Collection Account Manager (CAM)
From ForcaWiki, the simple encyclopedia
| In one sentence | A neutral company that collects all the money a movie earns worldwide and pays out each person's fair share in the right order. |
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| Category | Film and Television |
| Related | Debt, Box Office Receipts, Chain of Title |
Imagine five kids work together on a class project, and it ends up earning money at a school fair. Instead of trusting any one of the five kids to collect all that money and hand out everyone's fair share, which could easily lead to arguments or mistakes, they agree ahead of time to have a trusted teacher hold onto the money and pay everyone exactly what was agreed.
A movie's money is a lot like that, except much bigger and coming from all over the world at once. A single film might earn Box Office Receipts in one country, a streaming licensing fee in another, and a television deal somewhere else, all around the same time. Many different people are usually owed a piece of that money too: the bank that lent money to make the film, investors, the distributors, and sometimes the original writer or director. Instead of trusting one of those parties to collect everything and pay the rest fairly, they hire an independent outside company, called the collection account manager, or CAM.
How it works
Every dollar the movie earns, from every country and every kind of deal, gets paid into one bank account that only the CAM controls. The CAM then pays that money out to everyone else, in a specific order that all the parties agreed to in advance in a contract called the Collection Account Management Agreement, or CAMA. Usually the people who lent money or covered production Costs get paid back first, with everyone else sharing what is left after that.
Fun facts
- Using a neutral collection account manager is especially common on movies financed by many small investors and lenders from different countries, since none of them fully trusts the others to handle the money alone.
- The agreed order in which people get paid is often nicknamed a "waterfall," since the money fills up each person's share before spilling down to the next.
- A clean Chain of Title matters here too. A collection account manager needs to know exactly who legally owns each piece of the movie before it can know who to pay.