How To Get Massive Outcomes From Indie Films

You’ve financed an indie film. How do you help ensure its success?

The traditional way to make a profit in the film industry has been to be "so good they can’t ignore you":

• get some notoriety with a breakout success at a festival and hope to sell to a distributor.
• Or maybe go around “the town” asking for permission from the major studios and distributors and hope one of them sees the potential in your film.

Unfortunately, the “traditional” path is all but overgrown from lack of use.

With studios consolidating and acquiring each other there are fewer buyers, fewer gatekeepers, and fewer opportunities. After COVID and the dual writer and actor strikes in 2023, fewer productions have been financed and the box office still hasn’t recovered.

Given this landscape, how do you - a passionate, invested Executive Producer - help ensure your film finds success?

It comes down to leverage. You can earn it, or you can buy it, but either way, you need to be able to get a large enough audience of people to buy tickets to, rent, or stream your film to be profitable.

Do that and you’ll be able to make as many movies as you want for as long as you want. That's the dream!

What follows is a practical approach. We start with two recent examples of companies that have found outsized success, and then I’ll share a five-part framework you and your team can follow to get massive outcomes from your indie films.

Disrupting Indie Film Distribution

In 2023, a brand-new film distribution company entered the marketplace.

Their first movie had a $250,000 production budget, and made $13.5 million in the box office.^[1] Their second, a $14.5 million production budget that did $184 million in the US,^[2] more than the summer blockbuster offerings from the studios like Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, The Hunger Games, Transformers, and Elemental.^[3]

These two films helped make Angel Studios the largest independent distributor (and the 8th largest distributor overall) in 2023.^[4]

How did they do it?

For the previous 10 years they ran a website called VidAngel that allowed users to filter film and TV content, and grew it to over a million users.^[5] That’s a million people they could email for free when they later released their films through Angel Studios.

The First Streamer To Dominate TV Viewing

In 2005 a trio of ex-PayPal employees started a video streaming site called YouTube. A year and a half later it was acquired by Google for $1.6 billion. Google, notably, is not a television broadcast network. Yet, in September 2024, YouTube became the first streaming platform to ever break 10% market share for TV viewing.^[6]

Before they dominated the streaming TV landscape, YouTube/Google built an audience of over 2.5 billion users^[7] who wanted to watch videos for free online. That’s 2.5 billion people who they can market YouTube TV to for free every single day.

What do these two stories have in common?

1. Both companies were independent - i.e. outside of the Hollywood film and TV ecosystems
2. They built audiences to create the leverage they needed to achieve such massive outcomes

So, how do you do it? How do you create a profitable, sustainable track record in the film industry today?

You take responsibility for the outcome by embracing independence and creating leverage.

Let me show you how.

The MOVIE Framework

In my book, Blockbuster, I share a simple five-part framework for creators (eg filmmakers) to create massive outcomes in their businesses. We can apply the framework here, now, to help you grow an audience and create the leverage you need for your film to be profitable.

Shift Your MINDSET

Step one is believing and acting according to the belief that it’s possible. If you look at the comment section of any inspirational post online, you’ll see a deluge of “yeah, except that…” “well, that might work for you but…” and “I’ve tried that and it didn’t work…” replies.

These limiting mindsets are like shooting yourself in the foot with the starting gun of a marathon.

A few limiting mindsets that I see among Executive Producers:

• Not investing in marketing the film
• Expecting the producer/distributor to make the film successful
• Micromanaging the process, despite not having any film experience

The limiting mindset is the main thing holding most creators back from their dreams.

The first step is to embrace and live with an empowering mindset, one that helps you see the potential out there, take action, and get results. In turn, those results improve your mindset, and the flywheel you created keeps on spinning.

Define Your OUTCOMES

With that new empowering mindset, you can now objectively determine your outcome. Are you looking to break the top 20 in the box office? Reach 100,000 moviegoers? Win an award? Whatever it is, you can use that outcome to reverse-engineer the strategy you need.

That strategy, as with all other strategies, revolves around an audience of people who will be integral in the achievement of that outcome.

• An audience of customers who pay $10 to see your movie
• An audience of theater bookers who will program your movie in their theaters
• An audience of Academy voters who select the winning films each year

You need to understand how many people you need in your audience in order to achieve your outcome.

For example - breaking into the top 20 in the box office could mean $500,000 in ticket sales for the opening weekend of your film. At $10.78 per ticket,^[8] that’s 46,382 tickets you’ll need to sell opening weekend. So you’ll need an audience of more than 46,382, since it’s unlikely that 100% of your audience will buy what you’re selling - a ticket to your movie. That's what reverse-engineering the strategy from the outcome looks like, and how you inform your approach to financing, production, and distribution.

Maybe your target audience size is 1,000 theater bookers, or 10,000 academy voters, or 1,000,000 people who will see, rent, purchase, or stream your film.

Defining the audience that will help you get the leverage you need to get the outcomes you want is an essential step in the process.

Increase Your VISIBILITY

With your desired outcome and target audience size in hand, you need a way to reach them. As Daniel Priestley says, “Everything in your business is downstream from leads”.

What channel(s) will you use to reach new people and pull them into your audience?

Start with one manual channel - DMs, texts, cold emails - and one automated channel like a social media platform.

Angel Studios and YouTube both used an app as a way to reach their desired audiences with something the audience valued - filtered movies or free online videos.

With Faith of Angels we gained 2,000 new audience members by making the trailer available only to those who put in their email first. We did this two weeks before releasing the trailer on YouTube - of all places! - and spreading the news that the film was coming to theaters.

Consistently reach out to new people with a mini-offer to “join your audience”. Now you won’t use those words, but you’ll find a compelling way to get them to join, typically by sharing their email address in exchange for something of value. Remember that Angel and YouTube ran this strategy for years before they were able to achieve such massive outcomes. So don’t expect to build a devoted audience overnight.

That said, you can always pay to reach the intended audience for your films. Every year, Hollywood is filled with “For Your Consideration” billboards, targeting the individuals who will vote for the Emmy or Oscar winners. You can spend countless dollars on ads to interrupt the mindless scrolling of your desired audience, hoping that they resonate with the marketing message and click to learn more and become a customer. That strategy can work, but it's costly.

You’ll likely use a combination of both, so you can reach a broad audience as deeply and in as short a timeline as possible. The key thing to know is that it's better to build the audience before you need them to show up and become customers.

IMPLEMENT Systems

As you build the audience, you have to engage them over time to increase the tension between where they are and where they want to be - sitting in a theater watching your amazing movie.

You can share behind the scenes photos with them during prep and production of the film. Invite them to help market the movie by sharing it with their audiences. Let them see the trailer first before anyone else. Invite them to free screenings. Send weekly updates with the progress of the project.

I never understood the hesitation of sharing the real-time “making of” the movies I worked on. Two of the projects I produced had a “no social media” policy during filming, effectively limiting any chance of growing an audience interested in seeing the movie.

Instead, I prefer to share pictures every day from set, and share weekly status updates with audience and investors alike through an email newsletter.

Use an email platform like Kit to get emails from your audience and regularly update them on your project. I’ve used Kit (formerly ConvertKit) since 2013 and cannot recommend it enough!

When the time comes, put your offer (Get Your Tickets Now!) in front of your audience and track how effective your systems are - your systems for getting leads, engaging them, and monetizing them.

The more you systematize and automate these different steps, the easier it becomes to do it frequently and consistently.

EXPAND Your Impact

The best people I’ve worked with are obsessed with data and analytics. They want to base their decisions on facts and results, not hunches and emotions.

A simple tracking spreadsheet will do the trick, so you can repeat and double down on what’s working and stop doing the things that are ineffective. Doing this consistently for as long as it takes is the most direct route to success that I know of: Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t, and make progress every day.

On Faith of Angels we discovered at one point our Google Ads were costing us $4.19 per click! Not per conversion, per click. We only make about $3 every time someone buys a $10 movie ticket, so that obviously was not cost effective. We shut down that ad so fast to prevent any more spend on that ineffective (aka "overpriced") channel.

This five-part framework helps you achieve the best outcome possible for your MOVIE. An empowering Mindset, defining the Outcomes, focusing on Visibility, implementing Systems, and then Expanding your impact, that’s the simple process I’ve used time and time again to get massive outcomes from indie projects and businesses.

Now, questions always arise at this point.

How much audience do I need?

Enough to be profitable.

For a $250k opening weekend, it’s about 23,000 people buying a ticket. To get the best streaming deal, you need more than one interested buyer. To win an award, you need enough voters to choose your film over all of the other nominees.

How long will it take?

As long as it takes.

I’ve produced four films. From the time of investment to the first dollar earned, the timelines look like this:

• 18 months
• 15 months
• 30 months
• 15 months

I’d be surprised if you could do it faster than 15 months, and would default to expecting a 24-36 month timeline to start recouping your investment and getting into profitability.

What’s important to note is that you can be more profitable as an independent than a studio if you understand and employ leverage. Independents have less overhead, shorter timelines, and the ability to get to market faster than the studios.

The more you take responsibility for, the greater the upside. That's the one thing the studios understand that we need to implement on the indie side of the industry.

You can create leverage by building an audience. The greater the audience the greater your leverage. Greater leverage decreases risk. Lower risk means faster profit, and profit equals permission.

Your audience is your direct link to all of the permission you seek, which means you can keep making movies for as long as you desire.

Take responsibility and start building your audience now.