Alan d’Escragnolle came to film distribution from Silicon Valley, having built at Google, Intuit, and Square before co-founding Filmhub with the composer Klaus Badelt, whose scores you know from Pirates of the Caribbean and Gladiator. Filmhub is a worldwide, all-rights distributor that meets films where they are, pushing one title out to AVOD and FAST channels, putting real marketing behind another, taking a third to theaters or to the major streamers. The episode’s title sounds like a tip. It is closer to a warning: the job description of “filmmaker” has quietly expanded, and the part that got added is the part most filmmakers refuse to do.
The Old Bargain Is Dead, and Not Because Distributors Got Lazy
Filmhub itself runs on a deliberately filmmaker-friendly model, an eighty-twenty non-exclusive split where the filmmaker keeps both the majority of the revenue and the rights, alongside more traditional exclusive deals when a film warrants an advance. It works with thousands of rights holders, and it pairs old-fashioned relationships with purpose-built technology. But the model is not the argument; the argument is about whose job the audience has become. The deal used to be simple: you make the film, a distributor finds the audience. That deal is gone, and the cause is arithmetic. By d’Escragnolle’s count, something like 400,000 titles are added to IMDb every year. Access, the thing the old gatekeepers rationed, is now essentially free, and on its own it is worthless. The scarce resource is attention, and attention is won by knowing exactly who a film is for.
The job of a distributor really is no longer, for the most part, to build the audience around your film.
He is blunt about his own limits when he says this. He watched your film for two hours; you lived inside it for three years. There is no way, he insists, that he can understand its audience better than you can. So the burden has moved, and it has moved onto the one person positioned to carry it.
“Knowing Your Audience” Reaches All the Way Back to Development
Because the responsibility shifts to the filmmaker, it stops being a release-week chore and becomes a decision you make before you shoot. D’Escragnolle’s favorite strategy is to chase the untapped: Filmhub put a heavy marketing push behind Balance, a docuseries on perimenopause, a subject that affects half the population yet has almost nothing made about it, and got the filmmakers onto the Today Show. If you are one of the only films in a space a lot of people care about, you will be known by a good slice of that group. The flip side is just as real. He also points to the voracious niche, using a film Filmhub helped distribute as his proof.
He admits he did not personally get Hundreds of Beavers, the cult black-and-white slapstick epic, and doubted there was a big audience for it. The filmmakers were right and he was wrong.
It was just an audience that wanted it so badly that they were willing to pay for it.
That is the whole lesson in one line. A film does not need everyone; it needs the people who need it.
Positioning Is the Product
Once you accept that attention is the bottleneck, the unglamorous craft of positioning becomes the work. For films living on advertising-based services, d’Escragnolle says the game is essentially search and optimization: the title, the metadata, and above all the artwork. He runs marketing tests on key art and watches one image pull a fifty percent higher click-through than another, then watches filmmakers decline to pay for the better one because they prefer their own, or because they already spent money on the first. He calls that shooting yourself in the foot. His own posture is simple, to let the data decide what wins rather than defend an ego choice, because the audience, not the filmmaker, judges what resonates. Positioning also means knowing where a film naturally lives; a UFO documentary, he notes, will likely earn most on a mix of Amazon and ad-supported YouTube, and the strategy follows the platform. A recognizable name helps too, not as vanity but as leverage: having Alyssa Milano and Jeannie Mai attached to Balance is part of what got it booked on a show whose bookers want a face their audience already knows.
Think Like a Musician, Not a Lottery Player
The deepest shift he is arguing for is temporal. A film, in his framing, is not a lottery ticket you hand to a distributor and hope; it is one entry in a long-term relationship you build directly with an audience. Building that audience never happens with a single film; it needs repetition, which is why he tells filmmakers to plan on releasing something every one to two years, the way the digital creators who now own their audiences do. He wants filmmakers to think the way musicians already do, treating a catalog as an annuity that keeps paying out. His example is An Honest Liar, the 2014 documentary about the magician James Randi, which still spins off real money as evergreen content years later. The filmmakers he works with who have twenty or thirty titles, he says, are happy as clams, because the catalog throws off a steady stream that funds the next project. Repetition also builds the thing a distributor actually trades on, trust: because his real relationship is with the buyer at each platform, he can only vouch for a filmmaker he knows, which is why a director who has released twenty films with him can get a new one pre-packaged and pre-sold to a streamer, and a stranger cannot. This is the same instinct behind films it doesn’t name: the grassroots audience-building of The Blair Witch Project and the demand-driven release of Paranormal Activity, both of which understood their viewers before they ever found a screen.
The Hard Part Is the Nostalgia
The reason none of this is easy, and the note d’Escragnolle ends on, is that the industry and the filmmaker ego both resist it. He describes a business that does not want to change, that clings to the prestige and the rituals of the old model even as the market punishes exactly that nostalgia. He has watched the through-line himself, from selling films reel by reel and territory by territory, through the DVD era, to a streaming world where one upload reaches everyone and foreign sales matter less and less, and now into what he calls the great devaluation, where a million views on an ad-supported service might pay ten or twenty cents apiece while a million theater tickets would have paid five dollars. It is why he sees newer filmmakers baking brand deals into production, product placement on steroids, the way Uber did not land in The Big Sick by accident. The sweet spot, he argues, is holding both things at once: honoring the romance of cinema, the video stores and the Apollo 13 VHS tapes, while accepting that the romance no longer distributes itself. Which is what the title meant all along. Distribution starts before distribution, in the decision to make something for someone in particular, and then to keep showing up for them. Asked for his favorite film, he offers Cinema Paradiso for the cinephiles, then admits the real answer is Happy Gilmore, which is its own small lesson in knowing exactly who you are talking to.
