What it costs to self-distribute and promote an independent film

Marketing is a key part of any film’s success, but training and case studies are much more likely to focus on the filmmaking than on film promotion. So I went looking for real-world examples of indie movies where the people behind them had published how much they spent on marketing, and why.I ended up with 57 case files, built from interviews, Substack post-mortems, podcast transcripts and the small number of organisations that publish full release ledgers.The four big lessonsAcross the 57 cases I looked at for this piece, four key lessons kept occurring to me. You need to seriously budget for marketing. The filmmakers who fared best (Hundreds of Beavers, Columbus, Thunder Road) had already raised money before they needed it. The ones who suffered most ran out mid-release, such as the team behind the Oscar-shortlisted documentary UNION (2024), who published their campaign sums ($800,000 planned for an 18-month campaign, $400,000 actually raised against a $1.2m production budget),…