Rifftrax of movies from MST3K and why they do it

[BadFilms]

I've always wanted to know how much they really make, how are rights obtained, etc. One website claims the company's revenue is estimated at $1,8M yearly, but I wonder if that's exactly the case. I'm no CPA., FCPA., CGMA, CFO. nor a Qualified Actuary but I really wanted to know the details as a business study.

What? You're not a CPA, FCPA, CGMA like the rest of us? I, Bad Films, Poster of Riffs, Collector of Riffs, Watcher of Riffs, bar you from further participation in this forum until you get the proper credentials.

[blurg]

I've always wanted to know how much they really make, how are rights obtained, etc. One website claims the company's revenue is estimated at $1,8M yearly, but I wonder if that's exactly the case. I'm no CPA., FCPA., CGMA, CFO. nor a Qualified Actuary but I really wanted to know the details as a business study.

What? You're not a CPA, FCPA, CGMA like the rest of us? I, Bad Films, Poster of Riffs, Collector of Riffs, Watcher of Riffs, bar you from further participation in this forum until you get the proper credentials.

I assume, at least, he is studying to become a CPA

[BadFilms]

I've always wanted to know how much they really make, how are rights obtained, etc. One website claims the company's revenue is estimated at $1,8M yearly, but I wonder if that's exactly the case. I'm no CPA., FCPA., CGMA, CFO. nor a Qualified Actuary but I really wanted to know the details as a business study.

What? You're not a CPA, FCPA, CGMA like the rest of us? I, Bad Films, Poster of Riffs, Collector of Riffs, Watcher of Riffs, bar you from further participation in this forum until you get the proper credentials.

I assume, at least, he is studying to become a CPA

Until he's at least a forensic accountant, we have no use for him.

[CountMeowt]

Until he's at least a forensic accountant, we have no use for him.

[HmGabe85]

You're slightly right in the sense that, since it was something Shout Factory was able to acquire rights to for physical and digital release of MST3K episodes, you know the rightsholder(s) for the movie is game to negotiate with Rifftrax as well. You already know what uses they're willing to license for and it's just a matter of contract and price.

For MST3K, you had a situation where they were using films that were being sent out specifically to be syndicated on television for very, very cheap at Comedy Central. Then, at Sci-Fi Channel, they had access to the whole channel library of licensed films. Both of those methods eventually ended up in a few dead ends that will never be filled on DVD or digital again, as you had movies - like the Godzilla films - that had cheap American-licensed, edited, and dubbed versions shopped around to syndication for several years that, in the modern era, have returned to the Japanese rightsholders, who take both the movies and the treatment of their movies very seriously. So that leads to films that were easily available for a low-budget show in the 80s and 90s to now be inaccessibly expensive or completely refused licensing to re-release those episodes. So every MST3K episode that could be negotiated and released has been. The remaining few episodes will probably never see official release.

Rifftrax doesn't have that rights quagmire. What they do have is a very small company that probably isn't working with crazy margins on their product. They pay their employees, they run their own infrastructure, they license, produce, sell, and deliver their digital product - all out of one surprisingly small company that seems to have separated from Legends Films years ago. Legends Films gave them an early boost by allowing use of some content (like their colorized public domain films) and helping get the venture off the ground. I have no idea of the specifics, but the "copyright Legend Films" messages disappeared from the end of shorts and VODs years ago and the fact that Mike-only riffs and three-riffer versions of the Legend public domain films have started to disappear from sale leads me to believe that they separated as companies or were bought out to make it an independent venture and their license on continued use of the Legend Films products has started to finally expire. That may seem like a total aside, but I'm sure - early on - Legend was a big help in acquiring product and getting them into the business of licensing films instead of just providing mp3 commentary tracks and riffing on public domain educational films. Now they undoubtedly have a small team that handles the acquisition and legal issues of licensing films, but they undoubtedly have to search out very cheap product that they can afford to license and still be able to make money on at their normal prices. But, aside from being cheap, the film has to be usable - not so incompetent as to be unwatchable, not so boring as to make riffing a chore (a reason that more and more of their riffs are seeing a bit of editing to get dead-weight scenes out of the movies to maximize the pace). There's only so much material out there that fits into the window of being cheap enough but not too bad to riff.

Their big moves in licensing tend to happen with the live shows because of a few factors. First, after years of working with Legend colorized films and shorts before moving into other cheap licenses and then bigger movies, they got a pretty good idea of how many people will be coming to each show, historically, and can better budget exactly how much money they can spend to acquire a license to a bigger film. If you know how many people are coming and roughly how much they're paying at the various theaters throughout the country, you can better work out your possible overhead, how much you have to spend, negotiate better deals with Fathom, and try to get better, more enticing product as the years go by. Second, they have the Kickstarter, which allows them to get some liquid capital to work with before production starts to pay the theater, build the sets, pay licenses, pay airfare, pay salaries, and other sundry items without having to totally go out of pocket. As Kevin pointed out in regard to this year's Kickstarter, the goal they set isn't the total out-of-pocket cost for their production, so any amount over is going to go into bettering the production quality of the upcoming shows and, undoubtedly, not having to take everything out of Rifftrax as a company just to afford to continue doing the live shows. By basically pre-selling VODs for the shows they're licensing up front and giving other digital content at a reasonable cost, they're getting the money they need to continue functioning without gambling every penny they've got on the shows or having to take out short-term business loans every year, which obviously also would cut into their profits with interest payments.

That was a lot of rambling shit that's probably only interesting to me, but there it is.

Yeah, thank you for taking the time to write that out, man. That shit is useful.

And I personally enjoy most of the MST3K redos. The only two exceptions so far have been Spring Fever (which still wasn't bad) and Final Justice.

[Riffling]

I've been wondering lately if RiffTrax makes a little extra $ by restoring some of these films they offer (we know they restored the new Ice-cream Bunny print they found, and that they typically buy the shorts from film on eBay etc. then digitize them). I've noticed a few times that right when RiffTrax releases a new film, Amazon gets an HD version of it as well (e.g. Freddy Steps Out, and Junior Prom appeared in HD on Amazon right when RiffTrax did them, possibly others did too) - it seems they are linked, but I'm speculating as to how exactly.