Indie films are vanishing from cinemas – and that should worry us all

Grown-up dramas and eccentric comedies made far from Hollywood are an endangered species. But without them, the future of film looks bleak

What do Civil War, Sound of Freedom, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Longlegs and Hereditary have in common? All were independently produced – indeed, three of them by the same company, A24. And all had big muscle at the box office.
Now, another game. What do Before Sunrise, Grosse Pointe Blank, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite have in common? Again, all independent. All big hits in the 1990s and 2000s. These days, none would be likely to score a theatrical release, or even get made. They’d certainly have an uphill struggle turning a profit.
What’s the difference? If you were to describe the latter set of films as “indies”, it would reflect the classic definition of that term as a kind of genre, not just a descriptor of how they were produced. This is what distinguishes the newfangled group A most of all from the vintage group B. Those old-school indies could be termed “indie-indies”. 
“Indie-indies” used to be walk-and-talk endeavours – something like Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking (1996) is a near-parody of the form. They could be dramas about deadbeats (Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge, say) or eccentric romcoms, like a couple of the above. They certainly didn’t used to be dystopian warzone thrillers costing $50 million, or occult chillers buoyed by the best marketing departments in the industry.
The old, specific type of indie-indie is not just out of fashion, but tragically endangered right now. This is why this January’s Sundance film festival – the event where so many films of that ilk have been hatched, nurtured and premiered over the years – held crisis talks about how to resurrect the entire indie business model. Hit by the double strikes of 2023, the festival only accepted 83 films this year, down from over 100 the year before.
Streaming, I hear you insist, must be the natural home for indies this side of the pandemic. Well, yes and no. There was nothing like the hue and cry in Sundance that scored a bidding war over CODA in 2021, with Apple paying a festival-record $25 million for the rights, and shepherding it (somehow) to the Best Picture Oscar. (Despite being legitimately an indie-indie, it is also not good.) The closest equivalent in the marketplace this year was Netflix spending $17 million for the world rights to the buzzy horror-comedy It’s What’s Inside. But that’s horror, a freakishly successful genre at the moment for which different rules apply.
All the noise coming from Sundance this year was that even the streamers were turning their backs on indie-indies. The top prize winner, In the Summers, couldn’t find a US distributor until June, when the niche Music Box Films bought it, with plans for a tiddly release.
It’s ever harder to persuade adults off their sofas to go to the cinema, unless they’ve committed to a special-occasion outing to one of the year’s biggest films. As a result, very few indie-indies have made more than a tiny commercial splash lately. Kelly Reichardt’s art-world dramedy Showing Up (2022) made $1.2 million worldwide, bettered slightly by last year’s Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize winner A Thousand and One (2023), which took $3.5 million. Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener managed just $1.4 million (compared to $6.3 million for his Affliction back in 1997). 
The promotional drive behind Babes, just out in the UK, is understandably pushing it as the new Bridesmaids. But the latter, which had Universal’s backing and a much bigger budget, made $306 million worldwide in 2011; Babes finished its domestic run with $3.8m. Meanwhile, Holofcener and Julia Louis-Dreyfus fell a long way short of repeating the modest success of Enough Said (2013, $25.6 million) when they reteamed for last year’s You Hurt My Feelings ($5.7 million).
This is not a Sundance-only (or US-only) problem. Locally, last year was a poor one for UK films qualifying as independent. Despite a couple of successes – All of Us Strangers and The Great Escaper, notably – box office revenues for British and Irish independent films were down a whopping 49 per cent in 2023. And yet total revenues were up 4 per cent. 
This general trend may have been encouraging for the studios pushing Barbie, Oppenheimer, and this year’s Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine to become juggernauts. For the smaller players, though, and independent filmmakers, not so much.
For British films struggling to get made under the £15 million mark, the situation had become so precarious that petitioning for new government support finally came to a head. In the spring budget, the Independent Film Tax Credit was introduced, which allows 40 per cent relief for productions up to that budget level. We have yet to see the fruits of this intervention, but several upcoming British films have benefitted from it, including the Prince Naseem boxing biopic Giant and Craig Roberts’s killer-squirrel horror-comedy The Scurry.
The fight is on to get funding back in place, but also to combat the dispiriting idea that theatrical releases can only be reserved now for blockbusters and horror hits. Even Richard Linklater, king of the indie-indie, expressed frustration about his comedy-thriller Hit Man going straight to Netflix. With its sexy premise and great reviews, it ought to have been a popcorn flick for adult viewers in the multiplexes, much like Grosse Pointe Blank, which took $31m in 1997. 
These days, as Linklater said to the BBC, “the industry didn’t want to make the film”. He encountered resistance every step of the way for making what he calls a “sexy couple movie”, from nervous executives who weren’t sure they could sell it. “You don’t get fired for doing a sequel or an origin story, something that already exists,” he further rued.
Without Hit Man, which nearly didn’t get made, the star power of Glen Powell wouldn’t have got the bump it needed. This is what’s short-sighted about treating indie films like some pesky encrustation to be scraped off one’s shoe and forgotten about. They’re too important, not just in themselves, but as launchpads for careers that will keep the whole industry afloat.
Look at Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig, heroes of the film world last year, for Oppenheimer and Barbie respectively. Nolan made Following (1998) for $6,000, then Memento (2000) for $9 million, and without those films, he’d never have got noticed. Gerwig worked her way up through the American mumblecore scene earning a pittance, before proving her mettle with Frances Ha (2012) and Lady Bird (2017). Had all of these projects been siphoned off hypothetically to streaming, would these two wildly successful filmmakers have gained the prestige they now have?
Such trajectories also give us stars, who never arrive from nowhere to headline a $100 million picture overnight. They start small. Hugh Grant would not be Hugh Grant without Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), an unrepeatable sleeper hit which earned an astonishing $246 million worldwide, from a budget of £3 million. The same year, Kate Winslet needed Heavenly Creatures, or she’d never have been cast in Sense & Sensibility, and then Titanic.
Indies are a proving ground and much more: the communal experience of seeing them with a packed audience can be every bit as fulfilling as Oppenheimer at the Imax. Anyone who rented Reservoir Dogs probably remembers it quite well – but if you paid to see it in the cinema, you remember it better. 
It seems unavoidable that the streamers will claim a chunk of the goods these days. They’re more than welcome to CODA. They can also step in to get a Hit Man made when none of the studios are interested.
It’s true, some of the aforementioned titles that failed in cinemas found an audience eventually on Prime (say), where some would argue they should now contentedly belong. But we can’t exclusively rely on A24, a major studio in all but name, to get traction outside our living rooms for all things weird and wonderful. Their brand of boutique cult appeal restricts our diet too much. 
Indies can be comfort food, too. If Laura Linney wanted to reunite with Kenneth Lonergan, after the wonderful You Can Count On Me (2000), and make, I don’t know, a comedy-drama about a widowed fisherwoman who sets up a sushi business, they should still have the opportunity to do it. 
And I’d like the opportunity to see it, without having to pay for an Apple subscription. Surely that can’t be too much to ask?