Indie Film Has an Audience Problem

Editor’s note: This is the fourth chapter of “A Producer’s Path,” an ongoing column for IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking from independent producer Daren Smith. Read the first chapter here.

I can’t just bring a movie to the theaters anymore. I have to bring the audience along with it.

On my last two independent theatrical releases, we had distribution locked before greenlight. We did the work I wrote about in the last column: the deal was real, the screens were real, the release dates were real. And for each of the two films, somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 people actually showed up.

That’s a lot of people! It’s also not enough.

To make the math of independent theatrical work – the kind of math that pays investors back and funds the next film – we need 250,000 to 500,000+ people in seats. Ten times what we achieved.

So the distribution was fine. The movies were good. What was missing was the audience. And the audience wasn’t missing because we forgot to invite them. It was missing because we misunderstood the psychology of how they decide to show up.

Before We Talk About Marketing, We Have to Talk About Psychology

The model most of us use is some version of this: put out a handful of Instagram posts, cut a trailer, build a website, and then, a month before release, spray-and-pray ads at every target demographic we can afford.

We default to that model not because it works, but because it protects our identity. Starting audience work on day one means admitting the art alone isn’t enough to fill a theater. That’s an uncomfortable thought for any filmmaker. It’s easier to stay in the creative cocoon, finish the movie, and then hand a budget to an ad buyer six weeks before release. It feels like the right order: Make the thing, then sell the thing. But that order is built on ego, not psychology. And buyer psychology doesn’t care about our creative process.

Add up the time that model asks of a potential audience member. Ten minutes of scrolling + three minutes of trailer + two minutes on the website + maybe an ad or two they don’t skip.

Fifteen to 20 minutes across maybe two mediums. That’s what we’re offering people, and then we’re wondering why they don’t buy a ticket.

Daniel Priestley, a friend and mentor of mine, has been pointing at a principle pulled from Google’s buyer research that I can’t stop thinking about. He calls it 7-11-4.

Before the average buyer says yes, they consume seven hours of content, across 11 touches, on four different mediums.

Seven hours. Eleven touches. Four mediums.

Compare that to the 15 or 20 minutes across two mediums most indie films offer, and the gap between what we typically build and what buyers actually need is so wide it’s almost funny. Except it’s not funny, because it’s why our movies open to 5,000 or 50,000 people instead of 500,000.

7-11-4 is not optional, it’s the math. You can ignore it — most of the industry does — and take the outcome that comes with ignoring it. Or you can design a new system that aligns with buyer psychology.

It can be broken down into four mediums: Video. Audio. Text. Events. Let me start from the back.

Events

Something audiences can experience in person.

Over the last seven months, “Brotherhood – A Cinematic Musical” has done 10 previews of the script and music. The writer/director, Ross Boothe, reads through the script top to bottom and performs all 17 original songs live. Between arriving early, the event itself, and hanging out after, people are in the room for about three hours.

Stop and think about that. One event delivers three of your seven hours.

We did seven previews in Utah, two in New York, and one in Los Angeles. Between 20 and 100 people at each. The last two previews – the ones we ran the week before principal photography – did something different than the first eight. People walked in and realized this wasn’t an idea anymore. It was happening.

One attendee, a gentleman named Bob, was so moved after the Thursday night preview that he went home and emailed 150 people in his own network. A dozen of them showed up to the final preview on Monday night. I spent the evening shaking hands and hearing “I’m here because of Bob.” “I’m here because of Bob.” “I’m here because of Bob.”

That doesn’t happen unless you create the opportunity for it to happen.

For your film, it might not be previews. It might be table reads, meetups, industry nights, test screenings, salons, a rehearsal open to investors. The format doesn’t matter. What matters is that you plan it, you’re strategic about who’s invited, and you do it more than once.

Audio

Podcasts have defaulted to long form, which means there’s an entire audience trained to listen for 45 minutes to two hours at a time. The question is: who on your team can feed that audience demand?

On “Brotherhood,” Ross goes on composer and director podcasts. Our consulting producer, Liliana Bolaños, gets invited to podcasts I would never be invited to. Our choreographer, Alan Salazar, has a feature coming in Dance Magazine. Our cinematographer, Oscar Jimenez, can talk for an hour on camera, looks, and lenses. There are editors, costume designers, production designers, and obviously the cast, each with outlets that want their point of view.

Some of those podcasts have 10,000 listeners. Some have 1,000. It doesn’t matter, because every listener has a network. A single one-hour appearance can reach a small, already-warm audience and drop a handful of them into your funnel. Stack enough of those and you’ve built something.

And if you can get on a video podcast, you’ve got a “two-fer”. The video goes on YouTube and they post short clips on social. The audio gets distributed on Apple and Spotify and dozens of other platforms. Heck, if the host is awesome they’ll also send out an email blast to their list. 

One hour of your time, three mediums of output.

Text

Newsletters. Emails. Blogs. LinkedIn. This column, right here.

One reason I’m writing for IndieWire in the middle of production — not after, not next year, but during — is for reach I couldn’t otherwise buy. Yesterday, a friend in Australia was on a call when another filmmaker I’ve never met started quoting the last column on distribution and using it to rethink how he was going to pitch his next project.

That’s what text reach does. That’s what earned media does that bought media can’t.

Start with a simple email list, get people on it any way you can, and keep delivering value over time. We’ve grown the Brotherhood email list to over 500 people in less than 6 months, and that has led to investors, extras, and partners that we wouldn’t otherwise have reached with a simple ad weeks before the release. 

Video

Short form and long form, and they serve different jobs.

Here’s a real experiment we ran. Over two months, we posted to four platforms: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. We don’t have the team to keep four feeds fed at high velocity, so we wanted to see which one actually broke out. The results:

• TikTok: 62 followers.
• Facebook: seven followers.
• YouTube: 40 followers.
• Instagram: 727 followers.

Instagram was the outlier by an order of magnitude. So we killed active posting on the others, let Instagram cross-post to Facebook for free, and committed to daily content on Instagram. Three months later, we’ve cleared half a million impressions on the film before we rolled a single camera. For an independent film that’s not a known IP, that’s not normal.

Long form is the other half of the lift. That’s where podcast appearances, behind-the-scenes videos, and interviews live – the content that lets someone who just found you go somewhere deeper.

Eleven Touches

Eleven touches means a potential audience member needs to bump into your project 11 times before they’re in.

Do the math on that. If someone only sees one out of every 10 things you post, you need to post at least 110 times for them to see you 11. Which means daily posting during pre-production, production, and post — for six months minimum, a year if you can.

Eleven touches also applies to anyone who’s already said yes. When we invited 50 people to one of our previews and used Luma — which auto-reminds attendees the day before and the day of — 45 showed up. When we ran an event with less reminder discipline, we invited 50 and eight came.

Same invitation list. Different touch count. That’s a 40-person difference on a single night, created entirely by whether or not people got reminded. People are distracted, have too many priorities, and will not see every single email, social post, or ad. So you have to build in a way that aligns with that math. 

Seven Hours

Seven hours means creating enough content that when someone discovers your project, they can go down a seven-hour rabbit hole.

From the start of “Brotherhood,” we planned eight behind-the-scenes videos documenting the road to production. Eight videos at 15 minutes each is two hours of content, dripped out to new email subscribers over a week. Episode one welcomes them. Episode two catches them up. By episode eight, they’re not strangers anymore. They’re invested. They know the cast and crew. They feel enrolled.

That’s the goal of long form. You’re not trying to convince a cold audience to buy a ticket. You’re trying to turn strangers into co-conspirators – people who want this film to exist in the world, who will tell their friends about it, and who would feel personally let down if they missed opening weekend. You’re creating tension in an audience of people that can only be released by buying a ticket to see the movie in theaters. 

What This Actually Costs

For “Brotherhood,” we will spend $100,000 to $150,000 on audience and marketing before the paid ad campaign ever kicks off. That’s about five to seven percent of a roughly $2 million production budget, spent on building an audience before a typical marketing spend starts.

I want to be precise about when this started. We greenlit “Brotherhood” on November 1, 2025. The money hit the bank, and the first hires I made were not crew. They were marketers. A tour producer, an outreach lead, a behind-the-scenes videographer. Then social. Then publicity. By the time we walked onto set, seven people were already working on the marketing side of the film.

Is that a lot? Yes. Is it worth it? Also yes.

Only half of my job now is bringing a movie to theaters. The other half is bringing the audience with it. If I do only the first half, I’m repeating the outcome that got us 50,000 people in seats.

The Question You Should Be Asking

Independent film doesn’t have an audience shortage. There are more people hungry for specific, soul-fed, non-franchise stories right now than there have been in 20 years. What independent film has is an audience architecture problem — we don’t build for the psychology of how people actually decide to buy things, and then we’re surprised when they don’t show up.

7-11-4 is how you close that gap. Seven hours of content. Eleven touches. Four mediums. Start a year out if you can, six months at minimum, and understand that your marketing team is not someone you hire in post – it’s someone you hire the same day your funding closes.

So here is the question I’d leave you with: Of the people in your network or on your team, who are the one or two who love marketing, who are hungry to prove themselves, and who are passionate about connecting with audiences? Not vendors you hire three months before release, but partners you bring in on day one.

Find them. Enroll them. Hire them. 

Because without an audience, we’re just making movies for ourselves, and that is supply-side thinking. That’s exactly the model this column has spent two months arguing we have to leave behind.

We’ve walked through the broken architecture of the industry, the investors, the distributors, and now the audience. That leaves one final group: the filmmaker at the center of it all. If the model is changing – and it is – what does that actually ask of the artist? That’s where we’re going next.

Daren Smith is a Utah-based indie film producer and founder of Craftsman Films, an independent studio established last year to finance, develop, produce, market, and distribute values-based, family-friendly indie films that spark conversation and change people for the better. The first film he helped produce premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was acquired by IFC Films. His next film, “Brotherhood – A Cinematic Musical” films in April and is targeting an October release.