The Business of Independent Film

Follow the budgets and you can read Adam Wingard’s whole career like a bank statement. Mumblegore features made for around $75,000. Then You’re Next and The Guest, million-dollar festival darlings that turned into commercial hits. Then a decade in the land of intellectual property, a Blair Witch, a Death Note, and two Godzilla-and-Kong machines carrying budgets upward of $150 million for Warner Bros. And then, in May 2024, the trade announcement that reverses the whole curve: Wingard walks away from directing Godzilla x Kong: Supernova to make Onslaught, an original action-horror picture with his oldest writing partner, Simon Barrett, for A24 and Aaron Ryder’s company, at $15 million. From one hundred fifty to fifteen: a director buying back his own name at ninety percent off. ...

The arithmetic of The Wrong Girls is the kind that should be taught before anyone is allowed to say the word “passion project”: fourteen years from conception to camera, then twenty-nine days of photography. Fourteen years of what, exactly? Dylan Meyer, making her feature debut after a screenwriting career (An American Pickle, Moxie), describes the cycle without decoration: we had the money, we lost the money, we had the money, we lost the money. Her producer and best friend Maggie McLean remembers being broke at twenty-four in a back house, talking the movie into existence, and then spending a decade on the phone saying keep going. At the lowest point they were scouting New Jersey street corners, prepared to fake Los Angeles one restricted camera angle at a time, for a film whose entire reason to exist is Los Angeles. That is what a long raise actually looks like from inside: not a montage, but years of almost. ...

Follow the causal chain, because it is a clean one and it ends somewhere instructive. Eli Roth makes Borderlands for a studio at a budget north of one hundred million US dollars; the studio interferes; the film grosses thirty-three million worldwide. Roth responds the way a certain kind of veteran responds, and honestly the way I respect: he builds a smaller house where nobody can tell him what to do. The banner is called The Horror Section, and its first picture, Ice Cream Man, a Pied Piper slasher in which a stranger’s sweets turn a suburban town’s children into killers, was made as an economical indie for around five million US dollars, released through Iconic Events. From one hundred million and no control to five million and total control: that is the entire argument for independence, executed by a man with the name recognition to pull it off in one move. ...

Strip away the pickleball and The Dink is a financing story, and a rather pure one. A comedy star and a comedy writer who play poker together have lunch. The star says he wants the kind of picture the studios stopped making; the writer says the word pickleball; they develop it together, pull in a producer through friendship rather than an agency package, finance the film independently, shoot it, finish it, screen it in Hollywood, and only then open the doors to buyers. Apple TV+ released it on July 24, and Jake Johnson’s own account of how that happened deserves to be pinned above the desk of everyone who still sends treatments into the streamer void: ...

Twelve million US dollars for domestic rights. That was the cheque A24 wrote at Sundance for Olivia Wilde’s dinner-party comedy The Invite, one of the biggest sales of the festival, and the number is worth holding in your head for the length of this piece, because everything intelligent about this release flows from what the buyer and the seller decided to do with it next. They did the old thing. They did the thing the trades had been writing obituaries for since the pandemic: a platform release, New York and Los Angeles first, a slow build, and a bet that word of mouth still exists as a market force. Three weekends into wide release the film sat at twenty million domestic and fifteen point seven international from 36 markets, on its way past forty million worldwide with Italy, France and Spain still to open. The consultant David A. Gross, who watches these curves for a living, told Variety he would not be surprised by a finish above sixty million. For a talking-heads comedy in a summer owned by The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that is not counterprogramming. That is a heist. ...

Independent films usually cannot afford A-list talent. This is not simply because movie stars demand high salaries; it is because independent films cannot afford the logistical nightmare of keeping those stars on a prolonged shooting schedule. Director J.C. Chandor understood the mathematics of production. To secure an A-list cast for his $3.5 million film Margin Call, he enforced a brutal, extremely compressed 17-day shoot. The Short Commitment Pitch This “short commitment” pitch was the master key. Because Chandor only required two-and-a-half weeks of their time, he was able to secure Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, and Demi Moore. He weaponized scheduling to bypass the traditional financial barriers of Hollywood casting. ...