By Lisa Laman | Film | January 29, 2025 |
Outside of Britney Spears devotees, few people had ever been so happy to hear something toxic as many film geeks were on January 21, 2025. That’s when the news broke that Terrifier 3 distributor Cineverse would finally give The Toxic Avenger a theatrical release. This independent movie had languished on a shelf for 16 months since its September 2023 Fantastic Fest premiere. Now, it would be unleashed on the public as an unrated motion picture.
A day later, 2024 Sundance Film Festival critical darling Ponyboi finally got a general theatrical release plan. The film’s financier, Tideline, would put it into theaters on June 27, while the platform Gathr would partner with Tideline to get it into further theaters on what sounds like an on-demand basis.
Two seemingly separate pieces of news reflect a bleak reality for modern independent cinema. These films took forever to get distribution despite positive reviews and featuring notable stars (Ponyboi had Dylan O’Brien, Toxic Avenger had Dinklage, Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon). Ponyboi’s financiers are now distributing it largely themselves rather than receiving a glossy Fox Searchlight/Focus Features/A24 distribution deal that would have been inevitable even ten years.
As someone who’s been following indie distribution trends for over a decade, I’ve never seen things this bleak. The complete dearth of indie movie sales at 2025’s Sundance Film Festival make one thing clear: Ponyboi and The Toxic Avenger are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to indie cinema distribution’s dire state. Most tragically of all, imminent improvements to this dismal status quo are non-existent.
What Recent Indies Have Struggled To Get Distribution?
It isn’t just Ponyboi and The Toxic Avenger that have suffered trying to secure distribution after buzzy festival premieres. The Apprentice, which just scored two Oscar nominations, infamously was rejected by every distributor in Hollywood. It didn’t look like it would even see the light of day until Briarcliff Entertainment stepped in at the last minute. Meanwhile, the Palestinian documentary No Other Land has dominated the Best Documentary Feature category all award season. It’s a frontrunner to take home the same prize at this year’s Oscars. No U.S. distributor will touch it.
Speaking of 2024 documentaries that dropped in the earliest months of 2024, Union, an acclaimed documentary critical of Amazon, hit a smattering of U.S. theaters last October solely through a homegrown distribution platform. Indie studios like Briarcliff Entertainment, supposedly dedicated to preserving “free speech,” didn’t dare reaffirm that ethos when it came to a documentary critical of a corporation as big as Amazon. Ditto for reaffirming the importance of reproductive rights as showcased in the documentary Zurawski v Texas. Critical acclaim and Jennifer Lawrence coming aboard as a producer couldn’t help that urgently relevant feature find a proper distribution home.
The closest it has found to a “home” is Jolt, a streaming platform for challenging documentary fare. On Jolt, viewers pay for titles on a pay-per-view basis and movies only exist on the service for 90 days. Fellow controversial 2024 documentary The Bibi Files has also ended up on this platform despite getting shortlisted for a Best Documentary Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. Challenging documentaries speaking truth to power have struggled to gain any kind of distribution.
As The Apprentice, The Toxic Avenger, and Ponyboi can attest, though, narrative films have also been facing hardship in this matter. South by Southwest 2024 crowdpleaser A Nice Indian Boy, meanwhile, only just last month got theatrical distribution from Blue Harbor Entertainment. Never heard of that company? It’s a teeny-tiny outfit started only in October 2023 whose website indicates its only prior experience is with helping handle the release of movies from its spiritual predecessor, Screen Media Films. Did you know there’s a big star-studded Ron Howard movie starring Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, and Sydney Sweeney called Eden? It didn’t get euphoric reviews out of its September 2024 TIFF premiere, but it also didn’t get awful marks either. Surely a half-decent studio could distribute something with those stars to okay box office.
Instead, Eden hasn’t attracted a distributor nibble in the nearly five months since its premiere. Then there’s The People’s Joker, a movie that was caught in legal limbo forever before finally getting out and securing distribution from Altered Innocence. This outfit did great work on The People’s Joker, but it’s shameful Vera Drew’s directorial debut didn’t get even more high-profile distribution attention after all the media buzz surrounding its legal issues. Films of all stripes, from provocative queer comedies like People’s Joker to even Ron Howard directorial efforts like Eden, are feeling the crunch of modern cinema woes exacerbating long-standing film industry shortcomings.
It Wasn’t Always This Way
There was never a time when major studios embraced and/or acquired every movie that might cause a political ruckus or didn’t fit neatly into a four-quadrant box. Don’t forget, Disney forced subsidiary Miramax to sell off distribution rights to Fahrenheit 9/11 back in 2004. Still, even just looking at documentary films, studios and major arthouse labels didn’t always shy away from challenging material. 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth was released through Paramount Vantage, the arthouse division of Paramount Pictures. Four years later, Sony Pictures Classics helped finance Inside Job, a feature about the 2008 economic recession. That title ended with interview subjects openly criticizing then-President Barack Obama for his relaxed punishments on those responsible for this financial turmoil.
In terms of narrative films, major studios were openly acquiring independently produced mainstream features as late as 2014! Paramount Pictures bought Top Five after its buzzy fall film festival premiere in 2014. That same year, Warner Bros. Pictures bought the U.S. rights to the Zac Efron DJ film We Are Your Friends. Heck, in 2019, Warner Bros./New Line Cinema picked up Blinded by the Light at the Sundance Film Festival. Sony/Screen Gems, meanwhile, purchased the indie thriller Searching after it created a deluge of buzz at its 2018 Sundance Film Festival premiere.
The difference, of course, is that now studios produce way fewer movies annually. In 2015, Warner Bros. Pictures delivered 21 new wide-release movies into theaters. The following year, it unleashed 18 new wide releases. In 2024, that number was an embarrassing nine new theatrical wide releases. Meanwhile, 20th Century Fox, which once provided 16+ new theatrical movies annually, only does two or three theatrical releases a year in its 20th Century Studios incarnation under Disney ownership. The major studios have consolidated like crazy into a handful of outfits owned by people with deep pockets. Their owners may be wealthy, but Warner Bros. and 20th Century are shells of their former selves. Executives like David Zaslav, Bob Iger, and Brian L. Roberts have conveyed a clear disinterest in art in their corporate moves.
This means fewer movies get made and released even as theaters and independent film producers cry out for their aid. Movie theaters need more films to play to compensate for the dwindling Warner Bros. and 20th Century Studios slates. Titles ranging from No Other Land to A Nice Indian Boy to Eden (and everything in between) need to play in theaters for maximum visibility. The middle-man in this scenario, though, is distributors and major studios. They currently aren’t willing to play ball and that’s left American film distribution in crisis mode. Unless it’s directed by Francis Ford Coppola or Kevin Costner, your independent movie won’t get distribution. The empty husks of what once were great movie studios have no interest in them. Meanwhile, the indie distributor landscape has become a ghost town. From 2008 to 2020, a deluge of smaller distributors (like Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent Pictures, Miramax, Relativity Media, Open Road Films, and STX Entertainment) bit the dust.
These outfits picked up the slack from major studios and made sure Nightcrawler, Hustlers, Beyond the Light, and other indie films got to play in theaters. With them gone, nothing’s taken their place. Sure, A24 and Neon exist, but both are now moving into costlier in-house productions. Save for the occasional The Brutalist, acquiring film festival darlings isn’t really in A24’s game plan right now. Neon still picks up indie titles The Seed of the Sacred Fig or 2025 Sundance darling Together. However, Neon can’t be expected to carry this burden alone, especially since it’s largely eschewed distributing documentaries in the last two years.
The Political Circumstances Behind Distribution Woes
We also can’t ignore the reality that these struggles for a slew of indie movies starring and/or created by artists of color comes as major movie studios dial back diversity efforts and projects starring marginalized voices. Though this phenomenon has accelerated since Donald Trump won the US election in November 2024, the last three years of film industry trends have really signaled this frustrating trend.
After all, when David Zaslav bought Warner Bros. and its sister entertainment companies, he formed WarnerDiscovery and immediately put primarily white men in charge of the entity. Less than a year later, a slew of Black women studio executives were let go throughout the summer of 2023. With these corporate developments, the people in charge of crafting annual slates of theatrical movies continue to look further and further removed from the lives chronicled in actually challenging and essential cinema.
Don’t forget about a 2024 USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study showing that representation for women, many communities of color, and queer people (among other marginalized groups) has remained stagnant or barely improved since 2007. In a comment about this study, USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founder Stacey L. Smith remarked “The recipe for creating inclusion does not change from year to year. We have advocated for the solutions in the report for several years, but unless executives and other decision-makers listen and make different choices, we will not see different results. The entertainment industry seems either too apathetic or too fearful to use the tools in their arsenal to reflect back to its consumers the world that exists rather than a skewed representation of the population.”
One solution to that problem would be for major studios to acquire and nurture independent films that need distribution like A Nice Indian Boy, Ponyboi, Cannibal Mukbang, and Vera Egito’s The Battle. It’s impossible to declare that studios’—of all shapes and sizes— avoidance of these titles is rooted in intolerance. More likely, the compressed release slates of these companies are informing this total ignoring of indie cinema acquisitions.
What is clear, though, is that the lack of diverse theatrical releases from Warner Bros., Disney, Universal, Paramount, and other major studios adds (whether intentionally or not) another eerie layer to the glaring distribution struggles of these indie films. Even Chris Pine’s critically lambasted Poolman (starring and directed by a white man) got a Vertical Entertainment distribution deal that got into a couple of hundred theaters in early May 2024. The likes of No Other Land, Ponyboi, and others would’ve killed for that! No matter what’s inspiring this apathy toward cinema from diverse perspectives, the current outcome is the same: an erasure of voices that desperately need to be elevated in cinema.
Is There Hope For The Future of Indie Cinema Distribution?
The combined horrors of a monopolized cinematic landscape and a general corporate disinterest in cinema from non-white male perspectives have created a nightmare scenario for so much indie cinema. Not only are there fewer studios in existence to purchase indie films…the ones that remain refuse to back anything that might ruffle the feathers of an average Fox News viewer.
It’d be wonderful to conclude this film industry analysis with some hopeful message. Unfortunately, right now, there are few glimmers of hope in the American film distribution scene. Unless the biggest studios finally get broken up Teddy Roosevelt style, the current monopolization of theatrical cinema won’t vanish. The emphasis on stories focusing on the bourgeoise and privileged classes, meanwhile, only seems to be getting more intense. The next equivalent to Ponyboi or A Nice Indian Boy that catches on in the film festival circuit will, tragically, have even more problems to face.
Hope instead can be found in the existence of new pieces of cinema that dare to rebuke the status quo. The last five years have seen endless obstacles for theatrical cinema, ranging from COVID-19 to studio consolidation to labor strikes and so much more. Yet artists persist. They continue to toil away and bring people together to turn visions into cinematic reality. Not even the crumbling wasteland of the American film distribution scene could keep 2024’s greatest movie, Hundreds of Beavers, from engaging in DIY distribution that created a cult cinema sensation. When the mainstream gates closed, the Beavers crew dug a hole to somewhere even more prosperous. The joys of communally experienced art endure despite persistent pervasive disinterest from the Zaslav, Sarandos, and Iger’s of the world.
It shouldn’t have to be this way. Major studios should use their power and influence to acquire indie films and get them into theaters. Surely acquiring these titles and then giving them low-budget digital-only marketing campaigns (like the thrifty promotional blitz Sony/Screen Gems did for Tarot in 2024) should be a no-brainer. Alas, studios like Warner Bros. are now just shelving and depriving moviegoers access to in-house productions like Coyote vs. Acme or The Parenting. Even Lionsgate is more willing to put money into generative A.I. nonsense than acquiring hand-crafted indie movies. Of course this anti-art hostility would leave indie cinema adrift.
As usual, we cannot look to corporations for help. Working-class solidarity is all we have. So spread the word about indie cinema. Tell your friends about Ponyboi, Hundreds of Beavers, The Toxic Avenger, A Nice Indian Boy, and other features flying under the radar. On social media demand these titles come to your area. Whatever the eventual final quality of these indie motion pictures, its important audiences have access to a wide array of theatrical features across countless genres. Major and arthouse studios alike clearly have no interest in nurturing independent voices. That leaves it up to ordinary souls and artists to look out for these features in a dire new normal for independent cinema. Even in this dystopia where studios are active enemies to theatrical cinema, though, artists still make new motion pictures. They haven’t given up on this art form and neither should we.