Interview · moment 8 of 26
How Would You Actually Finance an Independent Movie
from Small Talk with Colin Quinn | The Tim Dillon Show #343 · #343
4 min
Guest
Tim and Colin get into the economics of financing and distributing an independent film themselves, kidnapping Joe Rogan's dog for money as a joke, streaming subscriptions replacing individual purchases, and the difficulty of recouping investor money.
- Movies cost enormous amounts of money, and distribution has fundamentally changed—people subscribe to Netflix and HBO instead of buying individual purchases like they did with iTunes.
- The realistic path for an independent film is to license it to Hulu or Netflix after production, but that's depressing because investors struggle to recoup their money through those deals.
- Podcasters have proven they can produce late-night-caliber content and sketches online can match SNL quality, but movies and prestige TV like Succession and Game of Thrones remain impossible to produce independently at scale.
- Studios make prestige shows because they control what gets promoted and what people see—they don't know how to make genuinely funny low-budget movies the way Scorsese did with Mean Streets.
- Even with podcast promotion, the math doesn't work: 50,000 people buying at ten dollars each is only $500,000; a million dollars requires 100,000 sales and massive awareness.
- If Tim, Christa, and Andrew made a movie together and promoted it on their podcasts, other comedians would go on their shows out of passive-aggressive interest at not being cast.
- The fundamental problem is unpredictability: you can estimate what percentage of your audience might buy based on numbers, but you can't know until the film is released how people actually receive it.
Mean StreetsJoe RoganAndrew SchulzChrista Stefano