How the Indie Film Finance Landscape Is Changing
In today’s newsletter, I’m going to show you how the indie film finance landscape is changing, and what that means for how you should be structuring your film.
This week, I spoke with a producer I’m working with who had just come back from the European Film Market.
She said something that stuck with me.
Pre-sales are getting smaller.
They’re harder to close.
And in some cases, they’re not meaningful enough to finance films the way they used to.
Now, this isn’t a dramatic “the market is dead” statement.
But it is a shift.
And if you don’t understand how that shift affects your finance plan, you’ll end up building your film around assumptions that no longer hold.
Because if you’re relying on pre-sales to close a meaningful portion of your budget, there’s a good chance that gap is now yours to fill.
So let’s break down what’s actually changing.
The old model
For a long time, pre-sales were one of the core engines of independent film finance.
A producer or sales agent would sell rights to distributors in different territories before the film was completed.
Those deals could then be cash-flowed through advances or lending.
In simple terms, you could use future sales to help finance the film now.
This model became more important after the studio system broke apart and independent producers had to piece together finance from multiple sources.
Instead of one studio funding and distributing the film, you had:
Multiple distributors
Across multiple territories
Each contributing a piece of the budget
That system still exists.
But it doesn’t work the same way it used to.
What’s changed
The easy conclusion is that there is less money in film.
That’s not quite right.
There is still a lot of money in entertainment.
But attention has fragmented.
Audiences now have:
Streaming
Social media
YouTube
Short-form content
All competing for the same time.
And a lot of that content is free.
So even though the overall industry is large, the pool of money available to independent films has tightened, particularly in the mid-market.
That pressure shows up in pre-sales.
They’re smaller.
They’re harder to secure.
And in some cases, they’re no longer meaningful enough to finance a film.
How this plays out in the market
Distributors are more risk-averse than they were before.
Without cast, many of them prefer to wait.
They’d rather see the finished film than take on early risk.
So instead of buying projects in development or pre-production, they sit back.
This creates a knock-on effect.
Fewer early deals get done.
Which makes pre-sales less reliable.
Which then reinforces the idea that presales are dying.
That’s the loop the market is currently in.
And if you’re building a finance plan that relies heavily on pre-sales without strong packaging, you’re going to feel that immediately.
Is the Distributor being rational?
Partly.
But it’s not the full picture.
Film returns are not linear. They’re driven by outliers.
A small number of films generate a disproportionate share of revenue, while most sit around breakeven or modest loss.
So when the market becomes overly conservative, there’s an argument that it reduces its exposure to the very outcomes that actually drive returns.
That said, distributors are managing real constraints in an industry where margins are tighter and there is more competition for attention.
So their behaviour makes sense at an individual deal level.
But at a market level, it can still become self-reinforcing.
Both of those things can be true at the same time.
What is still working
This is where filmmakers tend to get it wrong.
They hear all of the above and assume pre-sales are gone.
They’re not.
I know filmmakers who have recently hit close to $1m in presales.
So they’re still there, sales agents are just more selective.
What still works:
Lower budget genre
Clear audience positioning
Disciplined budgets
Directors with a strong point of view
There are still sales agents doing real business.
There are still pre-sales being done.
But the target we are aiming at is smaller.
The real shift
This is the part that matters.
If pre-sales are weaker than they used to be, something has to replace that portion of the budget.
That something is equity.
This is where a lot of filmmakers are behind.
They’re still structuring their films as though the market will close the gap for them.
In many cases, it won’t.
Which leads to two practical implications.
1. Your budget needs to reflect reality
You can’t build a budget based on what you hope the market will pay.
It needs to reflect:
What you can raise privately
What you can realistically pre-sell (if anything)
What incentives you can access
If pre-sales are softer, the finance plan or budget has to adjust.
2. You need to get comfortable with equity
If you want to finance films in this market, you need to understand how to raise private capital.
That includes:
How to frame risk
How to structure projections
How to position the film as an investment
And how to find investors to pitch to
Because that portion of the budget is no longer optional.
It’s where deals are getting done.
Final thought
The indie finance landscape hasn’t collapsed.
It’s shifted.
Pre-sales, sales agents, distributors.
They all still matter.
But they don’t carry the same weight they used to.
Which means the role of the producer becomes more important.
You need to understand the market.
You need to structure around reality.
And you need to be able to close the gap yourself.
Because the filmmakers who adapt to this shift will keep making films.
And the ones who don’t will keep waiting for a version of the market that isn’t coming back.
