Let’s be honest: Business is slow. At this point in a typical Cannes Film Market, there would usually be at least a handful of big deals, a bidding war or two. Instead, crickets.
The hallways of the Palais des Festivals are busy enough — there are plenty of packages on offer and buyers and sellers are making the rounds. But the deals aren’t coming, at least not at the pace or the scale the market once reliably delivered.
The independent film industry, to put it plainly, is in transition — and nobody has quite figured out what it’s transitioning into.
The old model, the one that sustained the indie ecosystem, is visibly fraying. At its center was the pay-one television window: a predictable, lucrative revenue stream that allowed distributors to take risks on projects at the presale stage, backing films before a frame was shot based on talent attachments and a promising pitch. That window has largely collapsed, squeezed out by streaming platforms that negotiate their own deals directly and on their own terms. What’s left for independent distributors is a landscape stripped of the financial cushions that once made risk-taking viable.
Without the pay-one window, distributors simply aren’t willing to pre-buy the way they used to, especially at the high end, for $50 million plus projects, unless they are obvious, mainstream theatrical plays with big, bankable stars. The kind that are few and far between at the Cannes Marché this year.
For producers, says David Garrett of Mister Smith Entertainment, who has been navigating these markets for decades, “that means relying more on equity financing and soft money to get movies financed.”
The result, at the Cannes Marché, is a buyer’s market without enough buyers — or at least without buyers willing to commit large sums up front. Films that would once have sparked competitive bidding are screening to polite attention and noncommittal follow-up meetings. Producers are waiting. Sellers are waiting. Everyone is waiting.
But here’s the thing about a vacuum: Something always fills it. And this year in Cannes, you can start to see the outlines of what that something might be — not one model, but several, each built around a different answer to the same question: How do you finance a film and find its audience when the traditional infrastructure has cracked beneath you?
One answer, increasingly convincing, is community. Watermelon Pictures, the Chicago-based production and distribution company co-founded by brothers Badie and Hamza Ali, has built its entire operation around the idea that a deeply engaged, underserved audience is a more reliable foundation than any presale agreement. Named for the fruit that has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance, Watermelon has co-produced and/or distributed a remarkable run of Palestinian-focused films — including Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab and Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You — all three of which made the Oscar shortlist for best international feature.
Rather than relying on traditional advertising or mainstream media coverage — often lacking for the films and subjects the distributor wants to highlight, Watermelon deploys WhatsApp groups, local community leaders and social media influencers to drive audiences to cinemas. The film industry calls this “grassroots marketing.” For Watermelon, it’s simply how you talk to the people your film is made for.
A faith-based variant of the same logic has produced even more dramatic results. Angel Studios, the Utah-based company behind Sound of Freedom and King of Kings, has been scaling rapidly, adding international output deals across Europe, Latin America and Asia. Another striking example of community-driven film and television is The Chosen, the multi-season drama about the life of Jesus of Nazareth that has become an underground phenomenon of staggering proportions.
The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins is in constant contact with the show’s fans and maintains a direct text chain with 3.5 million followers, a form of direct engagement that Mark Sourian, president of production at 5&2, who make The Chosen, argues is key.
“In the 21st century, if you are not in direct connection with your audience, if you are just letting your film ‘speak for itself,’ ” Sourian says, “you are going to lose control of the conversation.”
That lesson has been absorbed — instinctively, if not always consciously — by a generation of online creators now moving into feature filmmaking with their audiences already in tow.
The most striking proof of concept is Iron Lung, the sci-fi horror film written, directed and self-distributed by YouTuber and gaming personality Markiplier, which has now grossed more than $50 million worldwide.
This year at Cannes, the model is advancing. Club Kid, arguably the festival’s hottest title in terms of commercial potential, comes from Jordan Firstman, a comedian who built his following through viral Instagram skits during the pandemic before crossing over into features. The film has generated the kind of heat that has been missing elsewhere in the Marché this week, and a deal for domestic rights is all but certain (there are rumors A24 has already snatched it up).
None of these models is a clean replacement for what the independent film industry has lost. Community-driven distribution is hard to scale. But taken together, they suggest something important: The audience for independent film hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just waiting to be reached in new ways, on new terms, by filmmakers willing to meet it where it lives — whether that’s a church network, a WhatsApp group or a comment section on YouTube.