Had a great convo with Evan Shapiro and Marion Ranchet on The Media Odyssey about why film financing is broken.
Most filmmakers are stuck between wealthy investors on yachts or studio deals that take away their IP.
That's why we keep complaining about the films we see.
So we built a new path--using fan capital, where filmmakers share equity with their fans.
But why cut the fans in?
Because fans ultimately determine the film’s success. Audiences drive box office.
Markiplier: 30M followers, Iron Lung did $50M+ on a tiny budget.
Taylor Swift: 100M listeners, the Eras Tour film cost $15M and made $261M.
400M+ fans already fund creators on Patreon, Kickstarter, and OnlyFans. They get nothing back. It’s all donations—kind of awkward, no alignment.
But when fans OWN a piece of your film, you keep control, IP, AND you know you have the audience's support from day 1.
So, sounds great you say, but there must be a reason why this hasn’t been done before?
There is. The reason is simple: securities laws. It was literally illegal up until recently, when the SEC finally allowed everyday folks to invest in private assets and companies (which includes films).
So we’ve built Republic Film: where fans can invest in their favorite filmmakers (and they’ve invested tens of millions already).
And the kicker: we use tokenization as the backbone so fans can trade their shares too (think of it as “audience equity”). This is no doubt the future of film financing.
Thank you Evan and Marion for the chance to talk about this.
youtube.com/watch?v=Sg14JX…
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