You’ve been reading along, right? I’ve been doing a big review of what would make things better for our cinema ecosystem. Part One described the authored-cinema ecosystem we should be trying to build. Part Two asked who gets enough time, security, and forgivable failure to remain in it long enough to develop a lifelong creative practice.
Part Three turns to power: who gets to set the terms, who narrows the choices, and why we keep accepting arrangements that serve those already holding the leverage.
Part Four will ask how we change the deal. Then we’ll get to the missing machinery, the culture that sustains cinema, who takes responsibility for the whole thing, and finally the Cheat Sheet. At least that’s the plan for now; don’t hold me to it! You the perceptive readers may recognize also how the series on our Film Support Orgs feels a bit like a subset of this. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what happened. I started this, and realized I needed that. Welcome to HopeForFilmland, friends.
Let’s play that metaphor game. If Parts One and Two were about the destination and who gets to make the journey, Part Three is about power: who sets the terms, who narrows the choices, and who benefits when those choices get mistaken for inevitability.
The American cinema business worships markets as if markets were all-powerful forces. Language is one of the tools of control, and much of the language surrounding “the market” is pushing lies. We are told the market wants this, the market won’t support that, the market has spoken. I have always found something far more liberating to be true: audiences, art, and artists move quicker than business ever can.
The trouble is that we live inside a “system,” and that system is also in us. We absorb its assumptions. Internalize a false construct as an absolute truth. We learn which deals are supposedly possible, which ambitions are considered realistic, and which people we are expected to ask for permission. Working outside that influence requires understanding where the power sits and then acting with enough intention to change the status quo. C’mon, we all can do that!
Many of our problems come from incentives we have been trained to accept as inevitable even though they are not aligned with our values or principles. Some movies receive enormous marketing support while others get almost none, helping determine what we think matters and what audiences are likely to see. Companies consolidate because their leaders insist scale is essential, while stock prices and executive compensation encourage precisely that behavior. Platforms determine what audiences can access, and filmmakers take the deals offered because, well, those are the deals currently perceived as available.
Things would be structured differently if sustainability of our ecosystem were an agreed-upon goal.
For too long, we have behaved as though these problems will correct themselves if everybody simply leaves “the market” alone. We can thank our unearned faith in markets for plenty of this mess we are in. Markets are shaped by rules, ownership, and the habits power teaches everyone to accept. When a small handful of companies controls most of our ecosystem, the rest of us have to operate inside the conditions those companies establish and maintain. Sucks, don’t it? We know the playing field is not level. We don’t have to roll over on it.
Authored cinema needs more meaningful buyers and more ways to reach audiences. Licensing or selling our film shouldn’t be the only option or even the one we prefer. Creators need to retain more ownership, and everybody needs enough information to have a fighting chance. A passion industry cannot stay healthy when passion is plentiful but bargaining power is scarce.
We don’t need more films; we need more places capable of saying yes.
Competition looks very different depending on which side of the screen you sit on. A viewer may care whether there are three streaming services or six. A filmmaker cares whether there are three serious buyers for the work or thirty—and whether those buyers are actually active, accessible, and appropriate.
HopeForFilm readers know how misleading the apparent size of our marketplace can be. We can compile a list of one hundred sales agents, distributors, or financiers and discover that perhaps ten can genuinely move a particular project forward. The theoretical marketplace is much larger than the practical one. Let’s not get fooled by appearances.
When that practical marketplace shrinks, everybody selling into it loses leverage. Terms worsen. Ownership becomes harder to retain. One rejection matters far more because there are fewer credible places left to go. All of us working in American cinema should take media consolidation far more seriously than we do. This is painfully evident now.
When the next merger gets proposed, hopefully we will have learned something from the proposed illegal one currently underway. The first question cannot simply be whether somebody’s subscription goes up two bucks. We need to ask what happens to the people trying to make and distribute films. How many real buyers disappear? How much leverage does the producer lose? What kind of work becomes even harder to get made because the combined company does not already understand it? Preservation of competition is the goal, not what is the alternative to an AI-crazed, surveillance-obsessed, war-hungry oligarch.
History gives us plenty of clues about what disappears when companies combine. We all have to stand up before the deal is done instead of complaining afterward. A healthy cultural industry needs multiple options, and authored cinema especially needs a messy marketplace with many doors rather than a beautifully efficient hallway leading to just three.
Antitrust needs to protect the people supplying culture
Antitrust conversations tend to start over what consumers pay. Cinema also depends on what happens to the people supplying the work.
When a few companies become the principal buyers of films, scripts, labor, and rights, their preferences start becoming everybody else’s rules. A particular deal term stops being described as one company’s demand and gradually becomes “the way the business works.” That is one of the tricks by which power disguises itself as inevitability.
Suddenly the filmmaker retaining ownership seems unrealistic. Their agent and lawyer will tell them so. A short rights term becomes an unreasonable ask. Getting a film back when the distributor has stopped doing anything with it becomes an extraordinary request. Such positions are not the laws of nature. They became harder to challenge because the people saying “no” to them ran out of other places to go.
Antitrust has to care about our side of the market too. Artists and entrepreneurs need alternatives when a buyer says no, but just as importantly, we need somewhere else to go when the answer is yes on terms we should refuse. The ability to say no is part of what competition provides.
Those of you who would not fight the good fight because you felt we needed an alternative to Oracle/Skydance and Netflix had already bought into the false construct. You are already dancing to consolidation jig and you will dance us all off the cliff.
We must now revisit the principles behind FinSyn
The old Financial Interest and Syndication rules came from another television era, but the concern underneath them is remarkably current: what happens when the company controlling access to the audience can favor what it owns?
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