Visibility Comes First, Not Last

I’ve done it. I made a film that no one saw. We thought we did “everything rightâ€: We made a film (during COVID), it got into a big festival (Toronto International Film Festival), and sold it to a distributor (IFC Films). But then…

There wasn’t enough audience demand to warrant a real theatrical release. The film opened on 14 screens and made $5,935. It lasted a whole seven days in theaters. I still haven’t seen my one percent backend.

I thought we were making a movie! You know, big screen, dark room, hundreds of strangers, sold out theaters. That kind of movie.

To say that experience informed how I operate today would be a dramatic understatement. There are things that I learned on that film — and the three that followed — that I’m now implementing on my current film. Things that began back in November 2025 and will carry through the release of the film in October 2026.

My goal with “Brotherhood: A Cinematic Musical,†my current film, now in post-production, is to have it reach one million people theatrically. How we do that is the focus of today’s column, as the comments I received from the last one demanded more context around the V in the MOVIE framework — Visibility.

Most indie filmmakers build “inside-out.†They start with the movie and then go on a years-long begging spree. “Please give us money to make the movie… please let us into your festival… please distribute my movie… please watch my movie…â€

How to reach an audience is the thing that’s bolted on to the end, after a series of rejections. The filmmaker is “relegated†to having to self-promote and get their film to the market. They cobble together a poster, a trailer, and maybe even a little bit of money to four-wall the film, and they hope people show up.

As we’ve covered previously: hope is a terrible strategy. 

Without pre-existing demand, the market doesn’t magically appear when you need it to. The market is drowning in oversupply — there are too many movies and shows and verticals and social videos for anyone to watch in a lifetime, let alone at 7 p.m. this weekend where your film is playing. That’s what the “old†indie model exacerbates: more supply, more inventory sitting on dusty digital library shelves.

We don’t need more of that.

Instead, we have to flip to an “outside-in†approach. Said differently: audience-first, or demand-first filmmaking.

Visibility incorporates audience, awareness, engagement, demand, market dynamics, and more. In this approach, you discover and amplify existing demand before the product exists. That single switch changes everything downstream: how the movie gets financed, who agrees to be in it, lining up distribution before production starts, and building the audience alongside the film, not after.

This is the shift in thinking: you start the Visibility step before you build anything, film anything, or finance anything.

I’ve put numbers in front of you before. My last films each got somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 people into theaters, and I told you the math doesn’t work for a $1 million film until you’re moving 250,000 to 500,000-plus. One of those films was “Faith of Angels.†We self-released it with Purdie Distribution handling the bookings, and it did 100 times the box office of that IFC rollout on the first film.

And I still call it a near miss, because I only half-controlled the system. I was running pieces of outside-in, not the whole thing, and the distance between 50,000 and the number we actually needed is the distance between the pieces I controlled and the pieces I didn’t.

Here’s what it looks like in practice on “Brotherhood: A Cinematic Musical.†The first four hires on the movie were visibility hires: A tour producer who is responsible for a 20-city tour the month before the film hits theaters. An organization outreach partner to find sponsors and partners with existing audiences who would benefit from knowing about the film. A social media manager. And a long-form, behind-the-scenes videographer. By the time we wrapped production we had over 1,000 followers online, 450 people on a segment of my 4,000-plus email list, and more than 1 million impressions on the project.

What’s more, we had demand from financiers, distributors, production partners, cast, and crew months before production started. When the old model says “get the money on Friday and start pre-production on Monday,†we enjoyed the gift of time, which included six months of developing the script, the story, hiring key creatives and talent, and lining up all of our locations and crew for production. We started hiring and casting in early December for a mid-April shoot, which shocked the majority of our cast and crew who had never been given that kind of time before.

And here’s the part I’ll put on the record, in IndieWire, before the film is even locked: my goal is one million people in theaters. We plan to release in October for Hispanic Heritage Month. I’m naming the number now, before I’ve earned it, because you should get to watch whether this works in real time. That’s the deal.

I want you to pause here and feel the difference between the “Brotherhood†story — demand, time, partners — and the earlier story about my first film: hope, disappointment, frustration. It’s not just because I wrote it in an evocative way, but because you understand one or both of those as lived experiences.

It all should click. It makes sense both mentally and emotionally. So why do we resist it? Couple reasons that have been true for me in the past: It feels like selling before we’ve earned the right. We believe we need to make the thing before we can tell people about it or it feels too exposed, too vulnerable. There’s a chance people will see right through us if they see the work — or the idea — before it’s finished and perfect. And it feels risky. We don’t want to be seen as someone who over-promises and under-delivers.

The perfectionist instinct in the creative part of us is to hide until the work is done, then reveal. That instinct is what prevents us from doing it this new way.

We need to reframe what we’re doing so we avoid that resistance from ever showing up. 

You’re not selling. You’re inviting. 

You’re telling people you think would appreciate knowing that a thing either exists or will soon exist. You’re giving them an opportunity — one that they wouldn’t have otherwise — to be involved in the process.

This allows the audience to become a collaborator, not a target. You’re offering, not extracting. Serving, not selling.

What that means for you today, right now, is to tell someone about your project. Don’t sell them, invite them. Share what you’re working on, see if it aligns with the things they care about, and wait for my favorite question: “How can I help?†That’s when you know you a). have discovered existing demand, and b). made an invitation worth saying yes to.

Keep inviting — every day, multiple times a day — until you have everything you need to make your film. Invite enough investors and you have the financing you need. Invite enough collaborators and you’ve assembled your team. Invite enough distributors and you have a way to get your film to market. And — most importantly — if you invite enough audience to join you in the journey, you have enough demand to have a profitable outcome, not just a hope for one.

This isn’t a tactic you run once. It’s a permanent switch in how you operate. It’s Track Two thinking — building toward an audience that’s already there instead of hoping one shows up. It’s how you make sure the track never ends seven days and $5,935 short of where you meant to go.

Daren Smith is the founder of Craftsman Films and managing member of Producer Fund I. His current film, “Brotherhood — A Cinematic Musical,†is in post-production for an October 2 theatrical release.

All artwork for the Producer’s Path series is created by Steven de Groot.