AFM Wrap Up & Takeaways

+ where the opportunities are going forward

Well that’s a wrap on AFM! We’ve been discussing takeaways in the FS Pro forum and the TLDR; of it is that Vegas as a location was so-so and meetings with sales agents/financing partners were hard to crack unless projects were far enough along to meaningfully discuss. In other words, showing up with a script and not much else wasn’t worth the investment to be there. Projects really needed to be fully ‘baked’ before getting anyone to engage.

However, there’s a couple opportunities that revealed themselves to me when zooming out and looking at the market from a 30,000 ft view.

One is with the mid-budget smart Action films we talked about last week. Some of them with stuntmen-turned-directors, or First AD’s , Second Unit Directors, or DP’s making their Directorial debut. The thinking here is that established action directors are in short supply and are likely attached to much bigger projects in the $50-$60 million and up range. Those guys and gals aren’t necessarily going to attach to to the $15-$30 million projects that have to shoot in far flung locations to make work :)

Also Action packages are in high demand but short supply because the Streamers and Studios are keeping them for themselves and therefore, they’re not on the open market for international distributors to pre-buy. Buyers covet these packages particularly in Europe.

The second opportunity I see is with low and micro budget genre films that can be distributed across worldwide AVOD and FAST channels. The catch with these is that you have to finance them yourself or with private investors’ money, hopefully leveraging 20%-40% tax credits to lessen the burden a bit. The upside is that you get to own the film outright and then utilize the magic of creative windowing to earn revenue share over the lifecycle of the film and hopefully it performs like a dividend stock for you over time. I say hopefully because you never know if even the widest AVOD distribution will recoup your investment in the film which is why the lower you can make it for the better. I’m experimenting with budgets from $5K to $500K (doc and narrative formats) in this realm to better understand what works over the course of 12-24 months.

Finally after witnessing the deal making that took place at AFM I’m bullish on more Licensing for 2025 and 2026. I see Licensing becoming a priority again for US buyers once the dust settles from all the downsizing and layoffs plus less in-house production as a result plus streamers re-focusing their priorities. This spells a win for independent producers, financiers, and sales agents the health of the entire independent ecosystem depends on licensing rather than the cost-plus model over the long term.

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What are your AFM takeaways? Let’s discuss in the comments below!

I hope you all have a wonderful day and speak again soon…

Stacey

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