The Traditional Film Industry’s Collapse Is Right on Schedule — Opinion

Editor’s note: This is the thirteenth chapter of “A Producer’s Path,” an ongoing column for IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking from independent producer Daren Smith. Read previous chapters here. Whenever you might be reading this, I’m confident you can scan the news over the last week and reference another round of studio layoffs, a company crumbling or leaving town, or the latest hit to the gut of the film worker. Or the recent studio flop or indie success in the box office. Yet, we’re still surprised every time this happens. It’s almost as if we produce fresh surprise on a quarterly basis which is itself a clue. The collapse of the film industry isn’t happening to you. It’s happening right on time. Every reel starts the same way: a leader counting down, indifferent, running in the booth while the house is still filling up. It isn’t counting down at you, it’s just counting. Everyone in the industry describes these moments like weather. A rough patch. A cycle. They cry that the sky is falling when there’s plenty of evidence to support and to contradict that statement. The trade press says something one week and the opposite the next, which structurally prevents anyone from seeing the trend over years and years. Weather is something you wait out or grab a jacket for. A collapse is completely different. Waiting is the most expensive thing a producer can do in a time like this. It looks noble, altruistic even. The person waiting for the industry to return to “the way it was” is not lazy or foolish. They’re being loyal and faithful to the art they love. The schedule, however, doesn’t pause for faithfulness. Those producers will spend the only years they had to position themselves for what’s coming. And they’ll feel justified and even virtuous the whole time. There was a moment between these last two films I produced — “Faith of Angels” and “Brotherhood” — where the idea that “the cavalry isn’t coming” became personal. I looked at half a dozen distributors for “Brotherhood,” and realized that in order for us to make our money back using the traditional model, we’d have to make $15 million or more in the box office. If we self-distributed and used a hyper-targeted marketing strategy with 1/10th the typical budget, we could break even at just under $6 million. As the one responsible for returning investors’ capital, it was a no-brainer. At that moment, “Brotherhood” became “truly independent.” Financed, developed, produced, marketed, and distributed by my company, Craftsman Films. We found a company to help us with the theatrical booking, and we got to work. That was the final straw for us, but there were plenty of signs leading up to this point: First: The math. DVD was a huge profit layer for film, studio and indie alike. It was the thing that made the mid-budget film mathematically possible. When home video fell from its peak in the mid 2000s — more than $15 billion per year — the mid-budget drama or comedy or romcom lost its justification to exist, and everything since then moves movies to one of two ends of a budget barbell. You have sub-$5 million budgets and indies, including the micro-budget films, or you have the $70-350 million studio films and tentpoles. We have seen specialty companies close doors over the last two decades who made a name for themselves in the $5-20 million range, and now they’re gone. The math stopped working around 2005 and twenty years later we’re even worse off than we were then. Now we have to be demand-first in our approach to developing, financing, producing, and distributing indie films, and ensure that the market justifies the budget we want to spend on each project. Hoping for distribution is a long-expired strategy, it now requires its own line item in the budget. Second: How we missed it. There are three reasons that come to mind. Everyone who was making a living under that old math had a reason to hope that things would return to the way they were. The trades report in cycles, not in decades. And “the movies always come back” or my favorite, “people still see movies even when the economy is bad” is a genuinely beautiful belief. And a fourth, less forgivable than the other three: the number we all watched was the one that lied. Ticket prices kept climbing, so revenue held up while the audience shrank. 1.58 billion tickets sold in 2002. 1.23 billion in 2019, before anyone had heard of a lockdown. 769 million in 2025. Nobody watches the leader. That’s what it’s for. It runs while the moviegoers are still finding seats, and by the time anyone looks up, the count is already done. I keep looking at other mediums to anticipate what happens next. We’ve seen this play out with music in the early 2000s, news in the mid-2000s, television in the early 2010s, and now film. Film had a physical moat — you had to leave the house, drive to a theater, and pay to get the thing you wanted — until 2020 when we all got locked inside. That bought us a decade or two, which is why we’re behind those other three. The industry mistook that delay for immunity, but we’re on the same schedule as the other industries. Look at music now. After 15 years of collapse, it bottomed, and has grown every year since. $14.6 billion in 1999 at its peak, then down to ~$6.8 billion in 2014, then climbing to $17.7 billion in 2024, a nominal record, with streaming alone at $14.9 billion. A rebound, but with very different economics than 25 years before. The reason we didn’t prepare or better anticipate this collapse isn’t stupidity, it’s because it’s hard for us to admit the thing we love so much is changing and we have to change with it. Like any great relationship, you don’t want it to end. Especially when you give most of the hours of your day and the best years of your working life to that relationship. Calling it a catastrophe is comfortable, because that’s something that happens to you, not with you or because of you. It lets you stay innocent. A collapse occurring on schedule means you had time to prepare and chose not to. That’s a much harder pill to swallow. Everything in life runs on a calendar we can’t control. The industry, our careers, our relationships, our bodies. Preparing for what is coming isn’t pessimism, it’s realism, and honestly it’s more loving to those around you to prepare than to stubbornly oppose change you have no control over. Two ways forward: you can spend the years you have left doing excellent work inside a system that no longer serves you, that’s completing its schedule, waiting for permission that isn’t coming. At some point you run out of years. Alternatively, you see where you fit in the current schedule. You know what’s coming. You anticipate, and plan, and change, and adapt. That’s the only way that someone with no studio, no slate, and no permission can act at all. The film leader counts down to 2, there’s an audible “pop”, and then the picture starts. Anyone who’s ever worked a projection booth understands that the countdown is never the ending.