Film School Rejects Buys One.Perfect.Shot. (EXCLUSIVE)
Film School Rejects has purchased One.Perfect.Shot., Variety has learned.
The two popular film fan sites will merge, with the migration expected to begin on Thursday. The sale price is not known, but it was an all-cash deal. As part of the pact, One.Perfect.Shot. founder Geoff Todd will join Film School Rejects as an editor-at-large. He will also run the combined site’s Twitter feed. One.Perfect.Shot. began its life on Twitter in 2013 as a curated stream of iconic images from films by Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and other film icons. It launched a website the following year. Todd will continue to select the images featured on One.Perfect.Shot.
“It started as a place to catalogue shots I wanted to come back to and analyze,” said Todd, who says he looks for “something that’s well composed. Something that encapsulates a story in a single frame.”
The site got an initial boost after Todd posted a shot from “Shaun of the Dead” that got retweeted by its director Edgar Wright and subsequently shared by “Iron Man” director Jon Favreau.
“It blew up from there,” said Todd. “We added 5,000 followers in 48 hours.”
Todd said he was motivated to sell because his son has severe autism, and he wants to spend more time with him. That was hard to do given the long hours involved with running the site. The deal will enable him to work on longer, more thoughtful pieces that he hasn’t had time to write, given the demands of overseeing One.Perfect.Shot.
Todd’s cohort at One.Perfect.Shot., H. Perry Horton, will become a managing editor at Film School Rejects. They join a staff of three full-time editors and eight rotating contributors. One.Perfect.Shot. has its own network of contributors who will continue to write for the combined site.
Film School Rejects attracts an audience of 1.5 million to 2 million unique visitors a month, while One.Perfect.Shot. boasts a Twitter feed with 188,000 followers and commands an audience in the tens of thousands.
“They have an extremely engaged, hungry young audience,” said Neil Miller, publisher of Film School Rejects. “The next generation of filmmakers follows One.Perfect.Shot.”
Film School Rejects has remained independently owned at a time when many blogs have been absorbed into larger media companies. Collider, Screen Rant, and Latino Review are just a few of the sites that have been bought by deep-pocketed owners.
Miller sees the acquisition of One.Perfect.Shot. as part of a major pivot in his business strategy. Earlier this year, the company, which had been grappling with flatlining traffic, joined the Medium Publishing Platform. That has spurred advertising revenue growth and stabilized readership, as well as injected more sponsored content onto the site. In return for hosting the website on its platform, Medium gets a cut of ad sales.
The new business model allowed Miller to move away from what he terms “click bait” stories, to focus on deeper dives — be they shot by shot analysis of trailers or more thoughtful looks at seminal filmmakers. He believes that One.Perfect.Shot., with its talent for dissecting movie imagery, will fit nicely with that new, more analytical shift in editorial direction.
“There’s a better way to do this,” said Miller. “You don’t have to just do galleries and lists. You can write substantial content and still make money.”
Get more from Variety and Variety411: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter
