Streaming
Year: 2025
Distribution
The 2025 Film Markets Reality Check: Cannes, Sundance, TIFF, and AFM Under a Tighter Rulebook
The 2025 film markets delivered a consistent message across continents and calendars. Sundance tested demand. Cannes refined presales. TIFF amplified select winners. AFM clarified the new floor. Together, they confirmed that the industry is not rebounding to its old shape. It is stabilizing at a smaller, more disciplined scale. Fewer films will move. Fewer territories will matter. Fewer buyers will decide outcomes.
Distribution
Film Distribution in 2025: Consolidation, Content Austerity, and Shrinking Leverage
Hollywood spent 2025 pretending it was in a cyclical downturn. It is not. The business is reorganizing under a harsher premise: fewer buyers, fewer viable windows, and less tolerance for anything that doesn’t behave like a franchise asset. The result is an ineluctable narrowing of the market—one that punishes independents, rewards scale, and converts distribution into a political and financial instrument as much as a commercial one.
Distribution
The Fight to Control Warner: Ellison’s Power Project vs. Netflix’s Strategic Ambition
Hollywood is no longer shaped by audience demand but by competing political blocs and foreign capital. Netflix’s $82.7 billion bid for Warner Bros. triggered immediate scrutiny, with President Trump signaling he would “be involved” as regulators examine the streamer’s expanding market power. Within hours, Paramount, backed by Larry Ellison, RedBird, Gulf sovereign funds, and Jared Kushner, countered with a hostile $77.9 billion all-cash bid.
Distribution
Hollywood for Sale (Again): Political Favor, Regulatory Blindness, and the High-Cost Collapse of Legacy Media
Warner Bros. Discovery is barreling toward its fourth ownership change in seven years, a span marked by extraordinary value destruction, unchecked executive churn, and an industry unwilling—or unable—to confront the structural failures hollowing out the U.S. media sector. Instead of stabilizing long-term businesses, these megadeals have become vehicles for a handful of executives, financiers, and political allies to trade century-old cultural institutions like poker chips.
Distribution Intelligence
Distribution
AFM 2025 Review: Markets Reinvigorated, Deals Reshaped, and Distribution Reset
As the American Film Market wrapped at the Fairmont Century Plaza, the prevailing sentiment was unmistakable: relief. After four locations in four years—Santa Monica, virtual, Las Vegas—the independent business finally had a market that functioned, flowed, and felt worthy of the work being done inside it.
Distribution
AFM 2025: The 50 Hottest Film Packages, What Buyers Want, and How Deals Are Getting Done
This year’s AFM slate is unusually dense, featuring high-profile packages, prestige breakouts, and ambitious commercial plays across genres, drama, and franchise-adjacent concepts. To help readers track the projects driving the most conversation—across sellers, buyers, agencies, and financiers—we’ve compiled a curated list of the 50 packages dominating meetings and hallway chatter.
Distribution
AFM 2025: The Truth About Minimum Guarantees, Shrinking Territories, and Surviving the Reset
The global independent film market has entered a period of hard correction. The number of buyers has contracted, advances are smaller, and even strong festival premieres are taking longer to close. What was once an expansive network of territorial sales has narrowed into a handful of dependable regions and a few genres that still command premiums.
Distribution
Paramount’s Identity Crisis: Massive Layoffs, Creative Exodus, and Strategic Uncertainty
What was sold as a revitalization appears to many, both inside and outside the company, as a high-risk restructuring that may strip Paramount of the very assets that once justified the deal. The comparison made by several veterans suggests that this has the makings of another Bronfman-era playbook: big promises, bigger checks, and a costly pursuit of scale that can leave the core business weaker.
Distribution
From Blockbusters to Bust: Why the Film Industry Isn’t Bouncing Back
When the cinema lights go down and the credits roll, it becomes clear that the major studio theatrical business is no longer a reliable growth engine. Yes, the occasional billion-dollar franchise still lands. But beneath the surface lies a shrinking marketplace, fewer wide releases, and an exodus of mid-budget films with nowhere to land.
Streaming
Streaming Growth Slows: How SVOD Platforms Are Shifting Strategies in 2025
Global streaming is shifting from rapid subscriber growth to a focus on retention, monetization, and diversified content delivery. With mature markets slowing and engagement slipping, SVOD platforms are expanding into lower-ARPU regions, testing ad-supported tiers, and forging partnerships like Netflix’s landmark TF1 deal, which blends traditional TV, live sports, and on-demand programming.
Distribution
Paramount’s Bold Bid for Warner: What a $60 Billion Merger Means for Hollywood
Skydance, backed by the Ellison family, has just acquired Paramount, and is now eyeing Warner Bros. Discovery for its next takeover. If consummated, the merger would unite some of the most valuable entertainment assets under one roof—streaming platforms, TV networks, movie studios, and sports rights. The combined company would immediately rival Disney and Netflix in scale.
Distribution
Power Grabbers: Is Paramount About to Swallow Warner – and Media Integrity With It?
A looming takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery by the newly merged Paramount–Skydance is no longer a speculative fantasy — it’s a media and political power play with massive implications for creative independence, threatening to centralize control of news with little public accountability.
If Ellison-backed forces succeed, they won’t simply absorb streaming assets and film libraries; they’ll consolidate cultural influence, tighten control over narrative pipelines, and reshape what media pluralism even means.
Distribution
Film Distribution Reset: Genre Wins, Big Acquisitions, Sparse Deals, and New Frontiers
Let’s be blunt: TIFF 50’s low deal count and headline grabs tell the same story: the old model of acquisition excess no longer exists. But that doesn’t mean distribution is dead; it means it’s being refined. The more brutal, quieter truth is this: many films failed to get deals, not because they weren’t good, but because the margins, windows, and risk calculus no longer justify speculative purchasing.
Distribution
TIFF 2025 at Halfway Mark: Slow Negotiations, Genre Plays, New Distributors, and Market Jitters
Well into its second week, TIFF 2025 is shaping up less as a buying frenzy and more as a barometer for where the independent business is heading. Deal volume remains lean, but the festival has already produced a $15 million bidding war for a Midnight Madness horror and a seven-figure North American deal for Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire.”
Distribution
TIFF 50 Sees First Big Buy: Obsession Fetches $15M as Horror Fuels Market Momentum
As TIFF celebrates its 50th anniversary, the festival spotlights what might be its most resilient genre amid a fractured marketplace: horror. With shrinking screen counts, compressed Pay-1/Pay-2 deals, and younger ticket buyers pulling away from theaters en masse, horror remains a rare safe-haven—cheap to produce, reliably engaging, and buoyed by fervent word-of-mouth among young theater-goers.
Distribution
TIFF Turns 50 as Buyers Weigh Rising Costs Against Shrinking Streaming Fees
Toronto’s 50th anniversary edition arrives with independent distributors weighing risk against opportunity. Theatrical remains a tightrope, Pay-1 and Pay-2 license fees are under pressure, and negotiations are slower across the calendar. Yet a sturdier acquisitions slate, a pair of well-capitalized newcomers, and a crop of commercially minded titles suggest TIFF could regain some of its old deal energy.
Streaming
Global Streaming in 2025: SVOD Growth Slows as Hybrid TV Models Rise
Global streaming is shifting from rapid subscriber growth to a focus on retention, monetization, and diversified content delivery. With mature markets slowing and engagement slipping, SVOD platforms are expanding into lower-ARPU regions, testing ad-supported tiers, and forging partnerships like Netflix’s landmark TF1 deal, which blends traditional TV, live sports, and on-demand programming.