Below The Line

If you’ve been listening to the noise, you’d think North American indie distribution has turned into a graveyard. Fewer real buyers. Smaller MGs. Studio-level companies tightening mandates. Middle-tier films getting squeezed. Lower-tier films ignored entirely. Some of that is true — but it’s not the whole story. What’s actually happening is a reallocation of leverage . And the people quietly benefiting from it are not the legacy studio buyers everyone’s been chasing for the p

If you only read headlines, you’d think the international indie market is either dead  or *about to be saved by AI, FAST, or whatever platform launched last Tuesday. Neither is true. What is  true is this. The international marketplace didn’t disappear — it fragmented, and the people still making money are the ones who understand where volume lives , where price lives , and how to cast surgically instead of emotionally . And as we discussed in December, films operating on the

Let’s clear something up right away: Money is not scarce right now. Prepared filmmakers are. As of early 2026, private investors—especially doctors, dentists, real-estate developers, and successful entrepreneurs—are doing just fine. Many of them want  to invest in films. Not because movies are the best place to park capital (they aren’t), but because film sits at the intersection of logic and fantasy in a way few asset classes do. Your job isn’t to convince them movies are sa

There’s an old indie film playbook that a lot of filmmakers are still following. And then there’s what the acquisition side has actually been forced to do over the last couple years: pivot away from the “small day-and-date” model and into a higher-budget, more theatrical-forward world where fewer films qualify — and the ones that do have to play . That was the spine of my conversation with my pal Joshua Spector , Vice President of Acquisitions & Production at Grindstone | Lio