, but you need to read the Development Agreement completely and understand fully what you are doing before you post your work at Amazon Studios. Once you upload your screenplay to Amazon Studios you can no longer shop that script anyplace else. Realistically speaking, even after the Amazon Studios 18 month option period is over, that script is basically dead in the water. No agent or manager will want to take on a script that has been on the Internet for 18 months at Amazon Studios. Agents and Managers like fresh material that no one has ever seen, so they can build a buzz about it, and hopefully get a bidding war of sorts going. As a result, some of the best amateur screenwriters are avoiding the Amazon Studios contest all together or only submitting work they have already shopped all over town with no success. The most well regarded screenwriting contest generally has about 6,000 submissions but Amazon Studios currently only has about 2,000 entries with substantially larger prizes and at this writing the deadline for their first round or prizes has already passed. This discrepancy is completely due to that 18 month option that pulls your work off the market and gives complete control to Amazon Studios for that time period.

Amazon Studios tries to sell itself as a place where filmmakers and screenwriters can work together developing projects to their full potential. To be fair - it’s still early - this experiment has only been in operation for a little over two months, but as yet there is very little collaboration going on at Amazon Studios. For the most part, screenwriters are working on their own projects, and not attempting to rewrite other projects, and very few Test Movies are being made from posted screenplays. I’m not sure if any of this perceived collaboration will ever materialize since Amazon Studios is not doing much of anything to stimulate that kind of shared involvement. For now, Amazon Studios is a work-in-progress and we’ll just have to stand back and watch what develops in the future. I admire amazon.com for trying something new and different and for approaching movie development from a completely new direction; however, to date, as we approach the announcement of their first screenplay contest winners, I don’t see much promise in the system they’ve created or in the way they are managing the operation on a day-to-day basis.

The best way to fully understand what’s going on at Amazon Studios is to visit their website and take a look around.  I’m a participating screenwriter at Amazon Studios and you can read my screenplays and rewrite them if you like or make a Test Movie from your favorite Michael C Murphy script.  You can also read my screenplays and post your thoughts and suggestions for improvements.  I’d love to hear from you.  Remember, if your Test Movie is the best of the year, your prize will be One Million Dollars.