Every independent filmmaker who gets into a festival faces the same math. A publicist runs a few thousand dollars. Press kits, social ads, after parties, travel for the team, and more rack up costs fast. For a single festival, expenses can run from a few hundred dollars to north of twenty thousand. The assumption underneath all of it is that the spend buys something tangible: a fuller house, more buzz, and a better shot at a distributor in the room.
I wanted to know if this assumption could hold true, so I asked. I collected responses from 26 independent filmmakers about what they spent, how full their screenings were, and whether a distribution offer followed. The sample spanned a wide array of films (narrative, docs, shorts, and features) with films screening everywhere from regional fests to Sundance and Cannes. Though the sample is small and self-reported, the patterns were consistent enough to be worth writing up.
Attendance didn’t track spending at all
Let’s start with the thing marketing is supposed to most directly buy: butts in seats. In this sample, it didn’t.
Films that spent nothing on festival marketing filled on average about 84 per cent of their seats (as full as any group in the survey). Films at the highest spend tiers didn’t do measurably better. The single emptiest screening in the sample, roughly an eighth full, belonged to a film that had spent money on marketing. Across the board, the correlation between spend and seats filled was effectively zero.
To better understand this, it’s important to know how festival audiences actually buy in. For a feature, an attendee either buys a single ticket to whichever screening appeals to them or buys a festival pass to the entire slate. For shorts it’s even further out of the filmmaker’s hands: audiences buy a ticket to a block and sit through each film in that program. Either way the seats are filled by the festival’s draw, the scheduling, and word of mouth between screenings – not by whether you bought Instagram ads. Several respondents volunteered that their later screenings were emptier than their premieres, which points to a novelty effect (the premiere pulls the crowd) more than a marketing one.
Acquisition is where things get convoluted
Ultimately, distribution is the thing filmmakers actually care about. The data seems to favour higher marketing spends in this instance. Distribution offers climbed steadily with spend: about 31 per cent of the lowest-spending films got a distribution offer, versus 71 per cent of mid-tier spenders, and 100 per cent (all three) of the highest spenders.
By reading that alone we might conclude that the money works. In a sense, it does, but the caveat is that budget tracks acquisition quite tightly. Sub-$10k films got offers about a quarter of the time; films over $500k got them every time. Also, budget and marketing spend move together: bigger-budget films spend more on their festival runs. The two biggest marketing spenders in my survey were, unsurprisingly, $1M-plus productions.
With only 26 films, there is no honest way to separate ‘marketing spend wins deals’ from ‘marketing spend equals a bigger, more market-ready film that was going to attract buyers in the first place’. The single best predictor of an offer in the whole survey wasn’t any marketing line item – it was simply reaching a top-tier festival (Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, etc.), where six of seven films landed an offer.
The publicist question
For many filmmakers, hiring a publicist is the big-ticket decision, so I tried to make it a key part of the survey. Publicist-hirers did get offers at a higher rate than non-hirers, but five of the six were already higher-budget films, so the same confounding variable taints the result. The exceptions are the interesting part: one filmmaker spent thousands on a publicist and got no offer at all. On the other hand, a documentary feature that spent zero on marketing, did no promotional activities, and simply had a strong festival run walked away with a distribution deal.
What the spenders themselves said
The attitudes were almost more telling than the numbers. The filmmakers who spent the least were the ones who most often said they’d spend more next time. The filmmakers who spent the most said the opposite. A producer who spent over $100,000 on a festival run put it most bluntly: attending is rarely worth it relative to the eventual acquisition price, and the smarter economic move is often to sell the film before the festival for a minimum guarantee and let the distributor absorb the festival costs.
Several filmmakers also reported that the ‘offers’ they received were predatory (e.g. ‘pay up front to distribute’).
The caveats to my study
This is 26 self-reported responses, recruited informally. It cannot prove causation, several of the groups are tiny, and banded answers slightly blur results. Treat everything here as directional and provocative, not definitive. I would, however, like to see someone run a larger version to see what shifts might occur.
So what should you actually do?
The takeaway isn’t ‘marketing is worthless’. Rather, it’s that marketing spend is not a substitute for the two things that actually seem to drive outcomes: the film itself and the tier of festival it reaches. Zero-spend films filled theatres and, in a couple of cases, landed deals. Five-figure publicist budgets sometimes returned nothing.
If money is tight (which for independent filmmakers it often is), then this data suggests spending it to improve your odds of getting into a strong festival rather than spending it once you’re there. The room will likely fill either way. And the buyers, if they’re coming, are coming for the film.
Two cheaper methods are worth leveraging over a paid campaign. If there are specific people you want in the room (a programmer, sales agent, or critic), inviting them and comping their ticket costs a fraction of a PR firm and targets the problem much more directly. When you’re deciding which festivals to spend on, favour the ones that visibly promote screenings to local audiences over the ones where the crowd is mostly other filmmakers. A well-attended public screening is usually a sign the festival is doing that outreach for you.
Of course, if you want a full room, the cheapest tool of all is the festival community itself. Show up to other filmmakers’ screenings, talk to people, and try the honest ‘I will come to yours if you come to mine’ method. It costs nothing and fills more seats than any paid social media post.
Viktor Bury is a filmmaker, independent researcher, and economics instructor from the Pacific Northwest. His work sits at the intersection of cinema and economics. He is currently developing his debut feature, Fragile.
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