Another film distributor falls: 1091 was bought by The Orchard which was bought by Chicken Soup for the Soul which has created chaos and misery for indie filmmakers owed thousands they'll never get.
1091 was supposed to be one of the "good" ones and what's transpired is a yet another cautionary tale for filmmakers. Here's how to prevent it happening to you. Yes, you CAN prevent it.
I dislike starting off a New Year with yet another tale of indie filmmakers getting screwed over by their distributor but I feel like this is something we have to talk about as filmmakers and especially for me, as someone who guides filmmakers through the process of shepherding their films to success.
So let’s unpack this thing from the beginning. Chicken Soup for the Soul???!!! you may be thinking. You mean that corny gimmick-laden-feel-good book your parents used to keep on the back of the toilet?
Yup, that one.
Like you, I didn’t pay attention to their growth as a media company and didn’t realize that not only had they turned their feel-good brand of stories into an enterprise, but that slowly and steadily over the years they were gobbling up smaller companies via acquisitions to expand their reach.
They got so big, they were able to assume REDBOX in 2021 in a deal worth $375 million dollars, comprising about $50 million in Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment stock and the new company’s assumption of $325 million in debt from Redbox.
I once worked for an extremely large company whose CEO was hellbent on hitting a figure of a billion dollars in annual revenue as a goal so he could tout it to the trades and the only way they were able to do that was via acquisitions.
They were doing this to prime themselves for a larger acquisition by a private equity corporation. It was all peacocking and showboating.
The problem was, all the smaller businesses they acquired were ruined. Absolutely obliterated as they were enveloped in this corporate fold. Sure, they got a buy-out as part of their acquisitions deal but all those years of hard work building their businesses was wiped out in an instant.
Sound familiar?
Read on…
I started to notice something fowl was afoot (see what I did there?) with Chicken Soup for the Soul this year when some of the writing newsletters I subscribe to started advertising—