Cinedigm Corp. (NASDAQ:CIDM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dan Kurnos: Got it. Super helpful. Thanks. Congrats on the film and look forward to see what comes next.

Chris McGurk: Thanks, Dan.

Operator: The next question comes from Brian Kinstlinger from Alliance Global Partners. Brian, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Brian Kinstlinger: Great. Thanks so much for taking my question and lots of exciting news to talk about. I wanted to first follow up on Terrifier 2. Maybe, Erick or Chris, if you can share your plans and strategy now, maybe on an annual basis, if you formulated it yet, given the success on plans for wide releases and smaller releases on an annual basis? Is there a target yet? Is there a quarterly target? How are you thinking about that right now?

Chris McGurk: The answer, Brian, and thanks for your question is, it depends. We are — we don’t have a set plan to take movies wide like we did with Terrifier 2. It really depends on the potential of the movie. We never want the company to get into the game that the major studios and a lot of independents are in where they spend so much money in marketing movies and wide release. With Terrifier 2 as a matter we took it out as an event release the first weekend and it did so well that we went wide after it, which I think was a very smart approach. Again, we avoided the cost of going live in more than 1,000 theaters, and yeah, we got a great result and it’s going to end up being very, very profitable for us. But I think as I — in my answer to the last question, as we move forward, we are going to continue to have a very robust business releasing films in a limited release and the end date VOD and we will probably be doing one or two wider release movies, hopefully, in the same way we did it with Terrifier 2 in a smarter, much more profitable way than the traditional releasing business.

So I hope that answers your question.

Brian Kinstlinger: Yeah. Great. And then on Cineverse, I understand it’s new, it’s just been launched and you talked clearly about the ways to monetize it. How should investors think about the timeframe when this becomes meaningful now way you think it becomes meaningful to revenue generation? Is that a couple of quarters away? And then as platforms maybe take on Cineverse, will that lead to churn for individual channels? Just wondering how that impacts really?

Chris McGurk: Sorry, I missed the last part…

Brian Kinstlinger: Well, I guess, I am curious for someone who took — if Cineverse has the Bob Roche channel, it has the always

Chris McGurk: Sure.

Brian Kinstlinger: has a variety of channels.

Chris McGurk: Yeah.

Brian Kinstlinger: And does that mean if I have those channels, I am going to get rid of those agreements with Cinedigm. And then — and so there’s a little bit of cannibalization, but your Cineverse more than offsets it, I am just trying to think about the puts and the takes?

Chris McGurk: No. Yeah. So I think the answer there is, so if you really think about where we are going to take Cineverse, as I described during the call, the idea there is — this is — this goes far beyond Cinedigm’s 50,000-title library, right? We have a great library, but the reality is we are about one piece of a vast content ecosystem that just isn’t readily available. It would be like if Spotify only had the top major labels and left off 40 million, 50 million tracks off of Spotify. It would just be an incomplete platform. So our goal really long-term, is to make this platform the place where if it’s not the major streamers, it’s going to be on Cineverse, right? We want to build that base up. So we are starting with our 50,000 titles gives us a huge leg, a huge starting point and we added another 18,000 in licenses in the current quarter as well.