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In the seven months since I launched In Development, the same conversation kept showing up. Different people, roles, and career stages; powerful veterans and fresh rookies; same throughline.
I don’t know what’s going on, but this is weird, right? It’s not just me, is it?
No. It really is that weird. And no, it’s not just you.
This was the year that upended nearly every assumption about the business of storytelling. A year ago, the refrain was “Survive until ’25”; this year there’s no refrain because we realized rhymes don’t change anything.
All of which brings us to the last week of this pathological year and fresh hope for the new one. I’ll keep the predictions short, starting with the TL;DR: Since nothing stays weird forever, the real work can finally begin.
Movies will be made. Audiences exist. Talent is abundant. It’s the shared assumptions that held the system together — production, financing, distribution, marketing, screens, and formats — that weakened, fractured, or shifted out from under.
What happens next is a matter of perspective.
The bad news (for those so inclined): No matter what Ted Sarandos promises about theaters, the decline of legacy Hollywood won’t be reversed.
The good news (also for those so inclined): What’s emerging isn’t a replacement model but a new operating reality. When we look back at 2026, it will mark when the new normal began.
What follows isn’t a trend forecast in the traditional sense; it’s a synthesis of what’s now reshaping the storytelling ecosystem.
The Business of Film Is a Creative Act
Here’s where we are: The business of filmmaking can no longer be cleanly separated from the creative process. Producers are asked to think like founders. Directors are expected to articulate not just vision but value. Formats, platforms, and audiences shape projects.
For some, this feels like a dilution of the work. For others, the language of audience and sustainability is a new form of creative agency. The art hasn’t diminished, but it shifts the locus of creativity.
Audience Is the Infrastructure
Remember when distribution was the same thing as finding an audience? Over the past year, filmmakers learned (repeatedly) that landing a distributor, even going wide, is no guarantee of sustainability, visibility, or long-term life. Those outcomes lean on factors that begin long before a deal, or even a film, exists.
Audience, awareness, and community are becoming things to build alongside the work. Distribution is a design challenge that demands the same creative thinking that fuels production. It doesn’t matter if you go DIY, with a new-model distributor, or a legacy buyer: Filmmakers who want longevity must invest in audience relationships. Scale is secondary to connection.
Vertical Video Is Not a Joke
FOUND A HOMELESS BILLIONAIRE HUSBAND FOR CHRISTMAS, CLAIMED BY THE ALPHA I HATE. OOPS, I’M IN LOVE WITH MY STEPBROTHER! Go ahead, get it out of your system; we’re moving on.
One of the clearest signals of a shifting industry is how quickly vertical drama went from being China’s wacky, hyper-compressed format to a growing ecosystem with dedicated platforms, outside investment, and education pipelines. Vertical storytelling is no longer a novelty but a lane. Vertical dramas won’t replace features or series, but it’s expanding the definition of what an independent practice can look like and who gets to build one.
Financing Has Fragmented
I heard so many conversations devolve into a familiar complaint: What we really need are more major financiers. (Often followed by wistful invocations of “a new Participant.”)
That desire for one-stop shopping is universal, but fragmentation is the new normal. We’re used to tough pre-sales, the death of mid-budget movies, and buyers demanding names, but now the money behaves like mercury, breaking into smaller pieces and hiding in strange corners. Power has shifted away from the moment of acquisition and toward the architecture underneath it.
Reclaiming the Four-Wall
Four-walling has been around long enough to feel old-fashioned, the thing that manufactures press, legitimacy, and awareness when distributors won’t. Today, filmmakers flip the script and redirect that energy toward touring screenings, pop-ups, and community events that prioritize audience legitimacy.
What once signaled failure now concentrates demand, creates urgency, and turns screenings into durable relationships. The value of theatrical is migrating toward building something that lasts beyond the run.
Professional Control Is the New Creative Control
There’s a silver lining in the decline of bidding wars and minimum guarantees. Smaller deals that take longer to materialize can give filmmakers time and space to make intentional choices that prioritize control: clearer terms, retained rights, and audiences they can reach.
This isn’t about rejecting the lottery odds of an eight-figure Netflix deal; it’s about moving beyond the pick-me thrill that often comes with an illusion of scale. In a fragmented ecosystem, control is a form of creative and economic stability.
Festivals Are Relationship Markets
Now that major-festival premieres don’t guarantee sales and career leaps, it also suggests a return to festivals’ original function: discovery, conversation, and community that lead to future collaborators, funders, distributors, and peers.
The relevance remains, but it recalibrates the purpose. As festivals become nodes in a larger system rather than endpoints, expect more moments of amplification and fewer tidy resolutions.
The Multi-Hyphenate, Brand-Adjacent Filmmaker Is the Default
An unpopular take, but here it is: The pursuit of total creative purity is a trap. Balancing creative work with salaried roles, teaching, brand collaborations, or adjacent industries is a strategy.
With intention, overlapping income streams stabilize creative work rather than dilute it. And as more filmmakers do this together, those overlaps form ecosystems of their own. Sustainability recognizes flexibility as a strength, not a failure.
Ongoing Access to Your Audience Matters More Than Press Hits
Not to diminish In Development or our work at IndieWire, but: Press coverage confers legitimacy, not durability. Publicists love to talk about “earned media,” but more valuable is earned attention that comes from owned, direct relationships with audiences. A review can spike awareness, but a relationship sustains it. Filmmakers who invest in ongoing communication build leverage.
We Can Stop Arguing About “Independent Film”
I am so excited about this one. We get to retire the most tiresome argument there is: What does “independent” even mean? Does it mean anything? Is that film really independent?
The joke’s on us. After decades of trying to pin the butterfly, we’re surrounded by hundreds of species.
“Independent film” now encompasses radically different economic models, career paths, and creative practices — from vertical studios and hybrid distributors to creator-led collectives, YouTube, and yes, traditional indies.
The differences between these approaches are often more significant than their similarities. Lumping them together obscures how power, risk, and opportunity function.
A consensus definition of independence is no longer the point. In losing the old ideas of indie film (and the infrastructure that supported it), we gain clearer lanes with their own rules, trade-offs, and possibilities. The future of independent film won’t be unified. But it may be more legible, and for filmmakers, that’s real progress.
If the last few years were about disruption, 2026 is about execution. What comes next isn’t a single breakthrough or savior model but building within a new operating reality. In Development will be tracking that work in real time: how filmmakers adapt, where power settles, and which experiments endure.
This is where the good part starts.
Thank you so much for reading In Development this year. I can’t wait to see you in 2026.
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