>>22199So when I say indie filmmakers, I mean outside the system with budgets of less than 100k.
The quality of films at that level is incredibly inconsistent. And it suffers from a huge problem of oversaturation as barriers to entry become smaller and smaller.
To make money from a film you need to get people to watch it. Either you sell/rent it to them, or you sell ads to show them while watching. Most people don't watch films of this budget though. Ask yourself when the last time you watched a film with no notable actors that was made for that little money without a large marketing campaign (if it got nominated for an oscar or spammed on /tv/, it had a large marketing campaign) (also horror is a huge outlier as a genre in general and is the reason why a lot of microbudget filmmakers make horror films so what I'm saying doesn't apply to horror films).
For smaller distributors, they've been used to curating films from this sea of raisin and making a quick buck off small views. Whether they promote it with other films, or just add it to pad out their catalogue, they specialise in figuring out how to make money from this side of the industry. But a few years ago things changed. It's hard to say exactly when as it wasn't a sudden thing. One company did it and then others followed. But roughly right before and after covid was the turning point.
Curating from this pile is difficult. It requires watching hours of absolute garbage and then coming up with marketing plans for the few films that are less garbage. However, a lot of these filmmakers are desperate and poor. They don't read contracts properly and don't have much legal power if you break the contract anyway. So the distributors realised that they can just steal people's films and not pay money for them or report the sales, knowing that the filmmaker has basically no recourse. If they're "above board", they can charge money for subtitles and marketing that they won't let the filmmaker do directly. They can come up with a thousand different ways to screw you over with zero consequence because the people they're dealing with are the dregs outside the system in the first place.