This week's episode of The Crypto Mile has dissected this new 'crypto-wave' of filmmaking, that promises to disrupt how movies are financed, distributed and exhibited, and could turn the Hollywood industry on its head.
Prizefighter: The Life of Jem Belcher was partly funded using NFTs that lower the barrier of entry into the world of film financing and allow anyone to become an investor in the movie business.
The British-American boxing biopic was released this week on Amazon Prime (AMZN) and was written and produced by Matt Hookings, who also plays the lead role of Jem Belcher who became the youngest ever boxing world champion.
Hookings has been on the road with two-time world heavyweight champion Tyson Fury promoting the film and in his interview with The Crypto Mile, he discussed the way the film used pre-sale NFTs for financing and plans to release digital collectable content associated with the movie, also as NFTs.
Matt was accompanied to the Yahoo studio by James Mackie, the Team Lead at Moviecoin, the NFT film funding platform that designed the NFTs deployed for Prizefighter's funding round.
Prizefighter: The Life of Jem Belcher
Hookings is the actor, producer and writer of the latest boxing biopic to be distributed as an Amazon exclusive. He describes it as an audience-driven film, and part of the interest in the production is how NFTs played a crucial role in ensuring the film got made.
Speaking to Yahoo Finance Hookings described the trials and tribulations in getting the film made, he said: "We tried to make an independent film, with a studio level cast during covid and without support from the core film bodies in the UK, such as Film Wales and the BFI.
"We got to the point where we were filming in Malta and we reached out to James from Moviecoin to see if there was anything we could do to bring in Moviecoin and raise some more funding through NFT presales.
"At the last minute we managed to pull in the funding with James's help through Moviecoin NFTs as Russell Crowe had to get to Malta and certain costs had gone up."
Crypto start-ups, such as Moviecoin.com, have ambitions to disrupt the film industry's traditional funding procedures by offering the chance for anyone to invest in film production and take a share of the profits via the blockchain.
The start-up was created as a response to the concentration of film industry power into fewer and fewer hands. Moviecoin’s long-term goal is to break the power of the monopolies through decentralising and democratising the world of movie finance.
Speaking on this week's The Crypto Mile, Team Lead at Moviecoin James Mackie said: "The whole idea of Moviecoin.com is to fund movies using crypto or NFTs.
"To create the NFTs we decided to take props from the film, such as boxing gloves that Russell Crowe or Matt was wearing, and made the props into NFTs.
"We then sold these NFTs and unbelievably when we put them up on the NFT marketplace on the first day one of them sold for $5,000.
