FilmProfit

The Business of Successful Films

JNH

Looking Back At 2025

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And A Special Offer for Filmmakers and Producers!

2025 has been like a rollercoaster ride for all of my filmmaker friends and acquaintance. Near the end of 2025, I wanted to reup some of the things I have posted during this year that you may have missed. Follow the links to read. Special Offers Just Below: 

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Update on: What in Holy Hell Are Indie Films Facing

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Now, Five Years Later

Almost exactly 5 years ago to the day, I posted an article (What in Holy Hell Are Indie Films Facing in 2021?) in which I focused on key challenges in the world of film distribution, through the lens of exhibition woes.

An important question to me at that time centered around utilization (financially) of the screen count footprint. Now, I have been talking for quite some time with everyone who would listen, about there being too many screens. Too many screens cause significant pressure on the theater owners, who can easily drift into starving for content, and into taking any big film that comes along, hoping it will resolve their stressed-out economic equation. This creates too much pressure in the equation for smaller to mid-sized films. Hence, the turning away from dramas, mid-sized films and even thoughtful character and art films.

The result is that screens are for the taking, distributors and exhibitors are not “right-sizing” the release, and studios generally keep producing big budget films and anxiously awaiting the weekend box office numbers with their hearts in their mouths.

Chart showing the Number of Screens Each Year and the Total Box Office for the Year, (inflation adjusted)

In the 2020 missive, this was the first chart I shared, illustrating over a wide range of time the impact of this overbuilding of screens matched against box office gained on those screens. Notice the narrowing of the profit gap.

Now, in the new 2025 chart below, it becomes extremely clear that screens are overbuilt even more so now. Remembering that movie theaters are primarily a real estate business, and are primarily supported by real estate loans, these businesses are under intense pressure to perform. This can result in catastrophic utilization of screen infrastructure allocated to achieving box office. Lordy, lordy, this means that the theater owners are at serious mercy of the studios, with little room to move other than to hope the producers/distributors create content that will keep them in business.

By the way, I am offering some good deals on our most popular services. Deals that are sporting prices wrenched from the wayback machine:

DEAL ONE: CLICK HERE for 30% OFF Filmmaker’s Financials Package

DEAL TWO: CLICK HERE for 25% OFF Producer’s Complete Financials Package

Get one of these deals before they expire at the end of December 2025.

In 2025, some have begun to beg for more differentiated movies, but a lot of studio content is more like the same thing over and over. This isn’t about bashing the studios, but it is meant to illustrate the fact that the theaters are in a tight spot, and, as I have been saying for some time, theaters are over-built and have been for quite some time.

To make the point even clearer, I will post the average income per screen chart I made in 2020 that showed the state of things through 2019, and then how they are now, 5 years on.
November 2020 chart, showing results from 1987 through 2019. It is easy to see how the per-screen income has dropped steadily, even if not precipitously through 2019.

November 2020 chart, showing results from 1987 through 2019. It is easy to see how the per-screen income has dropped steadily, even if not precipitously through 2019. Notice the deep cuts into per screen income.

Then we cut to 2025

It was clearly a heyday in the late ’80’s, when screens were earning an average of $400,000+ per each screen.

But, then, after years of per-screen decline, Covid-19 and the lockdown hit and per-screen per year incomes to the theaters dropped precipitously. Yow! They have struggled to find their way back. With $50,000 per year earnings per screen in the depths of the lockdown, the business has been struggling to come back but hasn’t been able to regain seriously profitable footing.

Clearly, There Are Still Too Many Screens

I wish that meant that indie films could have a heyday and get in theaters with ease, so they could access their public (I call this access to shelf-space). But it has not meant that. Some independent filmmakers are going back to 1980’s indie roots and looking for any way to make personal connections with an audience. But movies are not inexpensive to make, and though theater owners make noises as if they want films to show, they clearly are caught in a vortex of expensive real estate and expensive buildings, and they don’t appear ready to relinquish any of it. Screens have clearly not retreated in ways that would heal these crazy mismatched numbers.

I am not going to worry here about how the big studios and big theater chains fix this beast of their own corporate making. But there are ways that these abundant screens could aid indies, but it only means that independent filmmakers, entrepreneurs, anyway, have to increase their entrepreneurship, take on more tasks (I know, hard already) in their already dense lives. Of course, a dream would be that each multiplex set aside one or more screening rooms and brand them as Indie venues. We have some indie houses, art houses, and indie chains like Alamo, and a few arthouses. But the big dream would be for the AMC and Fathom indie-embracing initiatives to bloom further and take excess capacity and use it for the financial betterment of both parties.

What Can Indies Do to Aid Themselves?

Be more focused on their audience, and who can be courted to be their audience. In my work, I am not only thinking about and reporting on the natural audience is, but also who the next and next nearest attendant audience can be for each film. The secondary and tertiary audiences are important to making sure you do not leave potential fans out of consideration. I am not building the marketing plans for films, but I am pointing the way and underscoring the necessity of “end-to-end” thinking for these film entrepreneurs.

Let me restate that –END to END– thinking, from the concept to the screen. Your idea is one end and your audience is the other end. Even if you get picked up by one of your target distribution partners, you really need to be prepared with information and intelligence, concrete information that can aid them in getting your film into the heads, hearts and hands of your soon-to-be fans.
Your audience is your savior, and your job is to get to know them by understanding them, then through knowing them, find them and communicate to them the existence of your film.

Yes, I did just create or underscore two more big jobs for the indie filmmaker who dreams of the A24/Neon/IFC/Roadside/Abramorama (among others) type of pickup of their film, to take these tasks off their hands. I think that should not be the plan, but even more independent thinking should be the plan. Even if your film were to be picked up by a really good distributor, you should know your audience, know where they are, know what they are activated by internally (I do not mean for manipulation purposes) and how they will be captured and moved and impacted by your film, because as an entrepreneur, you are embarking on a career long conversation with folks who will love, embrace, and then seek what you have to offer. Clarity at every step of this equation should be your goal and plan, and it starts with information and intelligence.

Too many screens, not enough compelling and differentiated films, big trouble for the chains. That is the backdrop to the world you are entering with your film. Like a bike messenger in crosstown traffic, your have to be quick and nimble and really get to know the route to your audience, and work hard to expand that audience at the edges.

There are folks like Ted Hope’s Hope For Film (Ted Hope | Substack), Dear Producer (Dear Producer | Substack), The Gotham (The Gotham), Film Independent (About – Film Independent) and the other film organizations that can also help you with this, but their checklists, their trench stories, their case studies and resources are all at the service of you doing this independent work on your own film so you can be prepared when you come face to face in presenting that film, to them, to anyone and to everyone else. This is your work.

Onward and Upward

Jeffrey Hardy

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Should Filmmakers Worry That AI Will Make You Obsolete?

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What has been the most common question asked of me by filmmakers when I am out at group events?

Simple: “Do you use AI to do your work?” Yes, that’s the question. And maybe you wonder about that, too? I have a quick answer, which can be contained in one word, “No.” I do not use AI to make financial models, or to write analysis of audiences, nor do I use it to track and report on how the industry is working today.

Why is that?

First: AI (more properly called LLM or Large Language Model) is not really an intelligence. And, before I go further, I do not want to pretend I am a database expert, a computer systems expert, or a newly minted AI expert. Nor do I want to be. (Those who are experts in that tell me it is closer to a prediction engine based on a pool of available data, than an actual intelligence). What I do want to be, and am, is an experienced motion picture and filmed entertainment analyst that focuses on how audiences search, find and consume films (and why) and I focus on how films earn in the marketplace, based on real world consumption by these consumers and based on real world deals (which are many and layered). I use this work to aid filmmakers in their preparation of films for finance, to be ready for a successful result from production while dodging as many risks as possible, and even more importantly, to be ready for successful business with their films.

By the way, I am offering some good deals on our most popular services. Deals that are sporting prices wrenched from the wayback machine:

DEAL ONE: CLICK HERE for 30% OFF Filmmaker’s Financials Package

DEAL TWO: CLICK HERE for 25% OFF Producer’s Complete Financials Package

Get one of these deals before they expire at the end of December 2025.

So, AI is not a brain, or anything like a brain. It is a massive pool of information that is programmed to appear to be an intelligence, when it is more readily a query system with very long tentacles and crafted to make you think you are in a dialogue with a sentient being.

Be aware, I am not talking about creating videos, which is not my purview here, but I am talking about things like modeling (not “predicting”) the consumer activity a film achieves, the box office, identifying the target, sometimes secondary and tertiary audiences, and the like. Since this is what I do in a careful fashion in my work, that is likely what folks asking me if I am using AI, must be talking about.

Can an LLM be fed with all box office of all films of all time to run high-end modeling on all that data? Potentially, yes. But where is your prospective film in that pool of titles of all time? Like any search engine, you need to guide it closer to your answer, but then why does every LLM I have seen warn you that there could be f*ck*ps in the result, and may not be reliable? What metrics do you feed in? Is genre great? But, did you know that under Horror, there are sub-genres that work well or poorly with differing audiences, and on what basis? With a new pair of socks, key market analytics are pretty simple, with only a few differentiating fillips or filigrees possible. Is this film another pair of socks with a new orange and green pattern? No. It is something much more complex. A prospective film, even a formulaic genre film acts in a realm of human experience that socks cannot even approach. A film is born oftentimes of a unique mind, or a group of minds. It is a very, very complex creative activity pursuing a singular or shared vision. Socks can be marginally unique from each other, but socks cannot approach a vision. An experiential product can touch you internally (we use “heart” often to talk about this experience), can move you and make an impression on you that lasts for a very long time. Can socks touch your heart? Likely no, but your grandmother, knowing you suffer from cold feet and knitting warm and particularly soft socks in the special favorite color you told her you loved when you were eight, those socks can touch your heart. Socks are a static product; your grandmother is experiential.

So, can an LLM duplicate these “heart” experiences for you? Only in the most insipid sense. So, movies touch the heart with experiences that can feel real and be retained in your real memory.

Then, can an LLM duplicate the complexity and leaping connections of the human brain? If we think of a Rube Goldberg machine, or The Wizard of Oz, it can approximate that, or even fake it for you, but can an LLM work hard on a project problem, then go to sleep and have the solution come to it in a dream, or upon awakening?

So, Artificial Intelligence, AI, an LLM can be called an imitation of intelligence. They sell it as intelligence, when it is actually a tool to spread knowledge and certain capabilities more widely. But it cannot do that without engorging massive amounts of knowledge to pull off this trick, this magic. Where do they acquire this knowledge?

I often tell clients that there is an iceberg under the water of the work I do, and that the part under the water is cogitation, or “thinking time.” My first task when taking on a project is to burrow into it so that I become like a weaker clone of the writer/producer/director, whatever that combination I am working for, and learn from them and any materials, what this project is, what the vision is. I feel I have accomplished my task when I can pitch the project back to my client and they find I have not missed any of the key nuances of the vision.

I have had clients use LLMs to read their scripts, which concerns me multiple ways, firstly being why would you allow the LLM to train itself on your intellectual property? And, secondly, it has appeared to stay awake throughout the script, and regurgitates it well, but it cannot make mental leaps outside of the context of the script and outside of the pool of data at its disposal. It does not invent, it cannot twist with the internal consistent gut check of a writer doing the dog work that is writing, or the work of the director or producer helping the writer heal a gap in the story, or run it through to its unique conclusion within the context of the mind that is creating it. The LLM that reads a script can become more stuffed or programmed, more Rube Goldbergian, but it will always be “other,” outside looking in, like a “replicant” with implanted memories, maybe even with photographs to support some of those memories, but always artificial.

I doubt an LLM can cogitate extensively on whether Deckard is or is not a replicant himself if those ideas were not included in its data pool.

So, no, I do not use AI to do my own work, but in defense of some AI capabilities, it can put search engines on steroids for me by aggregating wider information pools that can surface information that was heretofore harder to achieve. But the cost of the presentation of this as a panacea for lack of actual intelligence, or even for laziness, is seeming to be far too high in infrastructure and in energy consumption (that can swamp a town, and like in Memphis, TN [a town in my heart and family], can quite likely poison a population.)

In my years in the business, I have lived through quite a few bubbles and bursts in the outer and in the inner (filmed entertainment) economy. Is this another bubble, an AI bubble? I think it is acting like a bubble right now as the greed of some are seeing a great land-grab opportunity, but it might well settle down to be a unique toolset that aids multiple levels of this community to create their films more efficiently and more successfully, like the work that Steve Jobs put into building George Lucas’ “Droid Works” into Pixar, but I hope and believe it will not replace the incredibly hard creative work that is the real value at every level of this business.

A note about Pixar, it had a BIG staff doing programming constantly, drawing, animating, all the elements of digital animation. It was not a machine with a couple of buttons on it.

Two other thoughts:

I was there just before Kodak closed the company. In the two years before that day, I was doing and delivering intelligence on the penetration of digital capture, of great concern to the VP I was working for. My prediction to her and her cohorts in one word: “Tsunami.” Like later telecommunications executives, everyone around the VP pooh-poohed and looked for doors out of the room. Then, I called her one day to discuss further work, and it just happened I was the first person she talked to back from the devastating all-company meeting. And in shock is mild for what the closing of Kodak did to so many thousands. None of us wants that kind of paroxysm to sweep us up.

And, just recently, Jeff Clanagan, who I did some work for at Codeblack, now heading Hartbeat, posted a long and passioned LinkedIn letter encouraging all within hearing of his voice to get AI education before they get swamped, maybe like the folks at Kodak were swamped by forces at large.

You may disagree mildly or even vehemently with me, and that is okay. Right now, I am just staying dedicated to the work that is this business, which never fails to challenge as it evolves.

Onward and Upward for all of us.

Jeffrey Hardy

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The Importance of Diversity in Film Distribution

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In an increasingly and incredibly diverse world, film stories and the people who are in these stories need to be diverse as well. When right for the story, it is right for the distribution stream and for the audience. Studies I consult show me that audiences want authentic stories with authentic characters that reflect their real lives.

I work on films from across the spectrum so I study the attitudes, hopes and desires of a range of people. I enjoy that, and I constantly learn from it. In working on one film, I was learning about what kinds of films contemporary African Americans most like to see. A Morning Consult study and story helped me understand better, and helped me position the film I was working on as having great relevance to these contemporary audiences. Having relevancy to audiences is like injecting value into your film.

Here is a peek at that study:

In politics, this would be well more than a landslide opinion, a move of 18 points. So, I say, diversity in casting, when right for the part (and it is increasingly right for the part) is a boon to a film, and can be a boon to the marketability of your film. Authenticity in your story, in your playing and capturing of the script, authenticity in your marketing are a great way to go.

Here’s me talking about it a little bit in a discussion.

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Importance of Using Data to Identify Your Audience and Market

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Embrace information!

Digging into data, past and present is a much more effective way than following “fad” talk about what genres are hot in the industry right now. It is true that “fads” are followed by many (most?) humans. But fads are usually not the things that people cling to as cultural touchstones, songs that bring up distinct feelings repeatedly for years and years, or books that can be cherished and even re-read, or films that feed people at their emotional core. Understanding your audience is either natural to you (making you a savant!) or it is going to be a little extra work. And it can aid you in being a really strong advocate for your film.

It has been my experience, continually working to ferret out who might be the audience for individual films, that this is not information as available as news on your phone. Identifying folks, how many there are, what they are interested in, can often be found in data, but it doesn’t come easily packaged, and is often not readily understood. It takes dedication and strong intent to achieve results and understanding.

Besides investing the effort into making the best film you can, identifying and understanding who may embrace it is likely one of the strongest things you can do to achieve your goals of gaining effective distribution, and distribution that sets you up for success. Describing who your audience is can be a powerful advocation for your film and its market life.

Audiences are about triangulating, because films and their consumption are often about things in the complexity of human emotions and the heart. These things may be dark, they may be thrilling, they may be cerebral or just plain mundane, but they are hopes, desires, predilections and dreams. Trying to understand who, how and why folks have these currents can aid you in offering them the dreams that they can embrace in consuming your film. This is not an exhortation to lie, smudge, nudge or fudge, but to know and to use it to show your partners and audience how your film meets a need or set of needs. Of course, typically the tracking of manifestations of these dreams is done in the real world, and I do not mean the creepy algorithm stuff, but outright showing through actions and statements, and through openly discussing preferences. Not all segmentations are by age and gender and race and economics and education. A segment of folks can cross all of those lines. What we seek to know, then, is the distribution of those predilections and dreams as manifested in actions and statements around ideas, emotions, wants and so on.

This then becomes powerful information to break through the tired, overworked, jaded, and even cynical or faddish reception you can have at the hands of the industry partners you may need to achieve your goals.

A little video where I talk about the importance of this kind of work.

Onward and Upward. Jeffrey Hardy

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Jeff on Audience Segmenting

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After coming to a deep understanding of the picture I am working on, and choosing comparable pictures as avatars for the potential market and metrics for that film, the next confrontation is trying to understand everything we can about the audience. This brief video discusses that through segmentation.

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Issues to Think About in Greenlighting Your Film

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Cast Is No Panacea

People often ask what “so and so” actor is worth to a film, but my answer, I think, is almost never satisfactory, because an actor can seldom “open” a picture. They can be right for the part, and they can enhance the quality of a film just like all the other arts and crafts needed to make a film, but the one consistent marker I see in real audience studies is that the Subject Matter and Type of Movie are much more consistent draws.

Here is a little clip from a recent webinar I did with Nancy Fulton and MPMG, warning that you have to look at many things to determine if your film may have “financial headroom,” pursuant to a profitable endeavor.

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Part 2: A Bit More from The Interview by Nancy Fulton

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Earlier this year, Nancy Fulton, of Nancy Fulton Meetups interviewed Jeffrey and one of the people he works with often, about how he helps indie film producers prepare themselves and their project for successful finance.

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