A first film entirely financed by the NFT? – L’Eclaireur FNAC

Niels Juul, executive producer of Silence and of The irishman, announced the creation of NFT Studios to develop feature films through the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFT).

Little by little, the madness of NFT is gaining ground in Hollywood. In early November, the Warner Bros. studio announced the sale of NFT – this “digital certification” technology linked to the blockchain which in particular has exploded the art market since the start of the pandemic – upstream of the release of Matrix Resurrections, the long-awaited fourth opus of the cinematographic saga imagined by the Wachowski sisters. In another register, the director Quentin Tarantino had announced the sale of cut scenes from pulp Fiction, his cult film (winner of the Palme d’Or in 1994), in the form of NFT – a sale that will push the Miramax studio, holder of the film’s rights, to sue the director for conflict of interest. But so far, no feature film project funded exclusively through NFT technology has been formalized. It is now done through Niels Juul, a consultant specializing in corporate restructuring, who put his first foot in the film industry by re-establishing the Italian-American production company Cecchi Gori Pictures (Life is good, The Postman, Seven) at the start of 2010. A restructuring marked by the production of Silence (2017), movie Martin scorsese already under development in the 1990s.

Juul – not to be confused with a certain rapper from Marseille – will then participate in the financing of The irishman (Netflix, 2019), another Scorsese flagship project, as well as Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple TV +), his next film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert de Niro. He also co-produced the biopic on Enzo Ferrari directed by Michael Mann, currently in pre-production, with Hugh Jackman in the title role. For his first Hollywood film project financed by the sale of around 10,000 NFT, Niels Juul hopes to raise between 8 and 10 million dollars, also promising potential investors a share of the profits and a meeting with the stars of the film. Entitled A Wing and a Prayer, the film will be a dramatic comedy centered on the story of Brian Milton, the first man to circumnavigate the globe in a microlight.

” Studios basically produce franchise movies, an independent movie can take years and years. It is difficult to rally investors for films and productions in development, with the Hollywood system. We want to democratize it “, said the producer, which will reveal the film’s cast at the next Berlinale in February 2022. It remains to be seen whether this project will raise the necessary funds, which could then encourage the studios to experiment with a new production model.