We here at WIFT NZ love to cherry-pick and share with you any relevant and compelling data information that film industry data-guru Stephen Follows has to offer, and his latest one on indie films is a fascinating one. Not that of course his numbers are in USD - dive into the story preview below then click the link through to the full substack story.
Stephen Follows: What it costs to self-distribute and promote an independent film
I collected 57 published accounts of filmmakers opening their books on marketing and release spend, from a $1,000 USD theatrical opening to a $500,000 USD campaign that returned nearly $80 million.
Marketing is a key part of any film’s success, but training and case studies are much more likely to focus on the filmmaking than on film promotion.
So I went looking for real-world examples of indie movies where the people behind them had published how much they spent on marketing, and why.
I ended up with 57 case files, built from interviews, Substack post-mortems, podcast transcripts and the small number of organisations that publish full release ledgers.
The four big lessons
Across the 57 cases I looked at for this piece, four key lessons kept occurring to me.
- You need to seriously budget for marketing. The filmmakers who fared best (Hundreds of Beavers, Columbus, Thunder Road) had already raised money before they needed it. The ones who suffered most ran out mid-release, such as the team behind the Oscar-shortlisted documentary UNION (2024), who published their campaign sums ($800,000 planned for an 18-month campaign, $400,000 actually raised against a $1.2m production budget), wrote that their theatrical “could have kept going to even more success, but ran out of money to fund our modest social media ad budgets.
- Theatrical almost never recoups directly. “The theatrical release did not come close to recouping” (You, Me & Her). “Was not profitable. P&A is truly costly” is how Lisa Hurwitz put it in her account of self-distributing the documentary The Automat (2022) into 100+ cinemas, where her cut of the $255,000 box office “nearly covered” the $100,000 P&A. The 306 Hollywood team knew from the outset it was “nearly impossible to make a lot of money from our theatrical”. “Expect to lose money” (Bomb It). What theatrical bought, in many cases, was legitimacy that led to later deals and revenue.
- The biggest line item is not in the budget. The Beavers team valued their unpaid social labour at $150,000–$250,000. The UNION team “primarily worked for free throughout 2024”. Hammond counted 18 months as “a part-time marketer and DVD shipper” against his Sriracha profits. Warshawski toured Big Sonia for two years and reported the damage to her health. When you read about a film doing miraculously well on a low- or no-budget, look for the unpaid labour that made it happen.
- The numbers are shaky, hidden, and rarely complete. Very few filmmakers are kind enough to share their costs, and there are no effective tools to make a reasonable guess from the outside. Even when there are publicly agreed numbers, they often don’t tell the full story. For example, the trades said Eno grossed $300k, but its actual US revenue was $730k when the filmmaker-led one-off events are included. Burn grossed more than $1 million with no distributor at all, almost none of it through channels the trades track. The documentary Age of Champions (2011) built more than $1.5 million from screening kits, speaking fees and sponsorships, almost entirely outside every reporting system in the industry.
My fifth lesson is to follow Jon Rises and Distribution Advocates. Both have excellent Substacks that kept coming up time and again when looking for real numbers and case studies. Good examples are hard to find, so any filmmaker planning to release a film themselves should devour both of these sites.
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