But you may end with a horrific tax bill. In other words, if you can find someone to lend you $2.9 billion for a day (the principality of Monaco, perhaps), you could, in theory, charge a fortune for each ticket and grab the record from Avengers. The film-makers admit they had a few issues convincing the industry journals that the 30-minute film was what it claimed to be. And I don’t have that money in my bank account. “It’s because we actually have to purchase the tickets to be legitimate. Why not rack up $500,000 in sales? Why not go for Avengers: Endgame’s record of $2.8 billion? “Why aren’t we playing it more times?” Tabach says. Every five bucks he put in the till came straight back to his wallet.īut hang on. Tabach realised that all he needed to do was keep buying tickets for his own film and then report the proceeds to the box-office press. Every penny goes to the folk renting the theatre. Every now and then a maverick producer will rent a whole cinema and, without the assistance of distributors, screen his own film for independently minded punters.

The notion of “four-walling” has long been a controversial procedure in the movie business. The answer to the second problem was ingenious. How would they get even $25,000 worth of cinemagoers through the door in a time of social distancing? They had to make a film during lockdown and then somehow find a venue that would play the thing. “Realising the unique situation presented a loophole, we hatched a plan.” Easier said than done. “We joked any film put in a theatre would instantly top the box office,” Nilsson says.

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