Section four

The argument

The evidence behind the plays. Optional, if you want to know why any of it holds.

Attention isn't the problem

Ask distributors whether they can get a film noticed and most say yes, with effort. Ask whether that notice becomes a ticket, and the answer changes.

This finding came out of the first round of Resilient Film Marketing conversations, reported at the time in the words that fitted best: attention isn't the problem, conversion is. What follows is the next stage of that work: five further sessions, thirty participants across fifteen markets, and a survey of 274 filmgoers, testing whether it holds. It does. Asked directly whether it was harder to get a film noticed or to turn that into attendance, distributors in three separate sessions gave the same answer without prompting.

Distributors are good at attention

It is not easy, and it is getting harder. One described the reality of small films: "you always have to find a way of doing a lot with nothing." Another described the opposite problem, an ever-growing list of formats and platforms to maintain, with no reliable way to know which of it matters.

But the craft is real, and often inventive in ways budget alone would never buy. One distributor released a comedy with no press, no interviews and no television. The talent toured for a month instead, filmed daily, edited overnight, released as clips the following afternoon. It brought people into cinemas who had never been. A Brazilian distributor builds campaigns around offline stunts designed to travel online: a carnival parade on a festival red carpet, an entire red carpet dyed blue to match a film's title, a public lookalike contest for a film's lead.

These are not people struggling to be noticed.

Not the most interesting film. Not the best reviewed. The one that would lose something at home.

Attention and intention are different things

They are not two points on the same scale.

Attention is something an audience gives to a film. It is cheap to give and cheap to withdraw. Someone can watch a trailer, admire a poster, share a clip, and genuinely mean to see the film one day, without any of it committing them to anything.

Intention involves their own life. It is a specific Thursday, a particular cinema, the price of two tickets, and usually somebody else's schedule to coordinate. Every one of those conditions has got harder. A Brazilian distributor described cinemas competing directly with bars and restaurants while ticket prices rise: "in order for us to sell tickets and really succeed, the film must be like an event." A UK distributor put it more bluntly, audiences "will show up to certain things, but they absolutely won't show up for other things."

Audiences describe the same threshold in their own terms. Asked what makes a film worth leaving home for, 81% of survey respondents chose "it feels like the kind of film best experienced in a cinema." Not the most interesting film. Not the best reviewed. The one that would lose something at home.1

Which is why attention misleads

One distributor described a major premiere: a well-known name in attendance, a significant PR push, everything that normally reads as confidence. Early screenings a month later: "so many empty rooms."

Asked whether they could connect a piece of content to an actual ticket sale, another searched for the word in a second language rather than leave the thought unfinished: causality. There was no way to establish it.

The attention was real in both cases. What nobody could tell was whether any of it would turn up.

What intention looks like

The specificity that makes intention hard to manufacture is also what makes it visible. People who are planning behave differently from people who are interested.

It looks like a request rather than a reaction. A documentary distributor watched comments arrive asking why the film wasn't playing in Sheffield, or the north-east. They took the comments to exhibitors as evidence of demand, and won extra regional screenings on the strength of them.

It looks like an audience organising itself. A distributor releasing a Turkish-Georgian film noticed unexpected traction among Georgian audiences in Germany, and moved budget toward them mid-campaign. Another saw a Brazilian community turn out in numbers at a Swiss festival screening, weeks ahead of release. A third found the same pattern with Ukrainian audiences in Germany at Christmas.

It looks like arriving on purpose. Across 2025, on distributor platforms built with usheru, visitors who arrived direct reached a cinema at 44.8% and those from organic search at 35.5%. Paid traffic managed 2.2%.

Direct is a mixed category. It covers typed addresses and bookmarks, but also links shared in messaging apps that strip their origin, codes scanned off a poster, and anything where the referrer was lost along the way. Much of what looks like direct traffic is word of mouth that the analytics could not label. What unites all of it is that somebody arrived on purpose.

It looks like someone checking what time the film is on. A page view is attention. A showtime check is intention. So is selecting a city, sharing a listing, or clicking through to a cinema's ticketing page, though only where a platform has been built to record them. Across the distributor platforms usheru works on, the click through to a cinema is the most useful signal available, because it is the last observable act of planning before the part nobody can see.

It looks like people asking practical questions. Is this worth seeing in a cinema? What's showing near me? Is it for me? Those are not expressions of interest. They are the questions of someone deciding.

None of this is attribution. All of it arrives earlier than attribution, which is the point. And notice what those distributors did next: one took comments to an exhibitor and won screens, another moved budget mid-campaign. Each found part of the journey they could still influence.

Intention has been hard to work with largely because it has not been named. It is not a vague middle between two things the industry measures confidently. It is a set of specific behaviours that can be described, looked for, captured and acted on.

More signals, less certainty

Distributors do not lack signals. What they lack is a reliable way to tell which ones mean anything for the film in front of them.

In one session for this research, two experienced distributors were asked which signal they trust most. The first answered without hesitation: exhibitor enthusiasm. "They know very well what works and what doesn't." The second, who releases documentaries, said almost the opposite, exhibitor interest tells you mainly what else is opening that week. A booker may take your film because the slot exists, not because they believe in it. "That's one to take with a pinch of salt."

Both are right, for their own slate. Which is the difficulty: the same signal carries different weight depending on what you release.

Nobody checks what time a film is on unless they are thinking about going.

Five kinds of signal

Signals get discussed as a single pile, which is why the conversation goes nowhere. They answer five different questions: do people care (talent, subject, festival reaction, diaspora relevance), do we believe this works theatrically (exhibitor enthusiasm, presales, trailer response, reviews), are audiences moving toward action (showtime clicks, where-to-watch clicks, ticketing searches, questions asked of an assistant), did they attend (sales velocity, occupancy, group bookings, box office), and what improves the next one (false positives, traffic source quality, cinema overperformance, later-window performance).

The full inventory, with when each signal arrives and where it misleads, is in the appendix. The distinction that matters most is not between good signals and bad ones. It is this:

The challenge is not to collect more signals. It is to distinguish between signals that show interest, signals that build confidence, signals that reveal intent, and signals that arrive too late to change the plan.

Most distributors are well served on the first two categories and the fourth. The third is thin, and the fifth is almost never collected at all.

Three ways signals fail

They mislead. The most consistent trap in this research was talent whose fandom does not match the film. One distributor is releasing a well-known action star in a slow, poetic role and already expects the trailer response to overstate the audience: "it's sort of a false signal, because I already know that the word of mouth will not be that good." Another described two leads with enormous separate fandoms whose comment sections filled with excitement that had little to do with attending. A third assumed a documentary about two famous figures had one combined audience, and learned from the artwork comments that the two fan bases actively dislike each other.

Large numbers mislead too. One distributor distrusts headline view counts because a single share from a large account distorts the total. The useful question is not how many, but from where.

They arrive too late. Presales are among the clearest reads on intent available, and in most markets they open days before the film does, long after positioning, spend and scale are fixed. As one distributor put it, by the time you notice, "it's already too late."

They reverse. A Swiss distributor bought a film nobody else in the territory wanted, which exhibitors had skipped at Cannes. It then won two awards, and cinemas began approaching her unprompted. The signal at acquisition was worthless. Six weeks later it was decisive. Signals are not fixed properties of a film.

Which is why nobody has the formula

The head of marketing at one of Germany's largest independents, a company that buys tracking and comparison data on every release, is blunt about the limits: "We use a lot of data, but we are not led by data. In the end, decision cannot be made only out of data." And more directly: "If anybody found the formula, there would only be very successful movies out there."

The practical response is not to watch everything. It is to decide, before the campaign starts, which three or four signals speak to the specific assumption this release depends on, and what a good and a bad reading of each would look like. Part One sets out how.

The full signal inventory, twenty-nine signals across the five categories, with timing and failure modes, is in the appendix.

You can see further than you think

"We send people to cinema sites, but what happens next is invisible to us."

The reason is commercial, not technical

The data exists. Someone holds it. The obstacle is that they have good reasons not to pass it on. Exhibitors monetise audience data themselves, through advertising, memberships and their own marketing, so sharing it means giving away a revenue line. Nobody is being obstructive. The incentives simply point the other way.

In several markets an intermediary sits between the two. In Brazil, most tickets are sold through two large platforms that share nothing back with distributors. In Italy, regional booking agencies represent all distributors and take a fee per ticket, which gives them an interest in whichever title earns them most. One Italian distributor described not knowing her final screen count or which cities she would play until the week of release, committing P&A against a footprint she could not see.

What is visible

The handoff itself is measurable, and the spread is wide. Across 2025, on distributor platforms built with usheru, standard release pages moved 4.2% of visitors through to a cinema when showtimes were live. Platforms purpose-built for the release window moved 16.2%. Most distributors have never seen either figure for their own titles, which makes it difficult to know whether a campaign page is working or merely present.

That range matters more than any single number. It says the handoff is not a fixed rate you inherit, it responds to how the page is built, what else competes for the click, and whether showtimes appear at the moment intent peaks. It is a partial measure of a partial journey, but it can be compared against itself, release after release.

What you can do

Sell tickets directly where the format already allows it. Previews, Q&As and event screenings are yours to programme, they draw your highest-intent audience, and they are the one place you see the whole journey.

Reduce the friction on the stretch you own. The distance between interest and the cinema's site is where the range above is won and lost, and it is entirely yours to fix.

And ask. One distributor sent teams into their ten largest cinemas and surveyed six hundred attendees about what had brought them in, finding social dominant and billboards barely registering. Another approached a large independent cinema in his market, explained how much traffic he was sending them, and asked for nothing but a total: how many arrived, how many bought. The answer, across three releases, was 15 to 17%. Both got a straight answer to a direct question.

None of this produces a benchmark. It produces your own number, which is more than most distributors have, and it is where Part Three begins.