Did Kevin Smith already make his budget back with the Red State Roadshow Tour?

It certainly appears as such. In his latest post to The Red Statements (found here), he goes over the numbers (after a passage about how much Quentin Tarantino enjoyed the film) that the movie has made so far, and what it's got coming its way. Here's the relevant data from Kevin Smith himself:

Over the course of the 15 shows of the Red State USA Tour, we made almost one million dollars from ticket and merchandise sales. A few times, we had the highest per screen average in the country. We started out with a record-making show at Radio City Music Hall and went on to average 1100 people per screening. Had we booked ourselves into smaller houses, we could’ve SOLD OUT every show; but being in the larger houses cost us nothing extra.

And apparently, we managed to pull 1100 a night solely from our podcasts: when asked nightly if they heard about the show from a show at SModcast.com, an overwhelming 85/90% of the audience indicated yes (Jon swears it was 100% in Seattle). That bodes well for SIR.

You take what we made on the tour, you add that to the $1.5mil we’ve pulled in from foreign sales thus far (with a few big territories yet to sell). Add to that $3mil we’re on the verge of closing for all North American distribution rights excluding theatrical (which means VOD/HomeVideo/PayTV/Streaming).

The flick cost $5mil to make, but $4mil after the California tax incentive. One of the only things Jon and I promised the Red State investors in exchange for letting us handle American theatrical distribution ourselves was that their $4mil would be covered as soon as possible – something very few other production entities can promise or even offer. Invest a million dollars in almost any production, and you rarely if ever get your money back within five years, let alone the one year it’s looking like it’s gonna take for our guys to make their money back.

Add up all those figures above and you’ll notice our gains are higher than our spending. And without any dopey marketing figures to have to recoup, once we close the aforementioned deals (which Jonn Sloss & LawCo are working to close as we speak), simple math dictates Red State is in the black – long before any wide release. That’s music to the ears of any investor who only put up their money in September.

Ta-da!

Y’know what else is kinda sweet? Those $3million in deals I was talking about? That only materialized because our little movie went out and performed well. See, any idiot can lie and write hyperbolically (and high scholastically) about a movie’s future and its maker’s sanity all they want at 20,000 feet. But in the real world, when movie and maker put asses in seats and money in the bank – all without spending anything on marketing? I don’t know what the technical business term is for it, but I’m pretty sure it’s not “imploding”.

But like I said: this business bullshit should only be important to the investors, really. Well… maybe it’s an important point of pride for me and Jon, too: being in the black without spending a dime and before we go wide was one of our biggest dreams and goals – the “Imagine if…” we wanted to desperately make true. And once those deals close, we will have whimsied a reality and shown that The Harvey Boys are a financially responsible filmmaking unit that can make quality entertainment that puts asses in seats and gets you your investment back fucking fast. But like I said: none of this bizzzzz-ness should matter to anyone…

Unless you’re interested in investing in a hockey movie.

-Joey's Two Cents: I always said that the idea was a risky but potentially successful one, and it seems to have paid off for Smith. Box Office Mojo currently has the total at $851,832 (pretty much on par with what Smith said), so it looks like everything is coming up Milhouse for Red State...thoughts?