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Knowing the Market
Building and Maintaining Trusted Relationships
Being Smart about the Film's Budget
Getting Films Sold to Distributors
Negotiating a Good Distribution Deal
Avoiding Expensive Pitfalls

Independent film producers make money by:

  • Knowing their market
  • Building and maintaining trusted relationships with investors
  • Being smart about the budget on the front end of production
  • Getting their films sold to distributors
  • Negotiating a good back-end deal
  • Knowing and avoiding expensive pitfalls

If you can execute on each of those, you'll make money as an independent film producer. Easy, right?

Film producers earn money in several different ways while the film is being made and after it's been sold. The compensation structure looks very different for both stages:

Front end: This refers to before, during and after the film's production, or pre production, production and post production. When a film is referred to as high or low budget, it's the production budget that's being discussed. The producer takes a salary from the budget like other people working on the movie (actors, director, etc.). This is a razor that cuts both ways: an independent producer can choose her own salary, but if something goes sideways during production and there's no budget left to cover it, the producer's salary is likely to become a contingency fund. An inexperienced film producer can end up using his salary to ensure the movie gets made and take home nothing. Some producers opt to pay themselves last. There isn't an accepted rule for what percentage of the budget a producer might take as salary.

Distributor deal: When the producer sells the movie to a distributor (a movie studio or a streamer), the producer negotiates the split of revenue that the film generates when it’s released into the