by Lewis Khan
I think distributors are asking themselves the wrong question. For decades, the job has come down to one thing: which completed films should we buy? A film premieres at a festival, buyers watch the screenings, rights get negotiated, a marketing campaign gets assembled, and the film starts its run towards cinemas and, eventually, home entertainment.
The biggest change in independent film isn’t happening in cinemas. It’s happening much earlier, often before a screenplay has been locked or financing has been secured. The conversation has shifted. Producers are no longer asking distributors how much they’ll pay for a completed film. They’re asking whether they’ll come on board eighteen months earlier because a distributor’s endorsement can unlock finance, attract cast and reduce investor risk. Distribution has started moving upstream.
A24 is the clearest version of this. It signed former Disney Television chairman Peter Rice to develop and co-finance projects directly, from the artist-relationship stage rather than the finished-film stage and struck a first-look deal with Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries to option ideas before they’re even scripts. Neon has arrived at the same place from a different angle: backed by an expanded revolving credit facility and a multi-picture slate financing partnership with Waypoint Entertainment, Neon is now co-financing the films it will eventually distribute, not just bidding on them once they exist.
You see it in investor meetings now. The first question isn’t always who wrote the script or who is directing. It’s often who is distributing it. Twenty years ago, that answer usually came after the film had been made. Increasingly, investors want to know before they write the first cheque.
That changes the distributor’s role completely. Buying finished films is becoming the smallest part of the job. Understanding audience behaviour before production begins is becoming far more valuable. The distributors with the strongest data on what travels internationally, which genres still work theatrically, where streaming platforms have genuine demand and how social audiences form around projects have information that financiers and producers need long before the cameras roll.
The economics are changing as well. Marketing has become the single biggest risk for many independent films. Production budgets have remained relatively predictable. Reaching an audience has not. An Australian independent feature can spend years assembling finance only to discover that cutting through a crowded release calendar requires a marketing budget almost as large as the production itself. That’s where projects stall.
The old marketing playbook is also getting harder to justify financially. A TikTok-commissioned study of 38 US theatrical campaigns between 2023 and 2025 found a median 172 per cent lift in ticket-purchase rate among exposed audiences, running more than fifteen times as efficient as linear television on a cost basis. Most of those buyers had never seen a TV spot at all. That’s a different economic proposition to a six-figure billboard campaign, and it’s why creator relationships are becoming a line item distributors budget for, not a bonus a producer arranges themselves.
Distribution isn’t simply about selling rights anymore. It’s about reducing uncertainty.
Technology will accelerate that change, but perhaps not in the way many people expect. Artificial intelligence won’t decide which films become classics. A24’s new research partnership with Google DeepMind, a multi-year $75 million investment into AI tools built specifically for filmmakers, including a storyboarding prototype tied to Google’s Veo, is a useful test case for where the line actually sits. It isn’t being built to write scripts or pick winners. It’s being built to model release strategy, forecast audience response by territory and reduce the guesswork before money moves. Kane Parsons, the director behind A24’s own hit Backrooms, has said that he’d be happy to see generative AI “disappear forever.” A24 signed the deal anyway. Human judgement still matters. The difference is that judgement becomes better informed, whether or not the people doing the judging asked for the help.
There’s another shift that receives surprisingly little attention. The most valuable asset a distributor may own in 2035 won’t be its library. It will be its audience.
Film companies have traditionally built catalogues. The next generation may build communities instead. Angel Studios has taken this furthest: through its Angel Guild, more than 2.6 million people across 155 countries have put in well over $130 million to fund and vote on which projects get made, and its “pay it forward” ticketing, where an audience member buys a stranger’s seat, added nearly two million admissions to Sound of Freedom on its own. That’s an extreme version of the same shift. The audience relationship itself has become a balance-sheet item: Sony’s Aniplex paid A$35 million for Madman Entertainment’s anime division in 2019, and it wasn’t buying a theatrical slate. It was buying the fact that Madman knew, precisely, who was watching.
That has implications for Australian cinema. Australia will never outspend the major American distributors. It doesn’t need to. Our advantage has always been agility. Boutique distributors can make decisions faster, develop closer relationships with filmmakers and support films that would never survive inside a multinational release slate. The opportunity isn’t to copy the global studios. It’s to build businesses designed for a market they can’t serve efficiently.
Umbrella Entertainment is a working example. It has spent two decades restoring more than a hundred Australian films in high definition, alongside the National Film and Sound Archive, and building a market of collectors who will pay for a boutique 4K box set of a film that the majors would never bother releasing on disc at all. That’s not a company hoping cinemas hold up. It’s a company that decided its core relationship was with the fans, not the screen.
The next successful Australian distributor may still acquire films at festivals. But that will become only one part of the business. It will also package projects, advise financiers, build the kind of direct audience relationship that Umbrella and Madman already have, and think about release strategy before principal photography has even begun.
That’s a very different company from the one we recognise today. It’s also the only kind built to survive what’s coming for the ones that don’t change: the slow discovery that owning a library, and nothing else, stopped being a business a while ago.
Lewis Khan is a producer based in Sydney
