Over the past year, many people involved in the film industry have stepped into crypto either through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or other means. However, it looks like these individuals may have brought the space down somewhat as people aren’t taking crypto seriously anymore.
Film and Crypto Don’t Really Go Together
Eswar Prasas – author of “The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance” – explained in a recent interview:
Whatever the fate of decentralized cryptocurrencies, forms of crypto and blockchain technology are here to stay, [but] when an industry clamors for regulation, it typically craves the legitimacy that comes with it while trying to minimize oversight. The biggest risk regulators must guard against [is] giving the crypto industry an official imprimatur while subjecting it to light-touch regulation.
Oscar-winning producer and writer James Schamus also threw his two cents into the mix, saying:
Let’s be honest. There’s a good reason why the celebrity-driven crypto and NFT scam market has collapsed. To paraphrase Matt Damon, ‘Fortune does not favor the gullible,’ which is maybe why the average NFT sale price has dropped 92 percent in the past six months, but all that said, there are still potentially legit uses for some of these technologies, including perhaps digital rights management, royalty and residuals tracking, and more. As with any hyper-financialized derivative commodity, there will still be speculators and gamblers and hustlers out to pump up markets for special-price-for-you-certifiably-one-of-a-kind-digital-whatzyhoosies, but I wouldn’t write off the possible utility of these technologies just yet.
Web 3.0 blogger and digital entrepreneur James K. Wight added:
There’s a clear utility in video games because purchasing of NFTs is based on an emotionally driven, first-person investment basis. The clear message is that you buy because it’s fun and adds to a sense of completion to the user. On the other hand, there’s nothing an NFT can do that a great video game can’t do better.
Brian Beckmann – the CFO of Arclight Films – explained:
Producers are sellers at their core and are desperate to find new and alternative sources of finance. Hence, they are in danger of believing their own bullsh*t and therefore other people’s.
Many NFTs Have Fallen
Some people involved in film that have subsequently entered the NFT space claim the move was a total waste of time. One such person is John Giwa-Amu, who turned his first feature film “Little White Lies” into a series of NFTs. He said:
Once you get past the gold rush hype and the 20-something-year-old [then] millionaires, you realize this market is very young, has suffered from huge mistakes, and has a basic lack of understanding about how finance and risk behave. The key takeaway is that IPs in the form of digital canvasses are the tangible element behind NFTs, but the quality of that creative work really matters.
