How in the blue blazes is an independent filmmaker like yourself supposed to find a favorable distribution deal and secure profitability for your movie? You’re not. In today’s economy, in every sector of the entertainment industry, institutions are more apt to sell artists and creators the possibility of success than they are to invest in the actual labor that goes into making a film successful. Just like every other sector of the entertainment industry, this unsettling reality tends to make every business relationship feel at least a little bit exploitative or fraudulent. The truth is, they are.

Right now, we’re all working in a system that’s unsustainable and overextended. Anyone in a position of power is compensating for those imbalances by pushing liability towards people too powerless to argue with the logic of doing so, even if those same people are also too powerless to effectively manage the industry’s risks.

Am I saying that distribution is a non-starter? Nope. I’m saying we need to empower ourselves to manage the risks and responsibilities that distributors and the industry at large are foisting on us.

What I’m suggesting involves a life-defining workload, and one that most of us want no part of, which only compounds the workload of producing a film in the first place. By no means am I claiming that any of this is fair or just. What I am saying is that this is how we make movies successful in the current showbusiness economy. More importantly, this is how we become leaders in the industry.

My name is Tennyson E. Stead, and I’m writing this blog with ten years of film finance experience and twenty years spent in indie film development. Between my spec writing, my works for hire, and my script doctor clients, I’ve written more than seventy screenplays and sold a bunch. I’m currently serving as the Head of Development for Lady of the Light Productions out of Australia. I’m an experienced director and producer, I’m working constantly as a consultant, and I’ve got two screenplays on the brink of pre-production.

Let’s talk about how to build a successful distribution cycle.

BACK TO BASICS:

Anyone following my blogs here on Stage 32 has heard me say that success in showbusiness boils down to the strength in our craft and then strength in our community.

If the work is consistently and objectively good, and if people are consistently showing up when we need them - whether that’s at the box office, during production, or anywhere else people might be needed - then our risks are mitigated, and we trend towards success. If you’re reading this article, then let’s assume your craft is strong. What you need now is for people to start showing up.

CROWDFUNDING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Ideally, you’ve been working on this problem from the beginning of your development process. Anytime you need money, you should be running a crowdfunding campaign. Even if you don’t find the money you’re looking for, that campaign will give you a snapshot of how willing the people in your audience are to support your film. Until your audience is strong enough to maintain your film’s financial needs, that community is nowhere near ready to support a commercial release.

Today, it’s a foregone conclusion that your distributor is not going to provide that community for you. Instead, they’ll use your film to pad their content on streaming networks and anywhere else they make money. Distributors take a percentage of whatever your movie makes, and they take that money before your production company sees a dime, so it’s very possible for a distribution partner to grind an income out of their own business model while your investors wait to see a return on investment. Do not rely on your distributor to connect you to an audience.

Every crowdfunding push is a chance to connect with new audience members, to find out what they like about you and your movie, and to find supporters eager to share your project with their own networks. Building community is all about making ourselves necessary to other people, so the key is finding ways of facilitating the relationship that your audience wants to have with the entertainment industry.

Does your audience want advice on making their own films, maybe? Do they want behind-the-scenes information or anecdotes from sets you might have worked on? Do they want a more personal relationship with the people who create their entertainment? Ask them, and they’ll tell you!

Be a human being. Serve the needs of others. Welcome these people into your showfamily.

GO ON TOUR:

Literally every entertainment community outside of Hollywood values the necessity of touring. Name one comic who doesn’t travel. Name one band that stays in their own city. Sports teams are on the road as often as they’re home. Literally every Broadway production goes on tour, despite the fact that Broadway shows thrive first and foremost on New York City tourism!

Now, imagine if your average stand-up comic had access to a non-profit, nationwide network of venues that did all the booking, all the publicity, all the house relations, and all the ticket sales, in exchange for a $55 fee per show. Given the amount of hustle even a mediocre comic invests in themselves, that person might well become President of the United States. Meanwhile, filmmakers are looking at the festival circuit with a self-indulgent dismissiveness that borders on disgust. Unless a given festival has the hottest distributors or agents, and unless we as filmmakers are personally guaranteed facetime with those people for bothering to attend the Tallgrass Film Festival in Kansas, we want no part of it.

You can’t build a strong showbusiness community without going on the road! Stop thinking of the festival circuit as a grab-bag to be pillaged for prizes and prestige, and consider the fact that you have festival organizers toiling year after year to give filmmakers like yourself personal access to the film fans in their communities. Show up for them! When you find crowds that you connect with, keep going back to those festivals and support their work. Year after year, build a tour circuit of places you know you need to hit. Throw awesome parties. Host panels. Find out if any local colleges need a guest speaker while you’re in town.

Get people connected to your socials, and your crowdfunding efforts - not so you can milk them for cash, but so you can keep in touch, give them something of yourself, and invite them back to the same festival next year so you can all catch up over drinks. Build a consistent, disciplined, personal commitment to the festival circuit. In time, you’ll have a web of communal connectivity that extends across your home continent and beyond. On the one hand, you’ll have more people showing up for you. On the other hand, you’ll develop a very strong, very intimate sense of which cities will best support a platform theatrical release for the movies you’re making.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD DISTRIBUTION DEAL?

You do. You make a good distribution deal. Very rarely do distributors make any effort to offer a filmmaker like yourself terms that actually secure profitability for your movie.

How do you overcome this problem? First of all, you need to know what your movie costs. You need to know how the cash that flows into your movie is getting divided. Typically, any investors in your movie will be taking 100% of incoming monies until they are made whole, plus a certain additional percentage, after which the investor will continue taking 50% of your capital. Your production company and all the other equity holders will start participating in the other 50% at that point.

Keep in mind that this is how money gets divided as it flows into your production company. Your distributor is taking a percentage before they pay you out. So are the movie theaters. So is the bank, if you’ve taken any loans. Knowing how your production’s money flows means you have a good idea of how much money your movie needs to make in order to be profitable.

Having that information, don’t agree to a deal that doesn’t give you the tools to make your film successful. Your distributor isn’t going to do that work for you, so don’t bother looking for the distribution deal that somehow assures your film’s success. Ask for terms that put that success in your hands, and sustainably so. Don’t accept less than you need, ask for what you want, and don’t let people convince you of things that you know to be untrue.

Plenty of today’s indie distribution companies are demanding upfront fees from filmmakers. While I do not love this approach, it’s no more or less ethical than all the other “pay for access” business models emerging in New Hollywood right now. If you need to pay for distribution, then just make sure the terms of that deal are workable for you. Assume your distribution partner will do the barest minimum of what their contract allows, and figure out if the tools that company provides serve your exit strategy for the movie.

Most independent distributors today have a 50/50 deal with the movie theaters, where the movie theater takes half of the ticket sales upfront. While this sounds egregious, it can make your movie more competitive when it comes to fighting the studio films for screens. What’s more, most independent distributors will rely on you to cover the cost of marketing your film. Again, this practice is neither reasonable nor fair… and it can be very tempting to forego a theatrical release, take whatever a distributor is offering to get your film streaming on Netflix, Apple, or Prime, and simply hope for a breakout hit.

Don’t do that.

NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE SUCCESS

If you bow out of theaters and roll the dice on a less expensive and less involved streaming release, the results aren’t going to justify the investment you’ve made in your movie. Building a strong theatrical run is the best way to drive streaming revenue. While it’s true that most movies don’t break even in the theaters anymore, that’s largely because most of the filmmakers and executives working today don’t even understand the work we’ve been discussing in this blog.

Nobody’s touring. Nobody’s building their communities. Instead, they’re focused on more self-serving, immediately gratifying investments like networking and marketing. While these strategies might make sense in business school, they’re not showbusiness.

So, let’s say that you’ve built a strong crowdfunding base and that you’ve been relying on money from a supportive community to maintain an extensive, two-year festival run. By now, you’ve got a pretty good idea of which cities love you the most. Talk to your distributor, and organize a two-screen release (probably in Los Angeles and New York) that will expand into those five, “homebase” cities. Spend some time planning that opening, and spend some money putting together a marketing campaign with trailers, billboards, and some web advertising that targets those cities in particular.

Contact the people you’ve met in those cities through the festival circuit, including the actual festival organizers who hosted you. Ask for help turning people out for opening weekend. Mobilize your audience.

AN INDIE THEATRICAL RELEASE

Selling tickets is all about supply and demand. You’re opening in two theaters nationwide, and people have been reading and hearing about this movie for the last two years. If those two theaters are more full than the average theater that’s screening the latest big, nationwide release, if you’ve sold more tickets PER SCREEN than movies with more money and more reach than you have, then the movie theaters in those other three cities will be begging to add your movie to the marquis.

If you can hold those five screens, and if your five screens can each sell as many seats as the average 3,000 screen blockbuster in its second or third week of release, then you can expand out to ten screens. At ten screens, for sure, you’ll see some dropoff… but now you’re engaging new audiences. Now, you’re getting reviewed in new markets. Hold there for a week or two, and see if you can expand to 20 or 50 screens once people really start talking about the film.

None of this happens if you haven’t done the work… but it’s very possible for an independent film without the support of a major studio to roll out gradually to about 200 screens. If you can hang onto those screens for a month or two, you’ve probably made at least a few million dollars in ticket sales. Your film is probably breaking even, people are certainly talking about it, and the critics have already been watching you succeed on the festival circuit for a few years. What do you think happens, when you bring that film to Netflix?

GET YOUR STREAMING MONEY

If nothing else, the streamers will be much more willing to cut you a deal that involves up-front licensing fees and a much better backend. If you’re lucky, your film rides the momentum you’ve gained in your theatrical run to become a global phenomenon. You, your team, and your movie will finally have the attention you were hoping to find, when you first started development.

That’s what a good distribution deal looks like. Just like every other form of breakout success in Hollywood, what appears on the surface to be sparkles, magic, and “bippity-boppity boop” turns out to be nothing more than the relentless effort of a small group of people over an agonizingly long period of time.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER

Whenever this happens, the industry inevitably calls it luck. Everyone starts looking for the one thing about your film that made it so much more wildly successful than similarly positioned movies. Over the next several years, you’ll see any number of productions seemingly designed to clone your movie’s subgenre, or tone, or performance style. Nobody will want to believe it was the raw, unbridled effort and commitment you invested in the community around your film, because that would mean investing a comparable effort is the only way to see your results.

Your distributor, likewise, will reap the benefits of your success. Film trades will hail them as the next visionary champion of independent cinema, and they’ll start pulling in tons of investment capital and critical attention for the heroic job they did of discovering you as indie Hollywood’s next rising star… and you know what?

Let them. Be gracious. Even if all they did was offer you the same crappy deal that everyone else is getting, the simple fact is that they did so. You’re not here to establish yourself as an executive producer, so let them have the credit for your movie’s distribution. None of that matters, and I’ll tell you why:

When your theatrical run is finished, when the film is streaming, and when your self-propelled cycle of distribution and press coverage finally starts winding down, it’s time to reach out to the community you’ve built with your next project. Keep relying on them, and make sure they can always rely on you. What you’ve built is a family, and family sticks together.

When anyone comes asking for a piece of the success that you’ve created with this movie, and they will, make sure they pay you for it.

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