Shooting In Paradise

We love The Bahamas. We’ve had friends there for a number of years and whenever the AFM rolls around we always make a point of dropping in on the Bahamas Film Commission booth over at Lowes Hotel. As a social visit it’s better than most but we’re also working on good business reasons for spending time in the beautiful Bahamas.

We were invited a couple of years back to attend the Bahamas Film Festival, which is now in its sixth year, and intend to do so again when it opens in Nassau on December 10th. Our production arm is currently developing our feature The Diamond Runners, which zooms between Los Angeles, Las Vegas and back again. However, our subsequent project The Promise is a treasure-hunting caper set on the East coast, Florida Keys and The Bahamas. We’re already planning to base the production down in the islands, where we have access to the under-utilised Bahamas Film Studios (best known for the Pirates Of The Caribbean series) and some friends in the Film Commission.

There are logistical issues, of course, and it’s not an ideal location for every type of shoot, but for us it’s perfect for a pair of veteran treasure hunters on the trail of the “big one”, followed by a flotilla of tiny boats, narco-trafficer hoods, a CEO-kingpin in a shiny speedboat with twin babe lieutenants, a couple of hapless cops in the floating equivalent of a jalopy, and a budding romance formed by the accidental explosion of a vintage Mustang. We can’t wait to get down there again. Our Movie Portfolio Fund operates as an international offshore investment vehicle, and Nassau is an ideal financial services hub with most of the international banks represented there and a good fund management sector. It’s only a hop to Florida and a few hours to LA: it’s practically Hollywood adjacent.

It was reported this week in a Kagan report that bigger-budget movies make the most profit, with movies costing around $100 million earning about $118 million in profit, on average. Allowing for anyone and his dog’s definition of “profit” in the movie business, the headlines would suggest that you’d have to come up with $100 mil to stand a chance of making any money. Of course, a sensibly-budgeted high-quality movie with a proper distribution strategy will have good profit potential at any budget level but you never can tell. Our focus is on giving investors access to a portfolio of movie assets that will make them great returns by exposing them to various levels of risk and reward over time. Cross-collateralisation and diversification are obvious fund management tools which we believe work in films as in other asset classes.

The Out Of Obscurity Team.