Forming Movie LLCs

One of the first steps you take on the road to producing a movie is the formation of a dedicated corporate entity for the project, usually in the form of a Limited Liability Company or LLC (or GmbH if you're German.)

I should start by saying that I have no legal background, but I have hung around a lot of lawyers of different stripes, and according to them, the formation of an LLC for a film is generally considered “a good idea with numerous benefits” and “worth the $800 (!) a year it costs in the State of California.”

($800 is a ludicrous amount to pay because it’s like $30 basically everywhere else)

So what do you get for the price of a PS5 Pro? A bunch of financial and legal benefits. Top of the list is that the LLC shields us personally from legal liability in the event that, say, a real-life pair of Chinese brothers did in fact defend their family dumpling shop from a tech company and decide to sue us for clearly infringing on their rights and stealing their family story. A separate LLC for each film project also ensures any legal issues on one project won't affect the others.

Having a separate LLC also allows you to draw up and execute all the deal paperwork for your cast, crew, rental houses, locations, etc. in one place. It simplifies your accounting, as making a movie usually involves a big infusion of capital and the spending of all that capital in relatively short order. Running all the spending through a bank account owned by a dedicated corporate entity makes it much simpler to track business expenses. The LLC also allows a structure for investors in the film to participate in a revenue share through partial ownership of the entity. And, should you sell the project, having an LLC simplifies the handoff process of all the paperwork and rights.

In other words, it offers a bunch of totally reasonable protections and simplifies things legally and financially. Boring! The real reason to form an LLC is so you can come up with a fun in-joke LLC name!

This process is, incidentally, not without risk. Our friend Adam (producer on WAGD) told us a story of a project that formed with a wink-nudge vaguely lascivious inside joke for a title. The result was a headache for working with numerous locations and rental houses because, at first blush, the name seemed to imply that the project they were shooting was a porno, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the owners of expensive cameras and bedroom sets preferred not to risk their homes or expensive equipment coming into contact with the various human secretions the production of such projects might encounter.

For us, our in-jokes stem from one very important, very influential video. I am talking about Streets 1:12 -

If you haven't seen it, please enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMN3AeMYReI

Streets 1:12 shows the moment when Goldeneye 64 speedrunner Ryan Lockwood achieved a time of 1:12 on the level Streets.

As an eminently quotable video, Streets 1:12 provides us with numerous catchy phrases and word pairings to use for our company titles. WAGD was run under the entity “Lucky Break” as in “about time I get a lucky break in this fucking game!” The confluence of events that enabled Matt and I to actually be in a position to make We’re All Gonna Die certainly felt like a lucky break to us!

Myself and my brother meeting Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma. Matt said he would probably cry in this situation. I wore my custom self-designed Streets 112 shirt.

For Nail House, our LLC will be “Dude, What a Rush LLC” This one, too, feels appropriate as we’re hopefully in the thick of some filmmaking momentum and we think Nail House has the makings of a real intense, high-octane hand-to-hand thriller.

But perhaps most importantly, it evokes “action movie” far more than it evokes “porno.”

Freddie