ZDONK

For those of you who are viewing this page because we had your email, and our newsletter stirred some sense of obligation to come check us out – we appreciate your loyalty. If somehow you stumbled upon zdonk.com and decided to read this solely because of the strange animal located in the upper left-hand corner, even better.

Either way, we are excited to begin the process of talking about our company as it develops, and as our web site gets closer to its launch date in approximately 7 months. Until then, we plan on keeping in touch with our future users through this blog.

While covering more broad-based topics such as the constantly changing distribution landscape, and the challenges and rising costs of marketing movies, our blog will also highlight our goals/timeline, the films we have in development, and the various functionalities our site will offer our users. With some charm, maybe we can work our way into some screenings and report back to you.

First, a bit about our company…

ZDONK Entertainment is a production company that allows the public to invest in, and essentially green light, major Hollywood productions. Our goal is to involve our user community on ZDONK.com in the financing, production and marketing of our films. We want the public to own and have an actual financial stake in the product they enjoy seeing in theaters.

Although we will go into greater detail on the process in later posts, I’d like to briefly go over how we plan on integrating our web site and production company to produce feature length comedies:

We have established relationships with major agencies and studios for the sake of acquiring scripts, working with writers, and arranging distribution. After a project has been chosen and a distribution deal is in place, we will engage the public through ZDONK.com to fundraise a portion of the budget. Once the project gains enough support, and reaches its benchmark in public investment, the script is sent into production.

Users who purchase shares in the publicly owned movie will in effect be producers with a hand in production. After our films are distributed through a variety of platforms in domestic and international markets, shareholders who invested in and tracked this movie from its conception through its release will share in the profits generated from box office, DVD and TV sales.

The ZDONK user more interested in becoming creatively involved with our project will have the opportunity to take part in various competitions related to our films. Success in these contests could lead to awards such as film grants, invitations to red carpet events, and the opportunity to visit and even work with industry professionals on the set of a ZDONK film. We will also make certain roles in our films available for public auditions through ZDONK.com, where actors and comedians will have the ability to post media and potentially win the opportunity to play a small role in a major motion picture.

In later posts, we’ll get into how the functions of our site will offer content providers and talented individuals a reward system to compensate them for the popular, user-generated content they upload online.

Lastly, I figured it would be necessary to at least mention the idea behind our brand and its origination. A zdonk or, accurately spelled, zeedonk, is a sterile, awesome, very real animal that is the byproduct of a zebra and a donkey. Kind of like a mule, except substitute the zebra for the horse. We thought the name had an amusing ring to it, and the animal itself looked funny, so we named our company after it.

We have spent an enormously large portion of our last few months talking about and explaining the once thought to be mythical creature to potential partners and investors, which has led to some very bizarre, hilarious moments. A couple weeks ago, we met with an agent at CAA, and for some reason we forgot to mention the name of the company until the end of our meeting. When we dropped it on him, the agent looked bewildered – I thought we had offended him for some reason until he held out his cell phone and revealed, on the background, a picture he had taken of an actual zeedonk – very strange.

More to come.

We look forward to future posts and hope the length of this introduction doesn’t deter you from visiting in the future.

- Dennis