Alex Bogomolov: Film as an Asset Class

If smart money doesn't do film, someone forgot to tell BlackRock

Alex Bogomolov — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 22:48:30 GMT

In 2023, BlackRock Alternatives put $90M into MACRO, a film company founded with the explicit thesis that Black-centered storytelling is a massively underserved market. The round was led by BlackRock, with Goldman Sachs Asset Management and HarbourView Equity Partners alongside.

Not a philanthropic arm. BlackRock Alternatives. The same division that manages institutional capital for pension funds and sovereign wealth vehicles.

If smart money doesn’t do film, someone forgot to tell BlackRock.

The more honest framing is this: sophisticated capital has always followed genuine market gaps. What’s changed is the visibility. MACRO’s raise wasn’t an anomaly - it was the most legible data point in a pattern that’s been building for years.

And it kept happening. In June 2024, Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital led a round that valued A24 at $3.5B, up 40% in two years. A year later, Sequoia put $100M into Mubi at a $1B valuation.

Then there are the funds built for exactly this. Shamrock Capital, which started as the investment office for Roy E. Disney’s family, closed an $813M content fund in 2026, backed by pension funds and endowments, structured to buy film cash flows the way other funds buy real estate. Domain Capital closed $768M for the same purpose the same year. None of this is charity. It’s asset allocation.

Plan B Entertainment built its track record on films that other companies passed on. “12 Years a Slave.” “Moonlight.” “The Big Short.” Not a diversity mandate. A selection thesis: find the stories audiences are hungry for before the market knows it. Plan B sold a majority stake to European conglomerate Mediawan in 2022. Mediawan didn’t buy that company for its B-movie output. Mediawan is backed by KKR. Since buying Plan B it has rolled up a run of quality producers across Europe, including the team behind “Slow Horses” and “The Power of the Dog”, and paid roughly $900 million for Peter Chernin’s company in early 2026. Private equity running a deliberate play on prestige production, not a one-off.

Element Pictures in Ireland operates on a similar logic. Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe describe themselves as not driven primarily by commercial success, then produce “Room,” “The Favourite,” “Poor Things” - which grossed $117.6M globally. Killer Films has been running the same play for thirty years: Christine Vachon identified early that underserved audiences are underserved because no one served them, not because they don’t exist. That’s a business model, not idealism.

HarbourView Equity Partners, one of MACRO’s co-investors, has since done it twice more: Mucho Mas Media in 2024 and the Oscar-winning animation studio Lion Forge in 2025. The same investor doing it three times is a thesis.

The institutional interest has a second driver that’s less discussed. ESG - the environmental-social-governance investing category - is collapsing under its own weight.

BlackRock supported 47% of environmental and social shareholder proposals in 2021. By 2024, that number had dropped to 4%. By 2025, under 2%. US sustainable funds have now seen net outflows for fourteen consecutive quarters. In 2024, seventy-one ESG funds merged or liquidated in the same year only ten new ones launched. In January 2025, BlackRock walked out of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative entirely, and JPMorgan and Franklin Templeton followed within weeks.

ESG failed because it was built wrong. Negative screening - filtering out the worst actors in existing public companies - was never a mechanism for creating anything. It was a marketing mechanism that collapsed when political pressure arrived and greenwashing got called out.

The investors who went through that cycle and came out the other side are asking a different question now. Not “how do we filter what we own.” But “how do we fund what gets built.”

Film is one of the clearest answers available. When a film about climate resilience reaches thirty million people across theatrical, streaming, and educational distribution, it created something. An ESG-screened portfolio didn’t create anything. It just didn’t hold shares in the wrong companies.

Family office capital is moving toward what Goldman Sachs’ 2025 Family Office Investment Insights Report calls the “passion plus return” bucket. In one survey of ultra-wealthy investors, nearly 40% planned to increase their passion-asset allocation over the next five years, more than the share planning to increase traditional investments. Sports ownership already draws 25% of family offices. At the ultra-high-net-worth level, collectors now put 28% of their wealth into art, up from 15% a year earlier.

Film belongs in that bucket, and the distinction from sports team ownership is meaningful. Sports teams carry operational costs, municipal politics, labor negotiations, and stadium debt. A film investment is cleaner: the asset is the IP, the revenue windows are contractual, and the cultural product has global distribution potential from day one. It also has something a stadium doesn’t - it can still be watched in forty years.

The “stewardship not extraction” framing is what lands with the third generation of family office capital. Their grandparents funded concert halls and university buildings. Perspective-expanding cinema is the contemporary equivalent: accessible globally, permanent in cultural memory, and structured as an equity investment rather than a donation.

I’ve watched investors come to film after ESG cycles, after crypto cycles, after realizing that negative screens and speculative tokens are two different ways to feel like you’re doing something without actually building anything. The ones who stay are the ones who understand that cultural infrastructure compounds differently than other assets.

A film doesn’t depreciate the way a stadium does. It doesn’t dilute the way a token does. And unlike an ESG fund, it actually produces something.

The institutional validation is the least interesting part. The more interesting part is the question it leaves open: if BlackRock and Mediawan are at the table, what’s the right structure for the next layer of capital to enter alongside them?

That’s where the independent producer conversation starts getting interesting. And the window for that conversation is wider right now than most investors have priced in.

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5 red flags in an indie film deal

Alex Bogomolov — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:12:45 GMT

I built a 38-point due diligence framework for investing in indie films. Most of it matters. Five items on that list matter more than the rest combined.

These five show up before I check comp tables (the list of similar films a projection is judged against), before I read the operating agreement, before I talk to the sales agent. If any of them are wrong, the other 33 points don’t tell me enough to stay.

Here they are.

1. “We’ll figure out distribution after the festival.”

What it looks like: the pitch deck has a budget, a cast, a festival strategy. The distribution section says “to be determined” or “we’re targeting Sundance, then we’ll go from there.”

Why it kills the deal: distribution strategy isn’t post-production homework. It shapes casting decisions, marketing reserves, genre positioning, and technical delivery requirements from day one. A producer without a distribution thesis before principal photography is improvising with your capital. This is the single most common statement that separates experienced producers from amateurs.

2. Above-the-line costs exceed 50% of the total budget.

What it looks like: a $2M indie where star fees, producer fees, and director fees add up to $1.1M. The shoot gets whatever’s left.

Why it kills the deal: your money is primarily covering talent fees, not making the film. Below-the-line at under 50% means a compressed crew, a constrained schedule, and higher production risk on every day of the shoot. The diagnostic marker here is the bond company - the insurer that guarantees the film actually gets finished. Completion guarantors won’t bond a production at ATL for more than 40-50% of the total budget. When the bond company declines, they’re doing your diligence for you. Listen to them.

The healthy range for a well-structured indie is 25-35% ATL (with some exceptions). Above 50%, there is nothing left to negotiate.

3. No collection account.

What it looks like: the deal has a waterfall on paper - investors recoup first, then producer fees, then back-end. No mention of a CAMA (Collection Account Management Agreement) or who’s managing the revenue flow.

Why it kills the deal: without a neutral third party collecting and distributing revenues, investor recoupment depends entirely on the producer’s self-reporting. No enforcement. No transparency. No controls. A CAMA (Fintage House, FilmChain, Freeway Entertainment) costs $8,000-$15,000 to set up - a rounding error on any serious production. A producer who resists this is a producer who doesn’t expect the accounting to hold up to scrutiny.

4. LOIs presented as pre-sales.

What it looks like: the pitch deck says “distribution interest from [territory]” or lists territory deals as market validation. When you ask for the contracts, what arrives is a letter of intent.

Why it kills the deal: a pre-sale MG (minimum guarantee) is a binding contractual obligation paid upon delivery of a finished film. An LOI is a non-binding statement of interest with zero financial weight. These are categorically different. One can be discounted by a bank as loan collateral. The other is a compliment. A producer who conflates them in a pitch deck either doesn’t know the difference or is hoping you don’t. Either answer is disqualifying.

5. Comp table shows only winners.

What it looks like: the financial projections cite three or four successful titles in the same genre - the ones everyone recognizes, the ones that returned 5x or 10x or 50x. No failures. No middle performers.

Why it kills the deal: a real comp table shows the full distribution of outcomes. Slated’s data across 18,000+ independent films shows a median ROI of 0.8x for films without recognizable cast. That’s the actual center of gravity in this market, not the outliers. A producer who builds projections from the top 5% of their genre hasn’t done market analysis. They’ve done marketing. Ask directly: what happened to the 20 films that looked like this one five years ago? If they can’t answer, they haven’t asked.

There are 33 other items on my checklist that matter. But these five are the ones producers either can’t fix or won’t admit to. A producer who can’t address them openly, with documents rather than explanations, is selling something other than a film.

Full DD framework: 38 points across project, producer, deal, financial, and distribution layers. If you’re evaluating a film investment and want the complete structure, I published it in this series.

The producers who pass these five checks aren’t operating in isolation anymore. Increasingly, institutional capital is sitting at the same table.

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The waterfall - why film investors are last in line

Alex Bogomolov — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 22:28:55 GMT

“Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide.
New Line’s accounting showed a $167 million loss on paper.

Both numbers are real. The distance between them is a mechanism called the waterfall.

The waterfall is the contractual sequence that determines who gets paid, in what order, before a single dollar reaches the equity investor. It is not a conspiracy. It is a legal document. And if you invest in film without understanding it, you will get your first quarterly statement and wonder where your money went.

Here is how it actually works.

A film’s revenue is structured like Shrek’s onion: layer after layer, and by the time you reach the middle, someone’s crying. Every dollar passes through a series of buckets. The top bucket fills first. The next bucket only receives what overflows. Equity investors sit at the bottom - the innermost layer. On a $2M film that earns $1.8M in total revenue, here is what happens before the investor sees anything:

The collection account manager takes 1% off the top. That is $18,000. Guild residuals - ongoing payments owed to the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA: $25,000. The sales agent takes a 20% commission on gross revenue - roughly $351,000. The sales agent then recoups their expenses, capped at $60,000. Territory distributors take their fees across all the markets where the film sells: $180,000. Prints and advertising - the marketing spend for a limited release: $80,000.

Total off the top: roughly $714,000.

Remaining for equity recoupment: about $1,086,000. The investor is owed $960,000 - their $800K principal at a 120% preferred return, meaning they get their money back plus 20% before anyone splits profits. In this scenario, they recover the full amount, plus roughly $63,000 in profit share. A 28% return.

That is the good scenario.

Change the revenue to $800,000 instead of $1.8M - which is closer to the median for a film without solid festival attention and mid-tier international distribution - and the investor recoups about $380,000 of their $800,000. That is a 52% loss, on a film that got distribution.

Now stack the Hollywood Accounting cases on top of that mechanic.

“Forrest Gump” grossed $678M and won Best Picture. Author Winston Groom had a 3% net profit clause. He received $350,000 total. Paramount’s overhead charges, distribution fees, and internal allocations ensured the film never officially reached “net profit.”

Art Buchwald sued Paramount over “Coming to America”, which grossed $288M. A judge called the studio’s accounting practices “unconscionable.” Paramount settled for $900,000 rather than defend its methods in open court.

“The Lord of the Rings” trilogy grossed $6 billion across films and merchandise. Fifteen cast members sued over unpaid merchandise revenue. The Tolkien estate sued over 7.5% of gross receipts owed by contract. New Line’s books showed “horrendous losses.” All cases settled confidentially. The accounting was never defended in public.

These are studio cases. A properly structured independent film is different. The mechanism that changes everything is called a CAMA - a Collection Account Management Agreement. A neutral third party like Fintage House or Freeway Entertainment receives every dollar the film earns, verifies it against the contractual waterfall, and disburses to each party in order. The producer never touches the money. Setup cost: roughly $8,000. Ongoing fee: 1% of gross through the account. On a $2M revenue film, that is $20,000 total. It is the $20,000 that sits between “I trust the producer will pay me” and “a financial referee holds the funds.”

Without a CAMA, you are waiting for the producer to voluntarily send you money from their own bank account, against their own expenses, with no independent verification of what came in.

The waterfall itself is neutral architecture. Whether it protects you or works against you depends entirely on whether you read it before you sign.

Four things every investor should have in writing before closing: the full recoupment schedule with every position defined, a CAMA named in the agreement, an expense cap on the sales agent, and an explicit definition of what counts as a deductible cost before net profits are calculated.

Film earns money every week. The question is which bucket you are sitting in.

Reading the bucket right is half the work. The other half is recognizing the deals that won’t ever pay out, no matter what the waterfall says.

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The $3M film that only needs $1.1M from you

Alex Bogomolov — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:49:47 GMT

The number that matters is equity-at-risk: the slice of the budget that’s actually exposed if the film fails. On a well-structured $3M indie, that figure lands somewhere between $750K and $1.5M. The rest of the budget comes from a stack that most pitch decks explain badly.

Here is how that stack actually works.

Layer 1 - Tax credits.

Tax credits are the boring layer. Boring is the point: this is the only money in film that arrives whether or not anyone buys a ticket.

British Columbia refunds part of every dollar spent on BC labour, and it stacks higher than most investors think.

Start with the floor. The Production Services Tax Credit pays 36% of eligible BC labour, and the federal services credit adds 16% on top. The two don’t reduce each other. That’s 52% of qualifying BC wages back as a refundable government check - refundable meaning the government pays it out in cash even if you owe no tax.

Then it stacks. Shoot outside metro Vancouver and a regional credit adds 6%. A distant location adds another 6%. Visual effects and post-production qualify for the DAVE bonus at 16%. A distant-location, effects-heavy production pushes the combined credit up to 80% of eligible BC labour.

What that means for an investor: labour runs roughly 50-60% of a budget, so the credit comes back as something like 35-45% of the total budget.

On a $3M genre thriller, shot at a distant BC location with VFX work and the bonuses carry the cashback is roughly $1.2M. Independent of box office, independent of whether the film ever reaches a festival. More about Tax Credit and how to maximize it here.

Layer 2 - Pre-sales and minimum guarantees.

A minimum guarantee is exactly what it sounds like: a territorial distributor commits to pay a fixed amount - say $500,000 for US rights, $100,000 for UK - against delivery of a finished film. That commitment is made before production starts. The MG is a real cash advance, often borrowed against by a bank once the contract is signed.

When investors see the budget line for “pre-sale,” they sometimes read it as projected revenue. It isn’t. It’s a contracted advance from a buyer who has already evaluated the package - script, cast, producer track record - and committed in writing.

Layer 3 - Sales agent advance.

A reputable sales agent occasionally provides an advance against their commission. Smaller than the pre-sales but real: another $100,000-$200,000 in the stack without additional equity dilution.

MGs and sales advances are great additions to your package and pitch, it’s proof that it isn’t just you thinking the film is good. Someone with real money on the line already believes it’s marketable.

Put the layers together.

Take the $3M BC thriller worked example I use when structuring deals. Tax credits bring in roughly $1,200,000. UK and US pre-sales total $600,000. Sales agent advance adds $100,000.

That’s $1,900,000 - 63% of the budget - sourced before an equity investor writes a single check. The equity required to close the picture: $1,100,000.

When investors see $3M and walk away from the table, they are often walking away from a deal where their actual exposure was $1M to $1.5M - against a project that already had a collection account CAMA (a neutral account where every dollar of revenue lands, more on that in part 3), a completion bond (insurance that the film actually gets finished), and signed distribution commitments from territorial buyers who evaluated the same materials the investor was shown.

That’s the gap between perception and structure.

The perception is that the film is a $3M binary bet on whether audiences show up opening weekend.

The structure is that a well-packaged indie is a $1M-$1.5M position with a tax credit floor, contracted pre-sale commitments, and a recoupment waterfall - the contractual order money comes back in - that puts the equity investor’s principal ahead of the producers.

Not every film is structured this way. A lot of them aren’t. But when the stack is assembled correctly, equity-at-risk is a materially different number than the budget. The investor who knows to ask for it is operating with a different frame than the one who looked at the cover page and stopped there.

Knowing the size of your check is one half of the math. The order that check comes back in is the other.

Every investor heard '9 out of 10 films lose money'. Most are reading it wrong.

Alex Bogomolov — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:34:16 GMT

Every investor I meet has heard the line: 9 out of 10 films lose money.

The number is real. It’s also misleading in the most important way.

The source is Stephen Follows. He ran the numbers on 37,472 indie films released between 1999 and 2018. About 3.4% were profitable for their investors. That’s the stat in every “should I invest in film” article.

Two questions break it open.

The first: most of those 37,472 films never got distribution. No theater, no streamer, no audience. The dataset counts everything shot in that window, including the passion project someone’s cousin filmed in a cabin and screened for eleven relatives. The cabin is in the statistics.

The second: restrict the same dataset to films that got a real theatrical release, and the number jumps to roughly 33%. One in three. That’s a different conversation.

And inside that group, the curve is uneven. Horror lands at about 50% profitability over the same period. Same data, sliced by genre.

So “3.4%” describes a population where most members had no market path to begin with. Quoting it as the profile of a real film deal is like quoting the failure rate of every garage startup as the profile of venture capital.

Three things follow.

A producer’s track record matters more than the base rate, the average across everyone in the dataset. Someone who has placed their last three films into distribution is operating in a different statistical universe than the 37,472 average. Selection is the whole game.

Genre is strategy, not luck. Horror at 50% is a budget tier, a release rhythm, and an audience that shows up. Drama at the bottom of the curve is a known operating problem, not bad fortune.

And “film as an asset class” is really several asset classes wearing one name. Distributed indie thriller is one bet. Festival-only drama is another. Self-released hopefuls are a third. Average them together and you get a number that describes none of them.

The question that matters isn’t “is film a good investment?”

It’s “which version of film, and run by whom.”

The number worth quoting was never 3.4%. It’s 33% and 50%, and which group the film/package in front of you actually belongs to.

Film as an Alternative Asset

Alex Bogomolov — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:19:45 GMT

Educational, not financial advice. Numbers are sourced and dated. Talk to your own advisor and an entertainment lawyer before you invest in anything, mine included.

Most investors file film in the wrong drawer

Ask someone where film sits as an investment and you get one of two answers. Either it’s a gamble for rich people who want to walk a red carpet. Or it’s a blank stare, because they never knew you could invest in a film at all.

Both are wrong.

I produce independent films. That puts me on the other side of the table from the investor, building the thing your capital would back. So I wrote the comparison I’d want a sharp investor to run on me. Not a pitch. A map. Where does film actually sit next to venture capital, crypto, real estate, and angel deals?

The five questions every alternative asset has to answer

Strip away the story and every alternative asset answers the same five questions:

What’s the return profile?
What protects you on the downside?
How liquid is it, can you get out?
What’s the minimum, and how long is your money locked?
How does it move with the public market, and how is it taxed?

Run film through those five and compare it honestly. That’s the table.

One picture says it faster than the rows. Up means a real floor under your money, right means you can get out. Film sits alone in the protected corner.

Now let me walk the rows that matter.

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Return: film is a power-law asset, not an average one

Here’s the trap most film pitches fall into. They quote you an “average return” for film. There isn’t one. No standardized index tracks independent film the way the S&P and Nareit track stocks and REITs. Anyone who hands you a clean average for a film is selling.

So compare honestly. Film belongs in the same bucket as venture capital and angel investing: power-law assets. Most bets return little or nothing. A few outliers pay for everything. You’re not buying an average. You’re buying access to the tail.

Now the number everyone quotes. Stephen Follows ran 37,472 indie films and found that only 3.4% were profitable. That figure shows up in every “should I invest in film” article, and it’s misleading. Count only the films that actually got a theatrical release and it jumps to roughly 33%. Isolate horror over the same window and it’s near 50%. Same data, three very different answers depending on what you actually measure.

And film isn’t one sector, any more than the stock market is. An equity investor splits the market into tech, energy, healthcare. Film splits the same way: drama, auteur, comedy, genre film (horror, action, thriller, sci-fi). Each carries its own numbers, and one sector wins on repeat. Horror. Fear doesn’t need translation. A scare lands the same in any language, which is why genre travels across borders a dialogue-heavy drama never clears. That’s not taste, it’s distribution math.

The tail is real, too. Blair Witch, made for about $60,000, grossed roughly $248 million. Paranormal Activity, made for about $15,000, grossed close to $200 million. Terrifier 3, made for about $2 million, did over $89 million. Same shape as a venture portfolio that catches one unicorn.

Compare that to the other power-law asset on the table. US venture capital posted a pooled net IRR around 17.6% as of mid-2025, per Cambridge Associates, and that headline hides the same brutal distribution underneath. Most funds and most deals don’t drive it. A few do.

The point isn’t “film beats VC.” It doesn’t, on headline return, and I’m not going to pretend it does. The point is that film and venture are the same kind of bet: outlier-driven access plays. If you understand why you’d put money into early-stage venture, you already understand the return shape of film.

Downside: this is where film separates

Where film pulls ahead of its power-law cousins is the floor.

A seed-stage startup has no floor. If it fails, your capital is gone. Crypto has no floor. Angel deals have no floor.

A well-structured film does. Several, actually.

Tax credits. A disciplined producer filming in British Columbia can push the effective return toward 60%. All of it cash back from the government, paid whether or not the film ever finds an audience, and largely before the film’s first screening. I broke down exactly how that works and how far it goes here.

Pre-sales and minimum guarantees. Distributors commit to pay fixed amounts for their territory before the film is shot, against delivery. Contracted cash, not projected revenue.

A completion bond. A bonded film gets finished or the investor gets made whole. That’s an insurance product sitting under your capital.

A first-position waterfall. In a properly papered deal, the equity investor is first money out. Nobody touches a dollar of profit until the investor has recouped their full investment. I get paid after you’re made whole, not before.

Stack those and the math changes. On a $2M Canadian thriller, the tax credits and pre-sales can cover close to 75% of the budget before a single equity dollar goes in. The money actually at risk is meaningfully smaller than the budget on the cover page. No other asset on this list builds in a government-funded floor.

Liquidity: this is where film loses

Film is illiquid. No exchange, no daily price, no easy exit. If you need your money out early, the secondary market for indie film positions is thin and brutal. You might get 30 to 50 cents on the dollar relative to stated value, if you find a buyer at all.

Real estate is illiquid too if you hold it directly, but at least it pays you rent while you wait, and a public REIT trades daily. The S&P you can sell this afternoon. Crypto trades around the clock.

Film pays you nothing while you wait. The wait runs one to five years, sometimes faster, and there are no dividends along the way. Your return, if it comes, comes lumpy and late. If liquidity or income matters to you, film is the wrong asset. I’d rather tell you that now than have you find out in year two.

Correlation: a real edge, stated honestly

Film returns don’t track the stock market. Audiences don’t stop watching movies in a recession. They often watch more. Cinema attendance held up through the Great Depression, and 2008 and 2009 delivered some of the strongest box office of the decade while equities were coming apart. When life gets hard, people spend on escape. There’s even a name for the pattern, the lipstick effect: the small affordable pleasures hold or grow when budgets tighten, and a movie ticket is the cheapest seat in the house.

I’d still love to hand you a correlation coefficient here. I can’t, and neither can anyone honest, because there’s no clean film-return index to run the math on. So treat this as a directional argument, not a number. But the direction is real, and it runs opposite to your equity book.

The risk reframe: film vs the startup you’d back anyway

Put film next to the seed-stage startup, because that’s its real peer.

Both are bets most people lose. Both pay off through a handful of outliers. But the startup has no completion bond, no government credit covering half its costs, no pre-sold revenue, and no waterfall putting your principal first.

Film is the version of that bet with structural protections bolted on. Risky, yes. Uniquely risky, no. The data doesn’t support “film is the riskiest thing you can do with money.” A concentrated single-stock position or a cold seed check has a worse floor.

Who this is for, and who it isn’t

Film fits a specific investor.

You’ve made money in something volatile, tech or crypto or a business exit, and you want a real asset with cultural weight rather than another speculative ticker. You care about what the money makes, not only what it returns, because the film exists in the world and the REIT doesn’t. You can lock up a check from around $50K for one to five years without needing it back.

Film does not fit you if you need liquidity, need income along the way, or can’t hold for the period. No hard feelings. Better to know now.

The return that isn’t on the table

Every asset above returns money or it doesn’t. Film returns something else on top, and no spreadsheet captures it.

You get a credit on the film. You’re on the set if you want to be. You’re at the premiere, on the carpet, at the party. You meet the people who made it, cast included. You can even take a cameo if it suits you, which an indie producer can arrange far more easily than a studio ever could. And you put your name into the cultural record, attached to a film that keeps existing long after a fund’s vintage year is forgotten.

None of that is why a serious investor writes the check. All of it is why, given two comparable bets, they often write this one. Art, wine, and sports hand you a trophy. Film hands you a seat in the room where the thing gets made.

The part that’s mine

Everything above is true for film as a category. Here’s where I differ from the average deal you’d see.

I produce films the way a founder runs a startup. Market first, budget discipline, transparent numbers, a clear path for the money to come back. And I only make films built to do one thing: entertain a real audience while quietly shifting how they see something. That filters for quality, and quality is what travels.

The protections only work if the producer assembling them has done it before and put films into the market that came back. That’s the piece of due diligence no table can show you. It’s the piece worth a conversation.

Where to go from here

This is the map, not the deal. If it changed how you think about where film sits, the job’s done.

I write here every week on how independent film actually works as a business, for the people deciding whether to back one. Subscribe and follow along.

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The real version, the actual stack, the waterfall, the numbers on a specific slate, is a conversation, not a download. If you’re weighing whether film belongs in your portfolio, tell me where you’re at and I’ll send the deck and set up a call.

See how a slate is structured

Sources: Stephen Follows (indie film profitability); Cambridge Associates US Venture Capital Index, Q2 2025; Nareit (REIT long-run returns); Wiltbank, Returns to Angel Investors; OfficialData / Macrotrends (S&P 500 since 1926); Creative BC and federal PSTC (tax-credit rates); public box-office records (Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, Terrifier 3).

*Not financial advice. Film investment carries real risk, including total loss of capital. Consult your own financial advisor and an entertainment lawyer before investing.

How a $2M Canadian film gets $1.2M back from the government, in cash, before it sells a ticket

Alex Bogomolov — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:45:52 GMT

Canada’s film tax credit is not one number. It’s a stack of moving parts, which is why most people settle for a vague “25 to 40%” and leave it there. That range is real. It’s also what you get if your producer is lazy. Here’s what the credit actually is, and how a disciplined one runs it well past that.

First, it isn’t a discount on your budget. It’s refundable cash, paid by the government, calculated on qualifying labour, not on total cost. Refundable means you get it even if the company owes zero tax.

There are two systems, and you pick one per film. The Canadian-content path (CPTC federally, FIBC in British Columbia) is for Canadian-owned, Canadian-controlled productions. The production-services path (PSTC) is the one Hollywood uses to shoot in Vancouver. Each splits into a federal layer and a provincial layer, and the provincial layer sits on top of the federal one.

For a Canadian indie shot in BC, the relevant stack is CPTC plus FIBC.

The rates, current as of 2026:

Federal CPTC: 25% of qualifying labour, capped at 60% of net cost, so the real effective rate on total budget is around 15%. That’s the federal piece alone, and it’s why a conservative read lowballs the whole thing.
Provincial FIBC: 40% of qualifying BC labour. Then bonuses on top: regional +12.5%, distant location +6%, scriptwriting 35% on pre-production writing by BC-based writers, training 30% of trainee pay, and a DAVE bonus of 16% on visual-effects and post labour.

You cannot add those into one giant percentage though. They apply to different bases, and the provincial credit counts as “assistance” that grinds the federal one down. Model it net, never as a naive sum. But the direction is clear, and it runs well past the headline.

Watch it on a real shape. A $2M Canadian feature. Both credits cap the qualifying labour: FIBC tops out at 60% of the cost of production, so the base maxes at $1.2M no matter how much more you spent on crew. The federal credit has its own 60% cap.

FIBC at 40% on the $1.2M qualifying labour: $480,000.
Federal CPTC, after the provincial grind and the 60% cap: about $230,000.
Total: roughly $710,000 back. About 35% of the whole budget in refundable cash.

And that’s the floor. Basic credits only, no location bonuses, no DAVE, no scriptwriting credit. The producers who treat this as a craft, not a line item, go higher. A few moves do most of the work, and most productions leave them on the table.

Location. Shoot in a regional or distant area and you add 12.5% and 6% on labour, prorated by how many of your shoot days happen there. That’s a scheduling decision you make while you’re scouting, not a form you file later. Plan the calendar around the bonus.

Most filmmakers never reach for it because they assume distant means expensive. Often it’s the reverse. Vancouver Island, Sunshine Coast, Kelowna: cheaper permits, cheaper housing, less red tape. The remote shoot is the cheaper one more often than the budget in your head says.

VFX documentation. The DAVE bonus pays 16% on visual-effects and post labour, and most producers read that as the post house alone. It also reaches the on-set crew who shot a plate that later gets effects work. The bonus follows the paperwork, not the intention. You only get it if the shot was flagged as VFX-bound on the day. Nobody logging it on set means nobody claims it after wrap, and on a tight indie that’s real money walking out the door.

Vendor labour. A lot of what reads as “rental” has labour buried inside it. The location that comes with a site rep, the equipment house whose invoice includes its BC crew, the grip package that shows up with an operator. That labour portion is claimable, but only if it’s broken out on the invoice. So you do the unglamorous thing and ask every vendor to put the labour share in writing. It costs them nothing, most will, and the producers who can’t be bothered are the ones who later wonder why the credit came in light.

Crew kit. On an indie, half the crew arrives with their own gear, from the sound recordist’s kit to the DP’s lenses. You’re paying for that work either way, and inside a kit or box rental there’s a reasonable labour portion you can carry as labour rather than leaving the whole line sitting as equipment. The discipline is to keep it modest, a sensible slice, not a wholesale reclassification of the rental. A small, defensible amount survives an audit. Greed invites an adjustment.

Stack those and total-budget recovery clears 50%, past $1M on this $2M film. Labour-side recovery runs into the 70 to 80% range. Same film, same statute, a much bigger cheque.

None of this is a trick. It’s reading your own budget the way the statute reads it, and documenting what’s already there. Every one of these moves is inside the rules. The credit rewards the producer who does the paperwork, and quietly shrinks for the one who doesn’t.

There’s a price, and it’s not money. It’s paperwork. Labour codes set up on day one, residency proof collected at onboarding instead of chased after wrap, shot logs, vendor confirmations, the right corporate structure. The bonuses are real. The discipline is what you pay for them.

Why this matters if you’re the one writing the check, not making the film: this is the most de-risked dollar in the entire capital stack. It’s government money, it’s refundable, and banks will lend you up to 90% of it up front against an accountant’s opinion letter. A producer who understands it structures the raise around the gap above the credits, not the full budget. That single move changes how much equity is actually at risk.

The headline number is a ceiling for the lazy and a floor for the disciplined. Run it properly and it covers more than half.

Same statute. Different producer.

This is general information, not tax or legal advice. Rates and caps change; confirm current figures and your eligibility with a film tax-credit accountant.

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Start here: how this series works

Alex Bogomolov — Thu, 21 May 2026 03:53:44 GMT

Most writing about film investment is either a sales pitch or a horror story. This series is neither.

I produce independent films with international distribution. I have signed these deals and read the waterfalls. I have watched money come back, and watched it not come back. This is the business from the inside, written for the person deciding whether to write the check.

This page is the map. It fills in as the series publishes.

Linked titles are ready to read. Plain titles are on the way, one or two a week.

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Film as an Alternative Asset - how film compares to VC, crypto, and real estate. The whole thesis in one read. Everything below goes deeper.