Three Ways To Distribute Your Film In Theaters
Two filmmakers recently shared their struggles with distribution on LinkedIn:
Let's get into it by combining these two questions into one:
How do you get your films in theaters, and is using a distributor the best way to do it?
Three Ways To Get Your Films Into Theaters
The theatrical release is often looked at as the "holy grail" for filmmakers. It puts your film into a different echelon and gives you an extra "window" to sell your film to the intended audience.
Most indie filmmakers aren't going to have one of the top 10 (or even 50) distributors helping their films reach audiences, so how do you do it?
Here are a few ways:
Four Wall Distribution
Named after the "four walls" of a movie theater, this strategy involves renting a theater for a set amount of time directly from the circuit.
This is how movie premieres happen. You call up your desired theater (ideally weeks in advance) and ask to rent a specific screening room at a specific date and time.
So if you want to premiere your movie on Tuesday at 7pm, you call the theater or go to the events part of their website and submit a request. They will tell you the cost to rent the theater (typically between $500 and $3,500 for a few hours, depending on the day of the week and the number of seats the room has available).
At that point, you can sell tickets directly to your audience and keep 100% (minus any processing fees) of the revenue.
So if the room costs you $2,500 to rent, has 400 seats, and you sell them for $10 each, your revenue would be $4,000 and your profit would be $1,500.
That's not a bad screening!
You could do this to meet the demand you've built from your audience. So if there are 20 cities that each have a few hundred people who want to see your movie, and you can make $1,000-1,500 per screening, that's a nice $20-30k of revenue for your film.
Keep that amount in mind as we look at the other options!
The upside is you keep 100% of the ticket sales, the downside is that you have to front the cost of the rental, so if your demand doesn't match the supply, you risk losing money with this approach.
Plenty of filmmakers have done this strategy, and even some of the top 50 distributors have "four-walled" releases to be able to qualify for certain awards and/or better deals on streaming and other release windows.
Self Distribution
There are many tools out there now to help filmmakers self-distribute their films - theatrical or otherwise.
Jon Fitzgerald recently shared 10 "hybrid distribution" options on his site, On The Circuit:
Jon Fitzgerald
I've come to know a number of these companies, and wish that options like Gathr and Kinema existed when I was starting as a producer.
Another option we looked at for our two releases in 2024 is Cinema Cloud Works, a DIY distribution platform that gives you many of the tools that distributors use when booking theaters.
Many of these options are free or very cheap (think $100-200 per month). You essentially become your own distributor, and look at options both within and outside the box of traditional distribution in theaters.
Rather than going directly to the theaters, you go "up a level" to the theater bookers, and use those relationships to get your film booked in theaters, similar to what a distributor does.
Keep in mind that distribution is a full-time job, often for several people. So if you're going to go after this model, plan on having a clear calendar for a few months to pull it off.
Traditional Distribution
Finding (or not finding) a distributor for your film is often the reason films succeed or fail in the marketplace. Unfortunately, too many filmmakers wait until after their film is complete to start having conversations with distributors, either directly or through exhibiting their films at festivals.
A better strategy would be to identify the distributors who are a good fit for your film, and reach out to them early in the process - even before you start production!
There are almost 1,000 distributors who have released at least one film in the last 30 years. You only need one!
Find a distributor who has released similar films to yours, track them down through their website, LinkedIn, or IMDb Pro, and reach out!
The distributor will partner with you to help put your film in theaters. They will handle the deliverables - the posters and DCPs and trailers - and do all of the work of talking to bookers and getting your film in theaters.
They also handle collecting the revenue from the theaters and distributing that out to you.
But there are tradeoffs. When you go the traditional route, you get a smaller chunk of the revenue, and it takes longer to receive it.
Compared to our earlier example of making $20-30k from 20 screenings, look at how much you'd have to do to make the same amount from a traditional release:
Average Ticket Price: $10.78
Theater Split: 50-60% ($5.39 to $6.47 per ticket)
P&A Cost: $200 per theater (DCP, Poster, Shipping)
Distributor Fee: 20-35%
Let's say that we have the same 20 theaters and the same 400 people that buy tickets as our earlier example.
20 x 400 = 8,000 tickets x $10.78 = $86,240 gross box office
Average theater split of 55%: -$47,432
Net Box office = $38,808
P&A Cost = -$4,000
25% Distributor fee = -$8,702
Producer's Net Revenue = $26,106
You end up making about $0.30 for every dollar in ticket sales.
With the four-walled model, you end up with $3.75 per ticket sold, and you can charge more since you're selling directly to your audience.
If you charged $15 per ticket and sold the same 8,000 tickets, you'd make $120,000 in revenue and $70,000 in profit, or $8.75 per ticket.
If you charged $20 per ticket, that's $160,000 in revenue and $110,000 in profit, more than 4x what you made from the traditional model.
Now, if you want to scale this up to hundreds or even thousands of theaters, it makes sense both from a time, resources, and experience perspective to hire or work with a traditional distributor. You'll reach a point where you can't do it on your own and need the infrastructure from a whole team to pull it off.
But for many indie filmmakers who are doing smaller releases and selling directly to their audience, it makes sense to weigh the pros and cons and make a decision that serves their audience best and generates the best financial return.
Bonus Option - Distribute Directly Through The Theater
In recent years we saw an interesting new option surface in the industry - theaters doing the distribution for certain films!
AMC is arguably the most successful at this, distributing Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour and Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé. The first did a $93 million+ opening weekend as the number-one film and ended up with over $180 million in domestic ticket sales.
I don't know the specifics of the deal or what percentage of the box office the filmmakers received, but I have to think that the filmmakers avoided the typical distribution fee in exchange for releasing the film exclusively with the AMC theater circuit.
Cutting out 20-30% is tens of millions of dollars in added net revenue for the producers.
As the executive producer and/or producer of your film, it's your responsibility to find the best option for your film and make it happen. The resources are out there, and it's possible to be profitable with the right strategy.
If you have questions, leave them in the comments below!
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