by Lewis Khan
Most producers talk about marketing as if it begins once the film is locked.
It doesn’t.
By the time you’re cutting a trailer, you’re no longer shaping demand. You’re trying to protect whatever demand might exist.
The real marketing decisions happen when the idea is chosen.
Development isn’t just about drafts and attachments. It’s about market logic. Who is this for? What promise does it make? Can it be pitched cleanly in a line? Does the genre travel? Is the audience identifiable without a paragraph of explanation?
If those answers aren’t clear in development, the problem isn’t your campaign. It’s the asset.
Parts of the industry still behave as if we’re primarily solving for finance rather than demand. Projects are assembled around eligibility, mandates and what might close a gap. Audience positioning is deferred until after production — when it’s too late to change anything structural.
Buyers don’t respond to effort. They respond to clarity.
Look at Talk to Me. The hook was immediate. Youth-driven, high-concept horror with exportable energy. It didn’t need to be over-explained at market because the concept did the work. That legibility was a development decision.
Or go back to Wolf Creek. It wasn’t simply a thriller. It was built around a durable antagonist and a contained mythology that could repeat. The character architecture created sequel logic. That wasn’t discovered after release. It was designed.
Those weren’t marketing triumphs. They were asset-design choices.
Sales agents ask the uncomfortable questions early. Can this travel? What recent comps prove appetite? Is there follow-on potential? What is the territory-by-territory pitch? They are thinking about presales and risk tolerance while development meetings are still debating tone.
And here’s the financial layer most of us understand but don’t design around: producers are rarely first in the waterfall. Distribution fees, sales commissions, marketing recoupment and preferred equity come ahead of backend participation. If the audience base is diffuse, the economic outcome becomes narrow.
So, when a project has no clear audience spine and no repeatability, we’re not talking about creative purity. We’re talking about diminished leverage.
Marketing in development forces discipline. It forces decisions. It forces you to say who the film is not for. That’s often where resistance starts.
A concept that tries to appeal to everyone because it needs funding flexibility frequently arrives in market, appealing strongly to no one.
This isn’t an argument for chasing trends or flattening voice. It’s an argument for coherence. Films that break through tend to signal identity early and unapologetically. The positioning is visible in the logline. The world is durable. The tone is decisive.
The harder truth is this: marketing is not a function you hire. It’s a structural choice you make.
If you treat development as insulated from market reality, you’re effectively asking distributors to manufacture conviction later. They can amplify clarity. They cannot invent it.
By the time you’re in post looking for a hook, the decisions that shape demand are already behind you.
And in the current financing climate, that lag isn’t creative — it’s expensive.
Lewis Khan is a film and television producer based in Sydney.
