Ted Hope published a list this week. 224 things wrong with what he calls TheFKATheFilmBiz. It’s worth reading because seeing it all in one place is clarifying in a way that’s hard to look away from.
I’ve been in this industry long enough to recognize every item on that list. And for a long time, like a lot of us, I told myself the problem was me, that I just hadn’t figured out how to make it work yet; that if I coordinated enough productions, built enough relationships, proved enough value, it would all work smoothly.
That’s the story the industry tells us. And it’s not true.
The industry isn’t broken. It was built for someone else. For shareholders. For global platforms optimizing audience acquisition over everything else. For a system where the people who actually make the work are the last to be paid and the first to be discarded. Hope’s list is 224 items long because that’s how many ways a system can fail the people inside it.
I stopped coordinating productions in Vancouver because I finally stopped pretending the ceiling wasn’t there. I could see clearly what the industry was. And I could see, just as clearly, what it could be.
Here’s what I think comes next.
The future isn’t in the service hubs of Vancouver, Toronto, Atlanta, etc. These cities built infrastructure for a model that serves the studios and the platforms. That model is contracting. The jobs are moving. Crew who built careers in those ecosystems are having the rug pulled out from under them.
The future is indie, but indie done right this time. Not the festival-dependent, one-film-at-a-time, hope-a-distributor-notices model that Hope documents so thoroughly in his list. That model never worked for most of us either. It just had better PR.
What I mean by done right: taking the operational discipline of our crew and applying it to work we actually own. Taking the audience directness that new distribution tools make possible and using it to build real relationships with real viewers, not chasing platform algorithms or festival gatekeepers. Taking the collaborative values that drew most of us to filmmaking in the first place and actually structuring our opportunities around them.
That means cooperative crews where everyone has a stake in the outcome. It means building year-round, sustainable work in regions where production costs are lower, and communities actually want you there. It means developing IP across multiple streams instead of betting everything on one film at a time. It means building the audience before you need them, not after.
Hope asks, across many of his 224 points, who is going to build the alternative? He calls for someone to launch the artist-focused trade publication, the skills marketplace, the apprenticeship infrastructure, and the side hustle training school. He names the problems with precision but mostly leaves the solutions to someone else.
I’m not waiting for someone else.
On Vancouver Island, I’m building a production company structured around cooperative values and regional advantage. A workshop hub designed to transfer institutional knowledge to the crew and creatives ready to evolve, sharing the kind of knowledge that currently lives in the heads of experienced practitioners. An owned IP strategy that doesn’t depend on a platform’s approval to reach an audience. A direct-to-viewer distribution model built for how people actually consume content now.
None of this is radical. Most of it is just applying common sense to a system that abandoned common sense when scale became the only metric that mattered.
The industry as it exists wasn’t made for us. The question is what we build instead.
I know what I’m building.
