by Lewis Khan
Next month I’ll be pitching a feature film to private investors. It’s a very different room to the ones most Australian producers were trained for.
I’ve learned that there’s a moment in almost every financing meeting that tells you whether you’re connecting or losing the room. It usually comes within the first five minutes. The producer is still explaining the creative vision. The investor is already wondering how this becomes an investment.
That moment is happening more often now.
The traditional pitch deck was built for broadcasters. Tone references. Lookbook imagery. A director’s statement about why the film matters. That language made sense when commissioning editors controlled the majority of available money and had spent careers inside the system evaluating creative work. They knew what a treatment meant, what a director’s vision statement was supposed to do, and why tone boards existed. The document was written for them.
Those rooms still exist. They’re just not where most of the new money sits.
Private equity doesn’t read lookbooks. Family offices don’t either. The high-net-worth investors and professional capital now moving into Australian independent film have mostly built their wealth in property, infrastructure, or professional services. They understand IRR. They understand risk-adjusted returns. They’ve read investment memos their entire careers, and they assess documents the same way regardless of the industry.
They have no interest in learning a new format.
What they want is market evidence. Who is the audience for this film, and how large is that audience in the territories that matter to the financing structure. Where have comparable films found them, and what did those films return after the distributor took their cut, the sales agent took theirs, and any recoupment obligations were satisfied. What does the distribution pathway actually look like in this market, not in principle.
These aren’t creative questions. They’re the questions asked in every other investment category, applied to film.
The producers getting traction have worked out the sequencing. The investor memo leads. The deck follows; not as the primary argument, but as evidence of quality once the financial logic has already made sense to the room. That ordering change sounds minor. The difference in how those conversations unfold is not.
Most producers fall into a gap here. They know the project deeply. But ask for the sales estimate range their international sales agent has placed on comparable Australian genre titles over the last three financial years, and the room goes quiet. Ask how distributor minimum guarantees have shifted in key international territories since streamers stopped competing for indie acquisitions and Pay-TV output deals dried up, and it goes quieter still. That’s the silence where a lot of films stall.
Screen Australia can provide development funding. State agencies can co-invest at a production level. But when a project needs private capital to reach its actual budget, the people across the table aren’t evaluating the script. They’re evaluating whether the producer understands the commercial architecture of what they’re asking someone to fund. The deck, as it’s traditionally built, doesn’t tell them that one way or the other.
The harder truth is that the development culture most Australian producers trained inside never required this. The funding structures rewarded the ability to develop work and navigate the public money ecosystem. Commercial literacy was adjacent to the job, not central to it.
That’s changed. And it’s changed faster than the pitch materials have.
The investor appetite for Australian films is real. Private money is genuinely looking for places to deploy, and screen IP has characteristics that suit some portfolio structures. But the entry point into those conversations is no longer a tone document.
The pitch deck hasn’t disappeared; it’s just no longer the opening act. Today’s investors want to understand the commercial case before they fall in love with the creative one.
Lewis Khan is a producer based in Sydney
Image Source: Depositphotos
