The War Against Independent Filmmaking Part 2: What Rushes In When Culture Disappears

Part One was about what we are losing.

We saw that independent film was losing its middle. Local newspapers would cease to exist or never exist in the first place. Public broadcasting gets gutted by the government. Museums get pressured over which version of history they are allowed to tell.

So i’m sure we’re all thinking, “What happens next?” Because culture left an empty lot and there are lots of things that want to move. And increasingly, what moves in is whatever can arrive with the least uncertainty attached to it.

Things like football, franchises, true crime, celebrity scandal, existing intellectual property, you name it. That’s not to say these things are all horrible, some of them are fantastic (go Irish!).

But they are beginning to occupy cultural territory that used to contain much more friction, disagreement, regional weirdness, political danger, and outright failure.

If you run a giant media company right now, the NFL is nearly perfect. The audience knows where to find it. They are more than willing to sit in front of the television week in and week out without fail. You don’t need six weeks of trailers explaining why the Kansas City Chiefs are relevant (thanks Taylor Swift).

In 2025, NFL games accounted for 83 of the 100 most-watched television programs in America.¹ That number tells where mass attention still exists. When attention gets harder to find, then, of course, the industries whose entire job is to get our attention start moving towards more and more reliable sources of it.

That same impulse is happening in movies. Nine of the ten biggest domestic films of 2025 were connected to something audiences already knew: a franchise, existing character, earlier film, game, remake or other established intellectual property.² The exception was Sinners.

Thank God for Sinners. Because Sinners is proof that people have not suddenly developed an allergy to original ideas, and the box office numbers reflect that. The bigger problem sits farther upstream. Because between a project that already has recognition behind it and another project that is an original screenplay that has an argument for why people should care, I’ll let you guess which one is the safer option.

And unfortunately, this decision repeated over the years can fundamentally change a culture.

This is what I think we underestimate. A sequel, a superhero, a true-crime series, celebrity scandal, it all knows what it already is. The audience walks in halfway sold because it’s drunk from the same fountain for years and the water is just fine. But original work has to create that interest from scratch. Which is supposedly the entire fucking point of art.

You encounter something you did not already know you wanted. But we are building an entertainment economy increasingly uncomfortable with that transaction. UNCOMFORTABLE WITH ART. That’s not to say anything predictable isn’t art, not at all. But those in charge, as I’ve said before, are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with being uncomfortable (somehow more than they already were).

The work is being asked to prove its desirability before the audience has even encountered it. So we get more cultural products arriving with warranties. Recognizable face, titles, genres, subject matters. And the strange thing is you can still have enormous variety inside this system with thousands of shows, hundreds of movies, or a seemingly infinite number of videos…

And somehow still feel like you are being offered the same meal.

Documentaries make this especially obvious.

There are still filmmakers putting themselves in impossible situations to tell important stories. There are still terrific political documentaries being made. There is still great investigative work being done.

But look at what has become incredibly comfortable for streaming platforms: murder, cults, sexual abuse, serial killers, another murder. A 2026 study of the streaming documentary business described the growth of true crime, celebrity biography and “docutainment,” alongside concerns about editorial caution and increasingly standardized work.³

I understand why. True crime arrives with conflict already installed. There is a victim, and we feel bad for them, there’s a mystery in there somewhere, and there is usually an ending so the villain probably gets the punishment they deserve. This is not to undermine the situations the victims these documentaries cover at all; I’m simply just painting a picture of how these things get made, repeatedly.

Something to note, however, is that the villain is often safely containable. There are usually one or two people who are the bad guys.

It is considerably messier to make a documentary asking why private equity is destroying businesses. Or why a hospital system just abandoned a certain. Those stories are harder to end neatly and in the expected way, with the villain in handcuffs heading to the state penitentiary.

These things implicate systems, and systems are predictable, so investors see $$$. We wind up with an enormous quantity of supposedly “edgy” material that rarely threatens anybody capable of actually enacting change.

It really just boils down to: plenty of darkness and very little danger.

The feed. It’s kinda taken over our lives.

For most of modern cultural history, someone curated the public square. You had your newspaper editors or your theater programmers or your critics Those people could be kind, wrong, brilliant, full of shit.

But the point is that there was still a human argument taking place over what should enter public life. And trust me, i am the LAST person to harp on the rise of AI in today’s world. It’s extremely useful. But everything is dictated by the same question now.

What are you most likely to keep watching?

A culture designed around keeping you engaged can fail to show you what is truly important. Use TikTok as an example. Someone can have a random video go viral because it ticked enough of the algorithm’s unknown boxes. Then that person remains small and is left with a single viral video, never to make one again and with no knowledge of why the first one went viral. But from a viewer’s standpoint, that video makes complete sense. It aligns with your interests.

So it shows you what you are least likely to leave, and those are wildly different editorial philosophies. One can surprise you while the other becomes really, really good at giving you more of yourself. And suddenly we have millions of people consuming enormous amounts of media while encountering fewer things they did not already agree with, recognize, or select.

That is a very strange definition of a national culture.

Independent filmmakers can be annoying people. We love to wander into places we weren’t invited and we become obsessed with subjects nobody has proven work.

And that is GOOD. THAT is part of the job. This is what helps reshape the culture into something healthier. Somebody has to be irresponsible enough to follow the strange thing or make the film before there’s a franchise or point the camera at the large institution instead of the single murderer.

This is why I harp on the fact that we have to build an economy capable of keeping those people alive. The culture won’t pay us (for the 1,000th time, I know).

We cannot complain about predictable spectacle while building independent work that nobody can find and nobody pays for. The alternative has to function. The unpredictable has to function.

That means building audiences we can reach again and owning more of what we make. It means creating a distribution network that doesn’t go poof after one release and finding revenue around specific communities instead of fantasizing about reaching everybody under the sun.

Leaving each project with more infrastructure than we had when we started. Otherwise predictable spectacle wins for a very simple reason:

It has a business model.

The thing replacing American culture is not football, it’s not Netflix, it’s not true crime, it’s not sequels.No, it’s a system that increasingly rewards whatever arrives pre-sold and pre-recognized.

And if that becomes the dominant filter through which American stories reach the public, eventually we stop discovering ourselves and who we are as a nation. We start recognizing ourselves. Over and over and over again.

That is a much poorer culture.

So I want to end Part Two with one question:

A kind of movie, place, voice, TV show, doc, anything at all.

I’m curious where you find the holes to be.

¹ NFL games reportedly accounted for 83 of the 100 most-watched United States television programs in 2025. (Sportico)

² Nine of the ten highest-grossing domestic films of 2025 were connected to established franchises, characters, adaptations, games or previous films; Sinners was the sole fully original property among the top ten. (Box Office Mojo)

³ A 2026 academic study of the streaming documentary sector identified substantial growth in true crime, celebrity biography and “docutainment,” alongside industry concerns about aesthetic standardization and editorial caution. (Research Portal)

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.