Cinema on-demand platform Tugg Australia is growing month-by-month, delivering tidy sums to the producers of hot-button documentaries and incremental revenues for narrative features.
The top-grossing title so far is Frackman, Richard Todd’s profile of environmental activist Dayne Pratzky, which has generated $160,000 from 90 screenings.
Among other films in demand are Maya Newell’s Gayby Baby; Joao Dujon Pereira’s Black Hole, which chronicles the battle against Whitehaven Coal to save a woodland forest from being cleared to make way for an open cut coal mine; and Avi Lewis’ This Changes Everything, an attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change filmed in nine countries and five continents over four years.
Last week was a milestone as the platform had its biggest week ever since its soft launch in 2013, with 26 screenings and 3,000 ticket sales.
“With 27 confirmed screenings through the end of the month, October will deliver more than 80 screenings and 9,000 patrons with more ticket sales to come for those events that haven’t yet sold out,” Tugg Australia MD David Doepel tells IF.
“Consumer demand continues with an average of a dozen people per day requesting screenings all over Australia.”
Doepel is keen to get involved with projects at any early stage, particularly those that don’t have a natural hook or a clearly defined audience.
“We are very committed to developing strategies for genres and Australian narrative features – at the moment these centre on early engagement from script stage and building a cadre of potential promoters over the course of a film’s development life cycle,” he said.
He cites Louise Wadley’s lesbian-themed thriller All About E as an example of a film which cleverly tapped into both crowdfunding and crowdsourcing.
“We are engaged with five other films in development and working with them to foster engagement that delivers a number of promoters with national spread for a particular title,” he said.
“Those same promoters are also now starting to do multiple films (within a genre or interest group). We are already seeing that with LGBT, environmental titles and Kiwi films.”
This month Tugg acquired 10 new titles to ensure a steady supply for the rest of this year and into 2016.
The platform is also working in partnership with Australian and New Zealand distributors including Transmission (Holding the Man), Roadshow (Southpaw, Now Add Honey) and Vendetta (Born to Dance, Umrika) to enable films to reach communities which may otherwise never get the chance to see them.
The upcoming line-up includes Jack Gavin’s Hector, which stars Peter Mullan as a homeless man who goes on a personal odyssey through 21st century Britain, which Tugg will release in tandem with homeless advocacy organisations.
Slated for 2016 are Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe’s Remembering the Man, which tells the true story of the couple at the centre of Neil Armfield’s Holding the Man; Peter Blackburn’s Eight, a drama filmed in one take without a single edit in 81 minutes; and The Worm is Turning, a documentary which explores ecological farming in India, the US, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia.
Via Go Digital, an investor in Tugg US, Doepel has signed a deal to make participating titles available in Australia on Netflix and iTunes.