The North American Market Isn’t Dead — It’s Rebalancing (And the Middle Tier Is Eating)
- Gato Scatena
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
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 past decade. Those studios are shoring up their IP moats. While their focused there, others are capitalizing.
The New Reality at the Top
Studio-level and mini-major buyers — including companies like Grindstone | Lionsgate, Lionsgate (corporate), Sony Pictures, and Vertical Entertainment — are still active in the market. But they are behaving very differently.
They’re stricter, they’re slower, they’re paying less for middle-tier films, and they’re paying nothing for lower-tier titles.
This isn’t taste-based. It’s portfolio defense. Internal pressure. Risk compression.
And that shift has created a very real budget danger zone.
The $300K–$3MM Danger Zone
If your film is budgeted between $300K and $3MM, you’re operating in the most fragile band of the North American market. Ironic since just a few years ago, it was the sweet spot.
These are now too expensive to be a no-risk microbudget, too small to justify studio-scale marketing spend, and often not cast-driven enough to force competitive bidding at the top.
Films in this range used to survive on “good enough.” That no longer works.
That said — and this is the part most people miss — this doesn’t mean the market is closed.
It means the market has shifted downward.
The Shift Nobody’s Talking About
For years, many mid-tier North American buyers had trouble competing for strong middle-tier films. When studio-level companies came in with outsized MGs, filmmakers understandably ignored everything else — even when the rest of the deal terms were weaker.
That dynamic has flipped.
As the top pulls back, middle-tier buyers now have access to films they rarely got a real shot at before — and they are leaning in.
Companies like Level 33 Entertainment, Indican Pictures, Cineverse, and Cleopatra Entertainment are no longer just filling gaps. Though they’re certainly helping fill the gap left by Gravitas Ventures’ acquisition. And there are more than a couple dozen other buyers in this range.
They are actively competing. They’re offering higher MGs than they historically did. They’re offering better splits. They’re offering cleaner economics. And most importantly — they’re offering real attention.
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