The Resilient Film Marketing Playbook

Film distribution has always involved risk. Every release is close to a prototype, a new product launched into an ever-evolving market, and distributors have always made decisions with incomplete visibility and uncertain audience response.

What has changed is the margin for error. Audiences have far more to choose from and less reason to leave the house for any of it, and cinema-going has become less habitual and more event-led as a result. Meanwhile securing screens remains as hard as ever, the effect of marketing spend is still difficult to demonstrate, and audience discovery now travels globally before a local campaign has begun.

None of which means distribution is broken. The craft and invention we heard about was considerable. What kept surfacing alongside it was a small number of questions that recurred in very different markets and for very different kinds of film.

This playbook comes out of Resilient Film Marketing, an usheru-led programme of conversations about how distributors are adapting. It draws on six roundtables with thirty distributors, sales agents and exhibition partners across fifteen markets, a survey of 274 filmgoers, and campaign data from 835 releases.

We build tools for distributors, so we have an obvious interest in them succeeding, but the problems described in these sessions are not ones any single company can fix, ours included. They are structural, they are shared, and we have a useful position in the market from which to bring together different perspectives and data for its overall benefit.

So this playbook has two jobs. To document what good distributors are already doing, clearly enough to be useful on the next release. And to name what still needs solving collectively, and ask who wants to help.