Indie Film’s Plot Twist: Huge Demand, Not Enough Movies

Distributors are hungry. Really hungry. That’s the message I heard from some of the biggest dealmakers in independent film — CAA’s Roeg Sutherland and Sarah Schweitzman, UTA’s Rena Ronson, WME’s Deb McIntosh, Gersh’s Jessica Lacy and 30West’s Micah Green — as I took the temperature of a market suddenly feeling optimism again, bolstered by a record-breaking $4.7 billion summer box office.

And they have reason for optimism: Buyers are circling, audiences are showing up for movies well beyond the usual tentpoles, and Obsession has become the kind of breakout everyone wants to replicate. 

There’s just one strange problem: They don’t have enough movies to buy.

The people I spoke with describe an indie business with plenty of demand, plenty of capital and more confidence than it’s had in years — but a supply problem increasingly difficult to solve. Movies have become too expensive to make, and the domestic pay-TV market that once gave independent films a valuable second life has withered. A federal production tax credit could ease the first problem. The vanished pay-TV afterlife is the harder one to solve.

So I asked the people actually financing, selling and packaging these movies what’s working, what isn’t — and why a hot market still can’t produce enough product.

Here’s what they told me:

• What actually defines an “indie” today as studios co-finance or acquire movies
• Why the usual scorecard for indie-film health gets the business wrong
• The trait the year’s biggest theatrical breakouts actually share
• The surprisingly mundane costs blowing up production budgets
• Why a federal tax incentive could change the economics of getting movies made
• And what Paramount-Warner could mean for two of the industry’s newest specialty buyers