After Friday’s one hour meeting with the CEO of a film sales company in Beverly Hills I have the latest and most up-to-date info on what’s happening in the indie film distribution world.

The CEO recently returned from Cannes, and before that the European Film Market. He observed a trend among film buyers for foreign territories that will impact how indie filmmakers get our work into the world.

Right now the buyers are swamped with content. They aren’t buying movies that don’t have recognizable actors in the poster art and that didn’t have a movie house theatrical run. Buyers aren’t just looking at American made films, but also films made every where else. The American market, though, is almost exclusively showing American made content. Anything with subtitles gets relegated to art houses and a few select cable channels.

We have two choices: We can either spend more money (quite a bit more money) by casting known talent and paying to get our movies into theaters or we can continue making projects with full creative control and distribute them online through streaming.

The quantity of indie films will continue to grow every year now that the equipment is affordable and accessible.

What do we do?

• My audience wants to see movies I make.
• My audience doesn’t care if there’s someone famous in the credits.
• My audience is relatively small compared to the audience reach of a studio film.

It’s a trade off. I can make more content and increase my revenue by having a larger library of truly indie films, or I can gamble with bigger budget projects that may or may not hit the jackpot.

I know what I will do.

What will you do?