The War Against Independent Filmmaking Part 1: America Is Losing the Institutions That Tell It Who It Is

This is Part One of a two-part series about something I think is much larger than the film business. Part One is about what we are actually losing. Part Two will look at what is replacing it. Because the real cost of the war against independent filmmaking is not that fewer filmmakers get to make movies because of things like consolidation.

No, the cost is that America loses one of the biggest places where people are allowed to tell the country things it may not particularly want to hear.

Independent film has always been full of people willing to poke around where they probably weren’t invited. Churches. War. Poverty. Race. Take away enough of that work, and you damage more than just an industry; you damage a country’s ability to see itself.

And that is where this becomes much bigger than just cinema.

There is something particular about independent filmmakers. At the level of our temperament, we tend to be at least semi-rebellious. We are the people who make something before the market has agreed it should exist (or even when it agrees it shouldn’t exist).

We work outside institutions because sometimes, and especially now, the institution has already said no. We make uncomfortable things. Political things. Weird things. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we sometimes follow an idea before somebody has proven there is an audience for it.

That rebelliousness is the very value of independent filmmaking. A healthy culture needs defiant people like that because institutions, by nature, eventually become protective of themselves and try to shield themselves from anything controversial.

Think about a film like Spotlight. Its cultural value was not simply that it was good. It took an enormous and complicated institutional failure and made it understandable to millions of people. Participant Media helped build an entire company around that kind of work. Before shutting down in 2024, Participant had been involved with 135 films, including 50 documentaries, and its films generated more than $3.3 billion worldwide.¹

It proved a point that is becoming, for whatever reason, more and more radical as the years go on:

Serious culture can also sell.

But the people making that work are economically impossible to sustain.

“You don’t actually have to outlaw independent filmmaking. You just have to make it irrational,” said EveryStudioEver executive John Doe.

Over time, the system has been rebuilt around reducing uncertainty. Consolidation gives fewer companies more power over what gets financed and distributed. The Writers Guild of America West has warned that the increasing concentration of media ownership threatens competition, creative diversity, and the bargaining power of creators.²

Finance works the same way.

Banks do not lend money because an idea is culturally necessary. They lend against things they can value: intellectual-property rights, contracts, other collateral, etc. Lionsgate, for example, reported more than $1.25 billion in production loans secured by underlying film and television rights at the end of 2025.³

Makes sense. That is perfectly rational banking. But by doing this, you slowly filter out the uncomfortable, the unpredictable. Then look at what rises to the top. In 2024, NINE OF THE TEN highest-grossing movies in North America were sequels. The lone exception, Wicked, was hardly an unknown idea.⁴

That’s not to say sequels are bad in any way, although the original always seems to be better. It means the financial institutions in this country have gotten exceptionally good at providing money to things they know generate proven value, time and time again. Originality has increasingly been asked to arrive pre-approved.

That is how you marginalize independent filmmakers; you remove the middle. You reduce the buyers. You reward familiar intellectual property. And eventually you hand the filmmaker the bill for all the institutions that were lost in the process.

This is the really worrying part. The same thing is happening to the other institutions Americans have traditionally used to understand themselves.

In 2025, 213 American counties had no local news source at all. Another 1,524 had only one. Roughly 50 million Americans were living with limited or no access to local news.⁵ Of course, these towns did not stop having stories. But they lost people to tell them, which is scarier.

Then public broadcasting lost more than $1 billion in previously appropriated federal funding. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which had helped support more than 1,500 locally operated radio and television stations, began winding down and formally voted to dissolve after 58 years.⁶ 58 YEARS. Are we starting to see the problem?

And now the pressure is moving beyond just economics.

In 2025, the White House ordered officials to work to eliminate what it called “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and sought to condition future appropriations around that policy. A second executive order followed in 2026, again seeking changes to how the Smithsonian presents American history.⁷ That is where the larger pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

We are silencing voices that demand to be heard, while simultaneously distorting and twisting the ones that people have relied on for centuries.

And the result will keep moving in the same direction:

Fewer independent places where America can freely describe itself.

I want to be precise here because this is a big claim. Obviously, not every studio merger is a human-rights violation. But culture is not legally or morally trivial.

Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document written by the United Nations which acts as the foundational international human-rights statement, recognizes everyone’s right to participate freely in the cultural life of their community and enjoy the arts.⁸

And under the First Amendment, government regulation that discriminates against speech because of its viewpoint is presumptively unconstitutional in most contexts.⁹

So when political power begins deciding which versions of history are acceptable, which ideas deserve institutional support, or which cultural expression is sufficiently “American,” we are no longer talking only about the entertainment industry and its policies.

We are entering the territory of human rights as a whole.

America is running out of anything but content. We have football, true crime, celebrity scandals, podcasts, YouTube, TikTok and an endless supply of things to look at until we fall asleep holding our phones.

Some of it is truly brilliant.

But spectacle cannot perform every cultural job. It cannot replace investigative journalism, or create difficult political filmmaking, or preserve every small town’s memory. And it cannot be the only mirror a country has left.

That is the cost of marginalizing independent filmmakers.

We lose more than filmmakers. Once you understand that, the fight over independent filmmaking starts looking very different. You start to realize that it’s really a fight over who gets to describe America. And I think we all know how it’s been over the past year and a half when the wrong people get this job.

And so, I leave you with a question:

“What film, newspaper, book, theater, museum, or public institution first showed you a version of this country that you had never seen before?”

Part Two is about what rushes in when those institutions disappear, and why predictable spectacle is such an attractive replacement.

1. Associated Press reporting on Participant Media’s 2024 closure and its 20-year film catalogue. (AP News)

2. Writers Guild of America West, The New Gatekeepers, 2023. The report represents the union’s analysis of media consolidation. (Writers Guild of America West)

3. Lionsgate Securities and Exchange Commission filing for the period ending December 31, 2025. (SEC)

4. The Numbers’ 2024 North American theatrical-market analysis found nine of the top ten films were sequels. (The Numbers)

5. Medill State of Local News Project, 2025. (Medill)

6. Corporation for Public Broadcasting statements concerning federal rescissions and its subsequent dissolution, covered by NPR. (NPR)

7. White House orders concerning the Smithsonian, March 2025 and July 2026. (The White House)

8. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 27. (United Nations)

9. Congressional Research Service’s Constitution Annotated discussion of First Amendment viewpoint discrimination. (Constitution.gov)

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, showrunner, journalist, and development executive. Pitchcraft publishes dispatches from the intersection of storytelling, and the business of making things. Consider being a paid subscriber now and get updates in your inbox every week.