Excerpt from Third Window Films Newsletter #18 (August 13th, 2011):
Recently London and many other cities in the UK were hit by some of the
worst riots in history, leaving 5 people dead, shops destroyed,
mass-looting and hundreds of thousands of lives affected.During these riots the Sony warehouse in Enfield was looted and burnt
down. This warehouse was the main stockist for the majority of small to
medium sized film and music distribution labels (along with some of the
majors) in the UK. Third Window Films, along withTerracotta Distribution,Arrow Films,Network,Peccadillo Pictures,Dogwoof,BFI,Eureka and many more had most, if not all of their stock destroyed. We lost nearly 20,000 units of stock.
This is an undoubted tragedy and nobody is sure yet how this will
affect the long-term situation for us and many of these companies,
though what we can try to explain is that there will be a massive impact
on the short term. While our stock was insured, it was only the number
of units destroyed and units which will be replaced in terms of stock
credit with Sony. Unfortunately with Sony's minimum top up of 500 units
(luckily they've changed from the 1000 as previously required) we will
need to pay for all the difference in units replicated against credit.
For example as we had more than 10 films which had under 500 units of
stock in at the time, we need to pay the difference for all stock below
500 to top it up to the minimum number. While this may only equate to
around 3,000-4,000 units, it still means paying that amount at a time
when we won't have been generating sales, which is another major problem
with the situation...
This other major problem is that with this affecting so many companies,
and right leading to the main Q4 campaigns, all other companies that
are larger (we are one of the smallest in the UK) will have priority in
having their titles replicated and put back into circulation. We should
get a couple of our larger titles such as Confessions back into
circulation quickly, but it may take a couple months before our
catalogue titles get back into circulation, and with no units available
for sale anywhere (Amazon is nearly sold out of all films across our
whole catalogue) we will lose a massive chunk of our earnings over the
next few months. Unfortunately as such a small company we don't have
business interruption insurance which covers companies in the event of
such situations. Ironically the larger companies have such insurance and
yet their stock will be replicated first despite the fact they're
covered for the eventual losses, so this will really hit the smaller
companies the hardest (as is usually the case).
We will endeavor to get through this situation and plan on keeping our
release schedule of 2011 on track. 'Sawako Decides' and 'Quirky Guys and
Gals' will still be out October 3rd, though 'Underwater Love' has been
moved to November 21st. We can't really plan too far into the future as
we're really unsure right now as to how bad this will affect us.
What we ask of you, our fans, is to get the word out about us and other
small niche labels like Terracotta Distribution, Arrow Films, Network,
etc and get people interested in supporting independent cinema through
these hard times. We don't have any new stock to send to stores, but
there are still a few copies of our films on places likeAmazon,Play.comand in high-street stores such as HMV and Fopp, so if there was a title
you were thinking about picking up, please go out and buy it now so
that we can convince stores that ours are worth restocking sooner rather
than later. Alternately, we are trying to make many of our titles
available to view online viaMUBIso if you want to spread the word through that you can legally watch our titles through your PC or Playstation.
Thanks for your support and we'll try hard to get through this