We've now released TWO movies in theaters in the last two months, and have spent many (yet still not enough) dollars on the marketing and distribution of these films.

This is an initial breakdown of what we've learned and what I'd do differently in the future, and I plan on updating this as time goes on and with each new movie.

Three over-arching principles will help you spend your marketing budget, however limited it may be, most effectively.

And yes, you need a marketing budget! Making a commercial movie without telling anyone about it is short-sighted. In his 2014 SXSW keynote address, Jason Blum shared that "the financial success of his movies is 50% production and 50% marketing". This is the CEO of Blumhouse, whose movies have done over $5 billion in box office alone, saying what filmmakers need to hear: marketing is half the battle.

Even if you self-distribute, you need to have a budget for all marketing-related efforts: telling your audience the movie exists, going to festivals, hosting screenings and premieres, and advertising.

Here are some lessons from the trenches that I hope you apply in the distribution efforts of your next film:

Market as close to the point of purchase as possible

Every person who buys a ticket to your movie (or streams or rents or buys it online) goes through the same customer journey:

1. They learn the movie exists
2. They engage with marketing materials like your poster, trailer, or website
3. They click over to a ticketing site
4. They find a showtime
5. They buy a ticket

That's at LEAST five steps that every customer takes. Hopefully, the person buying the ticket also brings a spouse or a friend or their whole family as well.

The closer you can put your movie to the final steps, where people are already on a ticketing platform to buy a ticket, the better. Here's why:

Not everyone who sees your marketing is going to buy a ticket.

For every 1,000,000 people that see a piece of marketing, you might get 1% to click over to your website to learn more.

For those 10,000 people, maybe 10% will buy a ticket.

So you need 1,000,000 marketing "impressions" to sell 1,000 tickets. That's very simplified math, but I have the receipts to prove it.

For Faith of Angels, we had about 62,000,000 impressions (that we could track) and sold around 60,000 tickets.

If we wanted to sell 100,000 tickets, that would take 100,000,000+ impressions.

And impressions cost money.

Rather than spending money on a "spray and pray" campaign on the Meta and Google ad networks, spend your money on the sites that are selling tickets to moviegoers.

We spent money directly with Megaplex, Cinemark, AMC, Regal, and a handful of other independent theater chains. That led to our trailers in their lobbies, our movie posters on the front page of their apps and websites, and emails sent out to their subscribers with a link to get tickets to our movie.

We marketed to people who effectively already had a credit card out to purchase a movie ticket, but needed some help deciding which movie to see. We got to skip the "impressions" stage and go directly to the "find a showtime" stage.

That saves money and gives you a higher return on your marketing spend.

Know Your Customer Acquisition Cost

Clicks cost money. The most profitable indie films this year had a sub-$1 CAC or Customer Acquisition Cost.

That's the cost of everything marketing-related divided by the number of purchases or customers.

So if you spent $100,000 on the marketing and sold 100,000 tickets, that's a $1 cost per acquisition.

If you only sold 10,000 tickets, that's a $10 customer acquisition cost.

Here's the thing: indie films only make about $3 per $10 ticket sold. Half or more of that $10 (our average on Faith of Angels was 55%) goes to the theaters first. Then you have to pay 20-35% of the rest to your distributor.

So that $10 becomes $4.50 which then becomes $3.00-3.50 that ends up in your pocket to pay back the negative cost of the movie and get into profit.

So if it costs you $10 (or $5, or even $4) to get someone to buy a ticket, but you only make $3.50, you're losing money. That not only isn't profitable, but you'll end up more in the red than before you started the theatrical run.

No bueno.

So you need to understand your costs. Where are you spending your money, and how much of that spend can be attributed to ticket sales?

If you can't attribute, you can take the total spend divided by the total customers and do some quick math.

If your cost to get someone to the theater with your marketing is more than what you're making per purchase, then it's ineffective and you need to move further down the customer journey and be more efficient with your marketing.

Get Hyper-Targeted With Your Marketing

Chris McGurk, CEO of Cineverse who recently had a massive box-office hit with Terrifier 3 shared their strategy in marketing the $2m horror film.

They only spent $500,000 on the marketing, yet just crossed $50,000,000 in gross box office sales.

How?

Hyper-Targeted Marketing

Another lesser-known example: Susan Tuckett Media released Escape From Germany in April of 2024, and the movie did $2.6 million at the box office, a massive success for the low-budget indie.

How? Hyper-targeted marketing.

They zeroed in on the smallest possible target and aimed at the center of that pinpoint. The effect is that the people who already overvalue the movie because of genre, franchise, director, or actors, will go and see it...if they know about it.

So you tell the true fans that the movie is coming out. Tell them to bring their friends.

They love the movie, they tell more people, word of mouth grows and ticket sales go up.

Alternatively, the spray-and-pray approach blankets the internet with a thin layer of marketing that quickly evaporates without leaving any impact on anyone. The core audience misses the message, and no one goes to see the movie.

Cineverse hyper-targeted by working directly with news outlets and blogs - some were even owned channels. Susan Tuckett did the same by spending time identifying churches and groups within a specific area from the theaters where the movie was playing. Whatever it takes, "hyper-targeting" is the new way to profitable marketing spend.

With these three principles, you'll be well on your way to a more impactful theatrical release. Investors in film should wait to invest until the filmmakers present a coherent plan for how much marketing budget they intend to set aside, and how it will be spent. You can help them by sharing these principles.

I want a world with more indie films, and in order for that to happen, the films that hit theaters need to be profitable. Profit leads to permission - just think of what Cineverse can do next now that they've passed $50m in box office, a 25x on the production budget for Terrifier 3.

You can do the same, and you must.