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Editor’s note: This is the eleventh chapter of “A Producer’s Path,” an ongoing column for IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking from independent producer Daren Smith. Read previous chapters here.
There is more money looking at indie film than at any point in my career, and almost none of it wants the film you are trying to make.
An $84 trillion wealth transfer will occur over the next 20 years.
This isn’t just about money changing hands. It’s about who decides where that money gets invested. A real slice of that money is looking for films to underwrite, which means they will decide which stories get made and which don’t.
I’ve had investor meetings every week for the last 21 months, and there are three things that come up consistently:
First, they care about who they are backing at least as much as what they’re backing. They built their wealth by avoiding the get-rich-quick “opportunities” out there and partnering, instead, with operators who had already shown they can deliver. They are looking to do the same in film.
I know a founder here in Utah who is on his fourth company. Each time he sells a company, the core team follows him to the next venture. They love building with this CEO and they have built an incredible track record.
Who is your core team? What’s the track record? What results can you point to that you’ve already achieved for other investors and partners?
Second, they don’t care about more money. It’s laughable to think that someone worth $100 million (let alone a billion) would look to an indie filmmaker on how to make money. The investors I’m speaking with aren’t asking about multiples on their investment. Yes, they want to know that you have a plan for getting their money back, but beyond that they want to know how this adds to their legacy, how it makes their family proud, how they get opportunities and experiences they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. They light up when they think about their kids and grandkids sitting next to them at the premiere.
Third, they aren’t moved by the creative decisions that make up your pitch deck. Yes, the story has to resonate. An actor they know and like helps. But beyond that, they don’t know how to assess the value of story beats, or a creative team, or what camera you’re shooting on. They want something that resonates with their values. Show them that, show them you have a plan for how to manage their investment, and save the creative pitch deck for your creative collaborators.
Roughly four of every five scripts that crossed my desk these last two years are horror or thriller, heavy on graphic violence and sexual content and full of R-rated profanity.
Everyone points to “Terrifier 3,” “Iron Lung,” and “Obsession” as proof the industry is hungry for more. They’re not wrong about the box office. Horror has finished in the top four grossing genres domestically every year for a decade, in 2025 it was second only to action at more than sixteen percent of the entire domestic box office, and in 2026 it’s on a tear.
That’s exactly what makes this worth understanding. The money I’m describing isn’t chasing the highest-grossing genre, because it isn’t optimizing for gross. In 21 months of these meetings, not one investor has expressed interest in funding a dark, violent horror or thriller. Not because they doubt it sells, but because box office returns isn’t what they’re buying.
The money and the material are aimed in opposite directions, yet we filmmakers keep reading that as a shortage of capital. It’s not a shortage, it’s a mismatch. This is good news, as a mismatch is fixable in a way a shortage is not.
That might sound like I’m telling creative filmmakers to sell out and just make what rich people want to fund. I’m not. I’m saying that the market is the market, and when we align our stories with what the people in that marketplace are actually looking for, it becomes easier to sell. Find the genres and values your investors are interested in, and find a story that you genuinely want to tell inside those bounds. Artistic integrity does not require commercial failure.
On my last film, “Faith of Angels,” we were chatting with an investor about the film at a $500,000 budget. He was willing to invest — more like donate — $150,000. He didn’t see the alignment with his values, but he did want to support this filmmaker and get into film as an investor.
When Garrett (the writer-director) and I sat for lunch a week after that initial commitment, I asked him about the pitch meeting. He hadn’t asked the investor about his values, what he cares about, why he wanted to invest in film.
I drew out a different pitch right then and there on my iPad. Here’s how we have greater impact at $1,000,000 budget, how we can get bigger actors, spend more time filming which increases the production value, and how all of that allows us to get into theaters and have more people see the film.
Garrett went back to the investor, and came out with the full $1,000,000 commitment and we greenlit the film. All because we aligned with what the investor wanted — impact, more people seeing it, and a more impressive project with his name on it.
Same movie, 6.6x bigger check from the same investor. That film released on nearly 400 screens in the fall of 2024, became one of the biggest releases on Angel streaming in 2025, and millions of people have watched it. The investor got the impact they were after, we made a film we are extremely proud of, and the film is profitable for all involved.
I took that lesson into my next film, “Brotherhood.” When I saw what Ross Boothe had created with this story, I saw so many ways in for people to align on values. It’s a musical, a bilingual story, an opportunity to tell it authentically with Mexican actors and Mexican crew. It’s a story our country needs right now, about loving your neighbor and healing relationships. That’s not to say the money has been easy to raise, but that it’s easy to find values that investors resonate with that makes the conversations easier to start.
Money from aligned investors – you might even call them patrons – isn’t free money. It comes with obligation and responsibility. If you take money from investors you owe them a film that serves them and their values, not a film that uses them and their money for your vanity project.
We’ve often said on “Brotherhood,” “the way you make the thing is the thing.” The way you treat people, the stories you choose to tell, the weight of the responsibility that you carry throughout the life of the project. It all matters.
Daren Smith is the founder of Craftsman Films and managing member of Producer Fund I. His latest film, “Brotherhood: A Cinematic Musical,” opens in theaters October 2. All artwork for the Producer’s Path series is created by Steven de Groot.
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