Fred Seibert's Blog

As I was thinking exactly what to tell you all about wassup with Frederator Films, it occurred to me I ought to fill in a bit of backstory. Or, more specifically–Why does Frederator want to make movies anyhow?

Without belaboring the obvious, Frederator’s an animated film producer –a non-writing/creating producer–  and producers need to produce to keep their doors open. The films we’ve made to date are primarily cartoons for television and specifically, animated series for kids. We’d like to make adult series (actually we have, twice, with The Meth Minute 39, and Nite Fite), but it’s expensive for a small company like ours to develop, and there just aren’t that many adult series that are bought each year. We could go out of business, like many others have, if we concentrated on adult series.

So, we’ve done OK for ourselves by developing and selling kid series to cable networks. For 12 years Frederator was an exclusive, independent producer (parodox alert) for Nickelodeon, and now we’re “first look” at Nickelodeon, and we’ve sold our first series in many years to Cartoon Network. The problem for Frederator, as an independent is that the cable networks don’t really like dealing with production companies (Disney Channel will not make a deal with a non-creator producer at all), and ironically, the more successful we are in television, the less likely we are to sell a future series. Hmmm, guess we need to find more markets to produce for.

International television is a natural option, but truthfully, Frederator’s got absolutely no advantages when it comes to the world markets. And, as most of you know, and I mentioned above, Frederator’s been innovating on the internet for a few years now, but there’s no business model to keep our bills paid yet. (Yet.)

OK, so movies are a potential market for Frederator where we might be able to produce films. Might.

(More to come.)