Tropes are made to be tuned out. And between the creator economy, the attention economy, and all the other economies, there’s a whole vocabulary that risks becoming white noise.
Audience-first. Multi-platform. IP ecosystems. The idea that a film isn’t a standalone product so much as one expression of something larger.
For filmmakers, it’s easy to file it all under “other” — creator-economy thinking, YouTubers, digital-native brands, or crowdfunding campaigns.
That would be a mistake.
Now that movies no longer require big studios and powerful middlemen, money is shifting, too. It’s going to whoever owns an idea with an audience, along with multiple ways to make money from it.
For evidence of that shift, look no further than the co-financier of “Marty Supreme.” European investment firm IPR.VC recently published a white paper that argues entertainment financing is moving away from backing discrete assets — a film, a series — and toward continuous IP systems that build audience, engagement, and monetization across multiple formats.
The language can make it easy to dismiss: Hey, have you seen that new continuous IP system? I heard it’s awesome.
But beneath it is a much simpler idea: While a filmmaker may see themselves as someone who makes a great film, they’re being evaluated on whether that represents a repeatable business.
Prestige Films, Ecosystem Thinking
IPR.VC may not be widely known, but you know its money. It has a long-term partnership with A24 and it just closed a multi-year co-financing deal with MUBI.
Its deals fund films that sit squarely inside the traditional ecosystem — the furthest thing from multi-platform IP factories or content engines. “Marty Supreme” isn’t a franchise (although it looked that way for a moment). The MUBI slate includes Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland,” which will compete for the Palme d’Or at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.
So if the model is shifting toward ecosystems (continuous audience engagement, diversified revenue, IP that compounds over time), why invest in them?
The answer is the films haven’t changed as much as the context around them. The production is still a film, but the value — the key element that inspires investment — is elsewhere.
White paper author Victoria Fäh, manager of IPR LAB at IPR.VC, responded to my questions via email. She said that the company’s focus “is less on an individual project and more on whether the company behind it can create and grow value over time.”
So while the movies matter, funding favors companies “building portfolios, audience relationships, and repeatable ways of creating IP that stays culturally relevant.” That means a distinct brand system “often built for depth, resonance, and longevity with a specific audience.”
When the Film Is the Layer, Not the Point
For MUBI, that brand system may be its subscriber base, taste identity, or global audience relationships. If so, Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” matters to IPR.VC primarily as a contribution to a compounding audience system.
For A24, established as the tastemaker brand of indie film, the value could be brand equity, audience trust, and cultural positioning. In that case, “Marty Supreme” generated value as an awards contender and a box-office success, but its greater value lies in building the A24 brand and all it represents.
For filmmakers who view their individual work as the center of gravity, this can sit somewhere between confusing and insulting. And they have a point: It’s the thing being written, financed, cast, and made. What else could matter?
It’s worth sitting with that dissonance. Filmmakers think in terms of financing and distribution; investors focus on creating audience value, how it compounds, and where it can be extended.
Those aren’t opposing views. But they’re not the same business.
Audience First, Film Second
In the traditional model, a film is financed and produced before distribution and audience determine whether it works.
That sequence is starting to invert. Audience and attention can be built earlier across platforms and formats. Monetization becomes layered and continuous rather than tied to a single release window.
“Audience is frequently framed as a marketing question, when in reality it is a strategic one,” Fäh wrote.
“From an investor perspective, audience is not just about reach at release, but about the potential for sustained engagement over time.”
It’s the same logic that drives untested models like Jonah Feingold’s Romantical, which positions rom-coms as an ecosystem. It’s also what informed the blockbuster success of “Drive To Survive,” which saw F1’s investment create eight seasons of TV and counting, along with a massive rights deal with Apple.
That doesn’t mean every film has to become a franchise, or that every filmmaker must become a digital-native brand. However, it does mean that the film is no longer the only thing being evaluated.
“Traditional venture investors look at a company’s product-market-fit,” wrote Fäh. “We focus on content-audience-fit. Not just finding an audience once, but creating a brand and content that resonates with a specific audience, and that can hold that audience’s attention over time.”
When the investment firm that backs films through companies like A24 and MUBI talks about IP in these terms, this isn’t edge behavior. It’s underwriting logic.
In addition to financing prestige film slates, IPR.VC recently announced plans to invest in what they call “very short-form content.” It also expects that in the near future, 25% of media and entertainment will come from platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
Totally different products, but the same investment strategy. Short-form drives discovery and audience engagement. More-expensive formats (like films) become the premium layer in a system designed to generate and capture attention elsewhere.
What This Means If You’re Making Something
None of this means filmmakers must think like venture-backed creators or build out multi-platform strategies before they’ve even made a film. But for their own sanity, it makes sense to realize that the contexts are changing.
You can enter a conversation thinking you’re discussing a project’s specifics only to be evaluated on how that project might live beyond itself, how it connects to an audience, and whether that relationship can be extended.
Financiers still back films, but they also look through them for the system that surrounds it — the audience a platform can aggregate, the brand a company can compound, the portfolio an investor can build over time. It can be yours, or it can be someone else’s, but it needs to be there.
Film used to be the business. Now it sits inside one.
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