Both STEAL THIS STORY and ASK E.JEAN are excellent films, incredibly well made with fantastic central characters. And they each have multiple targetable audiences. Each film also truly land their ending, leaving you excited about the possibility of bettering this crazy world -- meaning they are great communal events. They will be recognized as CLASSICS, and watched long into the future. They will benefit from slow, dynamic distribution -- not evaluated on just box office terms but engagement and impact. We need to change our success metrics and, more importantly, change our release strategies. We have a plan for that...
Exactly. The problem is not only that our success metrics are too narrow. It is that our release strategies are still too often designed around a short theatrical test rather than the long life of the film.
Both of these films seem built for what you describe as slow, dynamic distribution: repeated community screenings, partnerships, facilitated conversations, impact activity, and release decisions that respond to where engagement is actually building.
The challenge is making that approach more than an exceptional act of stamina by individual filmmakers. We need funding, data, exhibition partnerships, and shared learning structures that support films across their full audience journey.
This is such an important distinction: thriving independent theatres do not necessarily mean thriving independent film.
A cinema can improve its box office by programming studio specialty releases while truly independent films and documentaries continue to disappear from view. The venue survives, but the ecosystem responsible for producing and circulating independent work keeps weakening.
The contrast between these two documentaries also shows how much theatrical success now depends on something beyond simply securing screens: an existing community, sustained audience relationships, and the ability of filmmakers or subjects to personally “eventize” the release. That can be enormously effective, but if every film requires an Amy Goodman-level touring commitment to find an audience, we have not built a sustainable distribution system. We have built one that depends on extraordinary individual labour.
Theatres matter tremendously as community infrastructure. But the films also need audience infrastructure: earlier audience development, flexible release pathways, better shared data, and support for building relationships that can continue beyond a single screening or opening weekend.
I think more evidence might be necessary before drawing the conclusion that the top ten list for independent theaters is a sign of a problem. If that top 10 created the profits that allowed the theater to show a lot of films you wouldn't otherwise see in theaters, then it's a success story, no?
I suspect that #11-50 will show a lot of (scripted) independent films. A24's Backrooms made $301M worldwide (from a $10M budget). The Invite (Olivia Wilde) had the highest per-screen average of its opening weekend. Neon's Hokum debuted at $6.4M on 1,885 screens. I Love Boosters (Boots Riley) opened at $3.7M. No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook) did nearly $2M on just 45 screens. A24 is now releasing $200M-grossing films.
It's really just documentaries that are conspicuously missing.
That’s a fair distinction. A top-ten list dominated by larger specialty releases is not, by itself, evidence that independent exhibition is failing independent film. If those titles generate the revenue that allows cinemas to take risks on smaller work, that can absolutely be a healthy form of cross-subsidy.
The more revealing question may be what appears further down the list, how long those films are held, and whether the profits from the top titles are actually creating meaningful access for a wider range of independent work.
But I agree that documentaries appear to be the sharper concern here. Their absence suggests a more specific structural problem involving financing, windowing, audience expectations, and the loss of theatrical opportunity for the titles most capable of building a market.
Agreed — and why scripted indie has recovered from the SVOD shakeout and docs haven't would be a fascinating research question.
I think part of why docs are vulnerable: scripted indie films can get private money because you can budget a predictable production timeline (and the script and the attachments tell you a lot about the film's potential) — at least with a scripted project you know when the film will be done and what it is likely to look like when it is done.
The best documentaries' timelines and narrative trajectories are uncertain, and anyone with a time value of money won't invest. So doc filmmakers depend on soft money and, while it existed, public money through CPB, and the latter had enormous power over distribution strategy.
Arguably, production finance for a scripted project reasonably entitles the financier to a lot of control. But I'd argue that early funding for documentary — which could come long before anyone has a sense of whether the film has the capacity to make a huge contribution to the ecosystem — buys the funder responsibility to the ecosystem rather than special privileges to lock out other opportunities.
Two podcast episodes and a YT video which I think illuminate these issues:
Also would like to shoutout Michael Tuckman for shepherding our documentary SECRET MALL APARTMENT which hit theaters last March (2025) and did nearly $1 million in theaters over the next several months, mostly at independent arthouse venues. We set out to reach curious and enthusiastic documentary audiences, and managed to find them.
I think some of it is due to the lack of mainstream appeal from a lot of the docs coming out these days - plus the drastically changed media landscape.
I’ve only seen one of the two docs you mentioned in the article at this point… and honestly it was ok. Not great, not terrible - just ok.
I would speculate that Ask E. Jean doesn’t have the same appeal of the “left wing fury” as you put it, because it was all over the news just a few years ago.
Most of the target audience probably saw nightly news coverage of both trials - they feel like they already know the story… and that they already watched it. Maybe they’re the 4.9 million people who watched Trump’s deposition footage on YouTube (and that’s only from one upload of it)
If your doc is preaching to the choir, you need to make sure the choir hasn’t already heard the entire sermon.
So true. “Preaching to the choir” can work, but only when the choir is being offered a new song, a deeper experience, or a meaningful reason to gather.
Success-based compensation is key to incentivizing quality.
The problem: many documentaries—particularly those with a real chance at theatrical distribution—are locked in early to contractual relationships with production finance distributors which do not accommodate third-party distribution, and which don't offer success-based compensation meaningfully, despite taking distributor-level rights (like AVOD).
When they do offer backend in distributor-level rights, they take the best of both (financier and distributor) worlds: full equity recoupment before producers see anything, and distributor fees on top of their recoupment.
That doesn't create the right incentives to strive either creatively or in a business sense.
I think a big challenge to theatrical distribution for docs is a viewer expectation that docs stream for free in their premiere window. A significant contributor to that expectation in the US is the public media ecosystem, which you can see in the first line here: https://www.indiefilmlandscape.org/where-are-people-watching. From 2021 to 2025, many of the best publicly funded docs ended up in production agreements that made it extremely hard, if not impossible, to preserve a premiere theatrical window against free streaming and unlimited linear TV broadcasts. The streaming and exhibition strategies made sense from the funders' perspective, but they didn't account for the impact on filmmakers' ability to build theatrical value. With films, the top 20% generally supports the 80% that lose money, so losing the best films from that group hurts everyone — and the effect compounds.
Perhaps A24 and Neon would have deeper relationships and dedicated teams (with greater expertise) in the doc space today if more of the best docs had been theatrically available with much less friction with the funders.
Losing public funding creates a massive gap that hopefully gets filled by soft money, investors, and by theatrical grosses. It remains to be seen whether, without CPB's funding constraints, public TV distribution financiers will be more flexible in accommodating the theatrical window — which would also help them close funding gaps with outside investors, or at least give filmmakers a better chance of recouping their investment.
It's worth noting that post-2023, the guilds have been laser-focused on residual structures which discourage early SVOD windows and force streamers to make rational economic decisions about streaming. Arguably, scripted films (and theaters which show them) are doing better because the guilds took this approach. If every doc had a DGA, WGA, and SAG-AFTRA member on the crew, maybe doc exhibitors would be incentivized to pursue per-title profit-maximizing distribution strategies rather than using a filmmaker's production as a loss leader to grow YouTube subscribers or maximize views of sponsor underwriting. And that would be good for everyone.
As @kbasin points out, success-based compensation is good for distributors and creators (as the guilds know). Success-based compensation might also address the other problem docs face, arguably a direct consequence of the prevalence of free streaming, which you can see in the change in genre quality graph here: https://www.statsignificant.com/p/how-streaming-elevated-and-ruined
I would be cautious about treating the preservation of a theatrical window as the answer for every documentary. For some films, rapid free access may best serve their public, educational, or impact purpose.
The real need is film-specific flexibility and informed trade-offs, rather than financing structures that determine the pathway before the audience strategy has been fully considered.
That's true — not every doc belongs in theaters, just as not every scripted film does. And for films where rapid free access best serves a public or impact purpose, that's a legitimate strategy — as long as 120% of the hard production costs have been funded before distribution, so that the filmmaker actually gets paid for their work. Otherwise, making the film is itself an act of charity (making the filmmaker a forced donor to the exhibitor without the income from the exhibitor to offset the donation).
There's a blurry line between documentaries and journalism. Journalism does need to get out to the world fast. But the economics of making and distributing professional, expensive documentary films are subject to a reality that has been consistent for over a century: windowing maximizes revenues (theatrical goes before limited release TV which goes before syndicated TV (and its modern equivalent, AVOD)).
The only disruption to windowing has been, in the last few years, Wall Street rewarding subscriber growth for SVOD services.
Now that there's complete SVOD saturation, the world is back to windowing for films that can sustain theatrical runs. That's what this story above reveals. The question which isn't answered is why documentaries aren't being swept up in the return to rational economic models for film production and distribution. There's no good reason documentaries don't belong in that model too.
A healthy ecosystem depends on the films that could do well theatrically getting that chance. Across creative industries — books, music, theater — again, roughly 20% of titles generate 80% of the revenue, and those successes underwrite the failures.
That's how creative industry ecosystems sustain themselves. I believe the absence of docs from theaters right now is due in some degree to the best ones being locked into relationships with financiers and distributors which make it extremely difficult to be in theaters in the premiere window. The data at those links reflects the period when that was happening, and the compounding effect is part of what we're seeing now.
Yes, that distinction matters. Rapid free access is only a defensible strategy if the filmmaker and production have actually been fully financed. Otherwise, “impact” can become a rationale for shifting the economic sacrifice onto the people who made the film.
I also agree that documentaries capable of sustaining a theatrical run should not be prevented from testing that potential because their financing agreements have already locked in an early free window. That removes choice before the audience response is known and may weaken the wider documentary ecosystem, not just the prospects of an individual title.
Perhaps the common ground is that neither theatrical nor free access should be treated as the default. The financing and release structure should preserve enough flexibility to choose the pathway, sequence, and windows that best serve the film’s audience, purpose, and economic sustainability.
Doc financing and distribution structures should focus on doing two things: allow films which have the potential for windowing to pursue it, and see success-based compensation as beneficial to the financier and distributor as it is to the filmmaker.
Don't throttle the contribution that a successful doc could make to the broader ecosystem. The one that succeeds theatrically isn't just earning for itself; it's sustaining the infrastructure, building relationships, and encouraging audience habits which benefit everyone.
At a time of profound societal upheaval and uncertainty, I think audiences go into “Survivor” mode — as in the highly successful TV series. People break into teams and constellate around the biggest, loudest voices. Hence “Project Hail Mary” and “The Devil Wears Prada 2” are the top performing films at indie (!) theaters. Understandable, maybe. But kinda sad if you’re on a small team.
Just be happy that when audiences go to see the big films they see trailers for the other films. I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 in a theater last weekend and saw the trailer for Leviticus, which I saw last night. Win win.
Both STEAL THIS STORY and ASK E.JEAN are excellent films, incredibly well made with fantastic central characters. And they each have multiple targetable audiences. Each film also truly land their ending, leaving you excited about the possibility of bettering this crazy world -- meaning they are great communal events. They will be recognized as CLASSICS, and watched long into the future. They will benefit from slow, dynamic distribution -- not evaluated on just box office terms but engagement and impact. We need to change our success metrics and, more importantly, change our release strategies. We have a plan for that...
Exactly. The problem is not only that our success metrics are too narrow. It is that our release strategies are still too often designed around a short theatrical test rather than the long life of the film.
Both of these films seem built for what you describe as slow, dynamic distribution: repeated community screenings, partnerships, facilitated conversations, impact activity, and release decisions that respond to where engagement is actually building.
The challenge is making that approach more than an exceptional act of stamina by individual filmmakers. We need funding, data, exhibition partnerships, and shared learning structures that support films across their full audience journey.
Very curious to hear more about the plan.
More about ASK E. JEAN here: https://tedhope.substack.com/p/ask-e-jean-you-will-see-yourself
More about STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE! here: https://tedhope.substack.com/p/steal-this-story-please-she-broke
Wholly agree with @FilmsNotMade and @AnthonyKaufman. And as you rightly note, that is a perfect example of Trump's mob-like intimidation tactics. With any luck, this morning's SCOTUS ruling that it will not hear Trump's appeal will allow E. Jean and Robbie to come out and do press going forward. Interview with Ivy here: https://thekingsnecktie.substack.com/p/the-prime-of-ms-e-jean-carroll?r=e3oq6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This is such an important distinction: thriving independent theatres do not necessarily mean thriving independent film.
A cinema can improve its box office by programming studio specialty releases while truly independent films and documentaries continue to disappear from view. The venue survives, but the ecosystem responsible for producing and circulating independent work keeps weakening.
The contrast between these two documentaries also shows how much theatrical success now depends on something beyond simply securing screens: an existing community, sustained audience relationships, and the ability of filmmakers or subjects to personally “eventize” the release. That can be enormously effective, but if every film requires an Amy Goodman-level touring commitment to find an audience, we have not built a sustainable distribution system. We have built one that depends on extraordinary individual labour.
Theatres matter tremendously as community infrastructure. But the films also need audience infrastructure: earlier audience development, flexible release pathways, better shared data, and support for building relationships that can continue beyond a single screening or opening weekend.
I think more evidence might be necessary before drawing the conclusion that the top ten list for independent theaters is a sign of a problem. If that top 10 created the profits that allowed the theater to show a lot of films you wouldn't otherwise see in theaters, then it's a success story, no?
I suspect that #11-50 will show a lot of (scripted) independent films. A24's Backrooms made $301M worldwide (from a $10M budget). The Invite (Olivia Wilde) had the highest per-screen average of its opening weekend. Neon's Hokum debuted at $6.4M on 1,885 screens. I Love Boosters (Boots Riley) opened at $3.7M. No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook) did nearly $2M on just 45 screens. A24 is now releasing $200M-grossing films.
It's really just documentaries that are conspicuously missing.
That’s a fair distinction. A top-ten list dominated by larger specialty releases is not, by itself, evidence that independent exhibition is failing independent film. If those titles generate the revenue that allows cinemas to take risks on smaller work, that can absolutely be a healthy form of cross-subsidy.
The more revealing question may be what appears further down the list, how long those films are held, and whether the profits from the top titles are actually creating meaningful access for a wider range of independent work.
But I agree that documentaries appear to be the sharper concern here. Their absence suggests a more specific structural problem involving financing, windowing, audience expectations, and the loss of theatrical opportunity for the titles most capable of building a market.
Agreed — and why scripted indie has recovered from the SVOD shakeout and docs haven't would be a fascinating research question.
I think part of why docs are vulnerable: scripted indie films can get private money because you can budget a predictable production timeline (and the script and the attachments tell you a lot about the film's potential) — at least with a scripted project you know when the film will be done and what it is likely to look like when it is done.
The best documentaries' timelines and narrative trajectories are uncertain, and anyone with a time value of money won't invest. So doc filmmakers depend on soft money and, while it existed, public money through CPB, and the latter had enormous power over distribution strategy.
Arguably, production finance for a scripted project reasonably entitles the financier to a lot of control. But I'd argue that early funding for documentary — which could come long before anyone has a sense of whether the film has the capacity to make a huge contribution to the ecosystem — buys the funder responsibility to the ecosystem rather than special privileges to lock out other opportunities.
Two podcast episodes and a YT video which I think illuminate these issues:
The Business of Television: The Old Ways Will Save Us — Eight Strategies from Hollywood's Past to Carry It Into the Future (https://substack.com/@kbasin)-https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cles-you-actually-want-to-hear/id1776668772?i=1000679913668
The Media Odyssey: FRONTLINE PUTS PBS ON YOUTUBE - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-media-odyssey/id1784460871?i=1000741800395
Shorenstein Film Fellow Karin Chien Shares 2024 Research Takeaways (https://substack.com/@karinchien) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YozwfNQ7bc
Also would like to shoutout Michael Tuckman for shepherding our documentary SECRET MALL APARTMENT which hit theaters last March (2025) and did nearly $1 million in theaters over the next several months, mostly at independent arthouse venues. We set out to reach curious and enthusiastic documentary audiences, and managed to find them.
Yes, he deserves the shout out!
I think some of it is due to the lack of mainstream appeal from a lot of the docs coming out these days - plus the drastically changed media landscape.
I’ve only seen one of the two docs you mentioned in the article at this point… and honestly it was ok. Not great, not terrible - just ok.
I would speculate that Ask E. Jean doesn’t have the same appeal of the “left wing fury” as you put it, because it was all over the news just a few years ago.
Most of the target audience probably saw nightly news coverage of both trials - they feel like they already know the story… and that they already watched it. Maybe they’re the 4.9 million people who watched Trump’s deposition footage on YouTube (and that’s only from one upload of it)
If your doc is preaching to the choir, you need to make sure the choir hasn’t already heard the entire sermon.
So true. “Preaching to the choir” can work, but only when the choir is being offered a new song, a deeper experience, or a meaningful reason to gather.
Success-based compensation is key to incentivizing quality.
The problem: many documentaries—particularly those with a real chance at theatrical distribution—are locked in early to contractual relationships with production finance distributors which do not accommodate third-party distribution, and which don't offer success-based compensation meaningfully, despite taking distributor-level rights (like AVOD).
When they do offer backend in distributor-level rights, they take the best of both (financier and distributor) worlds: full equity recoupment before producers see anything, and distributor fees on top of their recoupment.
That doesn't create the right incentives to strive either creatively or in a business sense.
I think a big challenge to theatrical distribution for docs is a viewer expectation that docs stream for free in their premiere window. A significant contributor to that expectation in the US is the public media ecosystem, which you can see in the first line here: https://www.indiefilmlandscape.org/where-are-people-watching. From 2021 to 2025, many of the best publicly funded docs ended up in production agreements that made it extremely hard, if not impossible, to preserve a premiere theatrical window against free streaming and unlimited linear TV broadcasts. The streaming and exhibition strategies made sense from the funders' perspective, but they didn't account for the impact on filmmakers' ability to build theatrical value. With films, the top 20% generally supports the 80% that lose money, so losing the best films from that group hurts everyone — and the effect compounds.
Perhaps A24 and Neon would have deeper relationships and dedicated teams (with greater expertise) in the doc space today if more of the best docs had been theatrically available with much less friction with the funders.
Losing public funding creates a massive gap that hopefully gets filled by soft money, investors, and by theatrical grosses. It remains to be seen whether, without CPB's funding constraints, public TV distribution financiers will be more flexible in accommodating the theatrical window — which would also help them close funding gaps with outside investors, or at least give filmmakers a better chance of recouping their investment.
It's worth noting that post-2023, the guilds have been laser-focused on residual structures which discourage early SVOD windows and force streamers to make rational economic decisions about streaming. Arguably, scripted films (and theaters which show them) are doing better because the guilds took this approach. If every doc had a DGA, WGA, and SAG-AFTRA member on the crew, maybe doc exhibitors would be incentivized to pursue per-title profit-maximizing distribution strategies rather than using a filmmaker's production as a loss leader to grow YouTube subscribers or maximize views of sponsor underwriting. And that would be good for everyone.
As @kbasin points out, success-based compensation is good for distributors and creators (as the guilds know). Success-based compensation might also address the other problem docs face, arguably a direct consequence of the prevalence of free streaming, which you can see in the change in genre quality graph here: https://www.statsignificant.com/p/how-streaming-elevated-and-ruined
I would be cautious about treating the preservation of a theatrical window as the answer for every documentary. For some films, rapid free access may best serve their public, educational, or impact purpose.
The real need is film-specific flexibility and informed trade-offs, rather than financing structures that determine the pathway before the audience strategy has been fully considered.
That's true — not every doc belongs in theaters, just as not every scripted film does. And for films where rapid free access best serves a public or impact purpose, that's a legitimate strategy — as long as 120% of the hard production costs have been funded before distribution, so that the filmmaker actually gets paid for their work. Otherwise, making the film is itself an act of charity (making the filmmaker a forced donor to the exhibitor without the income from the exhibitor to offset the donation).
There's a blurry line between documentaries and journalism. Journalism does need to get out to the world fast. But the economics of making and distributing professional, expensive documentary films are subject to a reality that has been consistent for over a century: windowing maximizes revenues (theatrical goes before limited release TV which goes before syndicated TV (and its modern equivalent, AVOD)).
The only disruption to windowing has been, in the last few years, Wall Street rewarding subscriber growth for SVOD services.
Now that there's complete SVOD saturation, the world is back to windowing for films that can sustain theatrical runs. That's what this story above reveals. The question which isn't answered is why documentaries aren't being swept up in the return to rational economic models for film production and distribution. There's no good reason documentaries don't belong in that model too.
A healthy ecosystem depends on the films that could do well theatrically getting that chance. Across creative industries — books, music, theater — again, roughly 20% of titles generate 80% of the revenue, and those successes underwrite the failures.
That's how creative industry ecosystems sustain themselves. I believe the absence of docs from theaters right now is due in some degree to the best ones being locked into relationships with financiers and distributors which make it extremely difficult to be in theaters in the premiere window. The data at those links reflects the period when that was happening, and the compounding effect is part of what we're seeing now.
Isaac, I think this discussion is important. Can I cite for a forthcoming post?
Yes, that distinction matters. Rapid free access is only a defensible strategy if the filmmaker and production have actually been fully financed. Otherwise, “impact” can become a rationale for shifting the economic sacrifice onto the people who made the film.
I also agree that documentaries capable of sustaining a theatrical run should not be prevented from testing that potential because their financing agreements have already locked in an early free window. That removes choice before the audience response is known and may weaken the wider documentary ecosystem, not just the prospects of an individual title.
Perhaps the common ground is that neither theatrical nor free access should be treated as the default. The financing and release structure should preserve enough flexibility to choose the pathway, sequence, and windows that best serve the film’s audience, purpose, and economic sustainability.
Annelise, I think this discussion is important. Can I cite for a forthcoming post?
Of course! 😃
I think that's exactly right.
Doc financing and distribution structures should focus on doing two things: allow films which have the potential for windowing to pursue it, and see success-based compensation as beneficial to the financier and distributor as it is to the filmmaker.
Don't throttle the contribution that a successful doc could make to the broader ecosystem. The one that succeeds theatrically isn't just earning for itself; it's sustaining the infrastructure, building relationships, and encouraging audience habits which benefit everyone.
At a time of profound societal upheaval and uncertainty, I think audiences go into “Survivor” mode — as in the highly successful TV series. People break into teams and constellate around the biggest, loudest voices. Hence “Project Hail Mary” and “The Devil Wears Prada 2” are the top performing films at indie (!) theaters. Understandable, maybe. But kinda sad if you’re on a small team.
Just be happy that when audiences go to see the big films they see trailers for the other films. I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 in a theater last weekend and saw the trailer for Leviticus, which I saw last night. Win win.
Seeing Leviticus this week. Hope it was good.
If you liked It Follows, you might love Leviticus
Maybe now that the Supreme Court has ruled to uphold the verdict in the E. Jean case there will be more publicity and interest in the film?
Wow, that's timely! But Trump’s litigious menace may not let up, but this is definitely good news.
No doubt there are legal implications and restrictions from her appearing and speaking in public, possibly even personal safety issues.
Yep