The mid-budget movie is dead.
For thirty years, studios made films in the $5M–$40M range — adult dramas, smart comedies, original thrillers. That ecosystem is gone. Studios make tentpoles or they make nothing. Streamers commission content that algorithms forecast, not films a director needed to make. The space between has collapsed.
Streaming squeezed out the financiers.
Pre-sales used to fund half a film's budget. Foreign distributors would put up minimum guarantees against territories. That market is a fraction of what it was. The traditional indie cap stack — tax credit, gap loan, pre-sale, equity — has lost its middle tier. Most great scripts sit in drawers because there's no $1M check.
Meanwhile, audiences are starving.
Every year, the most-discussed films at Sundance, SXSW, and TIFF can't find distribution. Letterboxd users review films they can't legally watch. Repertory theaters sell out screenings of 40-year-old films because no one is making new ones like them. The audience for character-driven, ambitious independent film isn't shrinking. The pipeline serving them is.
The audience IS the financier.
We think the answer is obvious. The people who'd buy the ticket, who'd subscribe to the streaming tier, who'd own the Criterion edition — these are the same people. Crowdfunding proved they'll pay $25 for a t-shirt. Fractional investing proves they'll commit $250 for actual equity. Add Reg CF compliance, real revenue share, and a streaming home, and the unit economics finally work.
This isn't charity. It's a market.
We don't ask backers to "support art." We ask them to invest. They get a real cap-table position, quarterly statements, and pro-rata revenue from their films' earnings. If a film hits, they hit. If it doesn't, they wear the loss like any other investor. That alignment is what separates this from a Kickstarter pitch — and what makes it sustainable.
The films we fund will define this decade.
When the history of 2020s cinema is written, the most important films won't have come from streamers chasing engagement metrics. They'll have come from communities that decided which stories were worth telling and put their money behind them. We want Indie Planet to be where that history starts.