Below The Line

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask For decades, independent film financing has revolved around one simple question: Who's in it? Not what's the story? Not who's the audience? Not how are we going to market it? The assumption has always been that recognizable actors create value. They help raise financing, support foreign sales, and give distributors something to market. And for a long time, that was true. But something interesting has happened over the past several years. A gro

You're Leaving Money on the Table And that includes movies you've already released. Independent filmmakers spend years obsessing over financing, casting, production, post-production, festivals, distribution, publicity, and marketing. Yet remarkably few spend even one percent of their production budget preparing their films to travel internationally. That may be one of the biggest missed opportunities in today's market. Before anyone accuses me of writing another "A.I. will ch

The Meeting That Finally Happened During Cannes, I was operating on a very different time zone while still trying to make a Zoom work with our acquisitions contact over at Paramount. Needless to say, between the back-to-backs, screenings, meetings, dinners, and the general chaos of a market, actually finding a workable time proved harder than expected. Still, last Friday, we finally got the meeting done — and honestly, it may have been better outside the noise and pressure of

Filmmakers love blaming algorithms. The algorithm buried my movie. The platform didn’t support us. The streamer never surfaced the film. The audience never found it. Sometimes those complaints are fair. But increasingly, filmmakers are misunderstanding what algorithms actually are — and more importantly, what the platforms themselves are trying to accomplish. Most filmmakers still think platforms are simply trying to maximize views. That’s not really true anymore. Platforms a

Cannes 2026 was one of the busiest and strangest markets I’ve attended. The Croisette was packed. Completely packed. The reported 16,000+ attendees absolutely felt real. Restaurants were slammed. Hotels were overflowing. The Palais was crowded from morning through evening. Asia and Latin America were heavily represented. Meetings ran nonstop. Buyers were active. Acquisitions were happening. And yet, simultaneously, there was a growing online narrative that Cannes felt “quiete

Above the Line: Importance of Prep Every year, thousands of filmmakers, producers, and distributors descend on the Marché du Film with the same expectation: that this is where deals happen, where careers change, and where the right handshake can unlock everything. That expectation is wrong. Cannes is not a discovery engine. It is not a place where you show up and “find your people.” It is not where most deals are made, and it is certainly not where they are closed. What Canne

Because bad windowing can destroy value just as fast as a bad deal. Windowing Isn’t Administrative — It’s Strategy There’s a quiet way independent films lose money that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough, and it isn’t always buried in commissions, expense caps, or weak MGs. Sometimes the problem is much simpler: your film is exploited in the wrong order. Bad windowing can depress the value of a film long before you ever realize what was lost. Too many filmmakers treat distri

This week I sat down with a team of filmmakers I’ve been a fan of for a couple years. They made this badass film, “Hunting Matthew Nichols,” and back in the day they had no idea what to do with it. Some lateral steps, and some others forward, and they found themselves in a legit wide theatrical release across North America with real revenue to show. So, how did this motley crew from north of the border pull off a theatrical hat trick on a film that so many distributors projec

One of the most common misconceptions among indie filmmakers is that the distributor is supposed to “cover” Errors & Omissions insurance. That is not how this works. You made the movie, which means you are the one who needs to make sure the product is legally clean, properly cleared, and safe to release. Distributors are not in the business of assuming unknown legal risk for somebody else’s film. Even when a distributor says they have a blanket E&O policy, filmmakers often mi

Hollywood keeps telling itself that the worst is over. Tell that to laid-off staff at Disney, Starz, Sony, Epic, Spotify, CBS, WME, Axios, Lionsgate, Netflix,... the list goes on. Yes: The strikes are done. Production is slowly returning. Buyers are still buying. Cannes is around the corner. There are still headlines about big packages, giant streamer deals, and nine-figure studio tentpoles. But beneath the surface, the industry is still contracting. The layoffs are still com

There’s a tendency in this business to treat labor deals as background noise—important, but ultimately someone else’s problem. Writers get paid more, studios pay more, and everyone else carries on. That’s not what just happened. The new agreement between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is not just an incremental update. It’s a structural adjustment to how content is valued in the streaming era. And while the full downst

The new WGA/AMPTP deal is being framed as a win for writers—and it is. But for indie producers, it quietly changes the math in ways that haven’t fully hit the market yet. Over the next 60 days, those changes are going to start showing up in what gets bought, how deals are structured, and who ends up carrying the risk when a film actually performs. In this piece, we’re going to break down what’s coming—and how to position your projects so you’re not on the wrong side of it. Th

There’s a version of this conversation where every filmmaker thinks they got screwed. And sometimes they did. But more often than not, what actually happened is something far less comfortable: they walked into a deal they didn’t fully understand, pushed for terms that didn’t make sense, and then blamed the outcome when the market didn’t behave the way they expected. The truth is, bad outcomes in sales agent relationships usually aren’t one-sided. There are absolutely sales ag

The New AI Workflow in Filmmaking (And Where You Fit In) There’s a version of this conversation where people pretend AI is just another tool. It’s not. What we’re watching right now is a fundamental restructuring of how films get made—from the first idea all the way through international distribution. And like every major technological shift this industry has seen, there are going to be clear winners, clear losers, and a very large group of people who realize too late which s

Most filmmakers think they’re being ignored because sales agents are too busy. That’s not what’s happening. Your email just didn’t make it past the first five seconds. Sales agents aren’t sitting around waiting for material — they’re filtering. Constantly. And the filter is brutal because it has to be. When you’re getting dozens (sometimes hundreds) of submissions a week, you’re not reading everything. You’re scanning for signals. Clear signals = an opened script. No signals

Let’s get this out of the way upfront: Starz is downsizing; that part is real. But if your immediate reaction is that this means fewer buyers, less money, and worse deals for independent film, you’re looking at it through an outdated lens. What’s happening inside Starz right now is more nuanced, and for a certain class of filmmaker, potentially very profitable. The Mistake Everyone Makes About Downsizing The mistake most people make when they hear “downsizing” is assuming it

The “Good Movie” Trap I see this all the time. A filmmaker sends me a movie, I sit down to watch it, and within the first twenty minutes I can tell: this is actually good. The performances are solid, the direction is competent, the cinematography is clean, and nothing is obviously broken. There’s no glaring issue that makes you want to turn it off. And yet, despite all of that, the movie doesn’t move. It doesn’t sell in any meaningful way, it doesn’t generate real revenue, an

Why So Many Indie Films Make Little Money — and Why the Distributor Is Usually the Last Person to Blame We’re going to do something unusual today. Something that tends to make filmmakers uncomfortable. We’re going to talk about real numbers — not hypothetical numbers, not festival-panel optimism, and not the magical “seven-figure projections” that somehow appear whenever low-budget producers are pitching investors. Actual revenue numbers. Before anyone panics, these numbers c

If there’s one mistake filmmakers consistently make when evaluating distribution offers, it’s assuming that the deal itself is the most important part of the equation. It isn’t. The contract matters, of course. Minimum guarantees matter. Marketing commitments matter. But none of those things determine the ultimate performance of your film nearly as much as where your distributor can actually place your movie once the deal is signed. Distribution has always been about access.

Why Roku, Tubi, Pluto and the expanding ad-supported ecosystem may quietly be stabilizing the economics of independent film If you’re a filmmaker with a movie that has already sold or is currently in distribution, there’s a good chance you’ve started noticing something in your quarterly statements: Roku. More and more AVOD revenue is now being driven through Roku placements, Roku-delivered advertising, or The Roku Channel itself. It’s showing up in statements and reporting in