'Ocean's Eleven' Director Steven Soderbergh Gives $300,000 to Crypto-Powered Film Fund

"Ocean's Eleven" director Steven Soderbergh has teamed up with crypto-powered film fund Decentralized Pictures to launch a $300,000 grant on the blockchain film financing platform.

According to IndieWire, Soderbergh's production company Extension 765 has launched the Andrews/Bernard Award on Decentralized Pictures's platform, offering a $300,000 pot of money to support filmmakers with finishing funds for English-language feature films or shorts.

"As with a lot of things I’ve done, it’s kind of an experiment," Soderbergh told IndieWire, adding that he's interested to see if blockchain film financing "really does work," and that he wants "to get up in the grill of this blockchain approach or structure to see if it’s going to do what it’s supposed to do."

As well as directing blockbusters including the "Ocean's Eleven" franchise, "Magic Mike" and the Oscar-winning "Erin Brockovich" and "Traffic," Soderbergh has past form when it comes to cinematic experiments.

His 2017 film "Logan Lucky" was funded through pre-selling foreign distribution rights to finance the film's production, and "everything except the movie showing up in a movie theater" to finance advertising and prints of the film. Soderbergh's 2018 thriller "Unsane," which was shot on iPhone cameras, followed a similar funding model.

At the time, he told GQ that this approach to funding would allow for "complete transparency," noting that, "There’s no intermediary. The money is not passing through anybody’s hands. All these people who work for scale to make this film will literally be able to go online with a password and look at this account as the money is delivered from the theaters."

Roman Coppola's Decentralized Pictures Is Shaking Up the Film Industry With Crypto

Making a film is an expensive business. Even the short films aspiring directors use as calling cards can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Small wonder, then, that it's a challenge for those starting in the industry to get a project off the ground—and that the organizations that provide funding for filmmakers are swamped with applications. "You need to move to Hollywood, you need to get representation, you need to get actors," Mike Musante, co-founder of crypto-powered filmmaking platform Decen...

It's unsurprising, then, that Soderbergh would be drawn to Decentralized Pictures, which promises to bring a similar level of transparency to indie film financing using crypto.

What is Decentralized Pictures?

Co-founded by members of Francis Ford Coppola's production company American Zoetrope alongside producer Roman Coppola, Decentralized Pictures invites filmmakers to submit movie pitches, paying a submission fee in the project's native token, FILMCredits (FILM).

Those submission fees go into a smart contract, which pays members of the DCP community for reviewing projects and completing other tasks to support the community.

Why I'm Funding a Short Film With NFTs

At Decrypt, we believe in experimenting with the technology we write about. And for the last year or so, I've been writing a lot about the film industry's growing interest in crypto, from its first tentative flirtations with blockchain to full-fledged DAOs aiming to shake up the way films are funded. Making a film—even a short one—is an expensive business. I should know, I've made a few in my time (if you're feeling brave, you can check them out here). And while it's true that you can shoot a f...

The top-rated projects go on to be reviewed by DCP, with the eventual winners receiving funds from awards such as that donated by Soderbergh. A portion of the profits from successful projects is then returned to the Decentralized Pictures pool to fund future awards.

"What we're trying to create here is an evergreen, self-sustaining film fund, that can support independent artists and artists from underserved and underrepresented communities going forward," Decentralized Pictures co-founder Mike Musante told Decrypt in a recent interview.