In Development: Not Every Filmmaker Has to Be a Hydra

Welcome to In Development! Each week I explore how creative work really functions now, across independent film, creators, and the people building new models in real time.

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In this week’s edition:

• First look: Community Center, a new prototype under development with the agency that brought us Letterboxd.
• Testers wanted: The founders are seeking filmmakers to kick the tires.
• Why it matters: Filmmakers are increasingly expected to be marketers, strategists, and entrepreneurs on top of the work itself. And who wants that?

Over the holidays I got a lot of thoughtful feedback on “How Independent Film Will Be Rewired in 2026.” This note from a distribution executive stuck with me:

“I understand and see that filmmakers are being forced to embrace newer models of reaching audiences directly, doing their own marketing/social media, and even booking theatrical screenings on their own,” they wrote. “Or placing their features online to bypass gatekeepers. But not all filmmakers/artists were cut out to be direct-to-consumer types. They should be able to focus on their art form and make the best final product they can.” [Emphasis mine.]

To which I replied: Oh hellll yes — you are my people. Seriously, this is the conundrum I wrestle with all the time.

And it is. At Square Peg, I was surrounded by more than two dozen filmmakers — all brilliant, all hand-selected — and exactly none were excited by the prospect of building audience or crafting distribution strategy. As one put it, “Oh, you mean the stuff that marketing used to do?”

They want to make movies. Full stop. And who could blame them? They’re filmmakers.

Not Everyone Has to Be a Hydra

Even so, we’re well past the moment when sales, marketing, and distribution can be treated as something separate from the act of creation. That doesn’t mean every writer-director must become a hydra.

Rather than see every artist reinvent themselves to survive, I expect to see the rise of tools that intrinsically link the filmmaking process to audience development, marketing, and distribution. These tools will be essential for producers (hydra is their job description), but the scope of this work is big enough to become its own specialty.

Demonstrating that you begin with the end in mind will increasingly be part of the financing conversation and a negotiating tool in distribution deals, whether you’re talking to an old-school buyer, planning a theatrical roadshow, or working with a direct-to-consumer platform.

This isn’t a trend I’m speculating about in the abstract. It’s already starting.

Enter Community Center

My first conversation with Elizabeth Joyce gave me a great story, and it tells you a lot about who she is. A sociologist by training, she spent seven years running a bootstrapped startup when a friend pushed her to talk with a reality show producer who was casting entrepreneurs. Asked about her hobbies she replied, “Economic theory.” That ended the audition.

In April 2020, she wanted to return to an early love: screenwriting. However, as she began educating herself about the film industry, she saw a near-perfect use case for alternative business models.

“Artists are intrinsically motivated to make their art,” Joyce said. “So many of them are collaborative, open-minded, and willing to try new things.”

While writing, she spent a year working with cofounders Finnerty Steeves and Lauren Joseph to shape the idea that would become Community Center: a platform that would allow filmmakers to build audience as part of the production process, in a way that could also make projects more attractive to financiers and distributors.

“I don’t want brilliant filmmakers spending time thinking about conversion rates,” Joyce said. “But the question that drives funding is always, ‘Do we understand how to market this product and who the customer is?’ That’s not the right way to think about art. That’s why we need tools that handle that piece, so filmmakers can do the work they’re actually good at.”

A Bottom Rung for the Ecosystem

Joyce and her cofounders eventually pitched the idea to Cactuslab, the design and development agency behind Letterboxd. After several rounds of discussion, Cactuslab agreed to take it on.

(As Joyce recalled: “They said, ’We won’t do it unless we believe it can succeed.’“)

Letterboxd, she argues, sits at the top rung of the ecosystem — a place where films that already exist are discovered and discussed. Community Center is meant to occupy a bottom rung where projects are still forming and audience relationships can begin.

The Community Center design includes Letterboxd integration, creating a virtuous cycle in which people who like a filmmaker’s previous work can discover what they’re making next.

Full disclosure: Community Center has angel investors funding the prototype, which is now under construction. It’s a long way from market. But here’s a snapshot of how Joyce envisions it working.

Building Audience During Production, Not After

Community Center is built around filmmaker profiles and project pages designed to leverage goodwill marketing expense deductions by partnering with local businesses.

“Our film, for example, is set in Boston and includes Irish music sessions in pubs,” Joyce said. “By partnering with the pubs, we can say during script development: ’The filmmakers from Crybaby will be at the Druid tonight, casting for extras. Bring your fiddle and meet the filmmakers.’”

The point isn’t hype but participation. These events generate email lists, deepen relationships with local businesses, and create marketing content that doesn’t feel like marketing. “It’s an event they want to promote,” Joyce said. “It has a natural tie-in with the film. Everybody benefits.”

Community Center is an attempt to imagine how that first rung might allow relationships, audiences, and context to move with a project as it progresses through development, crowdfunding, distribution, and discovery.

It’s also structured as a public benefit corporation, with bylaws that prioritize social impact.

“We’re only going after mission-driven investors who understand that these things are tied together,” Joyce said. “The local bookstore and the local filmmaker are both battling Amazon. None of us can compete with Amazon on cash, but you can’t buy authenticity.”

Farm-to-Table Development

Community Center is actively recruiting filmmakers to test early versions and offer feedback. The goal isn’t to ship fast, but to build something that reflects how creators work, rather than how platforms assume they do. For now, the emphasis is on learning whether the framework genuinely helps filmmakers before focusing on scale, growth, or monetization.

Also unusual for a tech product: Community Center isn’t designed to lock in users. The stated goal is data portability, allowing creators to export audiences and relationships. There’s even an internal “algorithm manifesto” guiding development, grounded in the idea that algorithms should serve people rather than manipulate them.

That ethos is increasingly visible among early-stage creator tools that have emerged in reaction to extractive platforms. At Letterboxd, discovery is driven by user taste graphs rather than engagement maximization; Substackhas repeatedly stated that it limits algorithmic optimization in favor of direct creator–audience relationships.

(Joyce said they’re also open to other names for the product: “I know this isn’t a name without vowels.” Send alternates to [email protected].)

A Signal of What’s Coming

With fewer deals and shrinking minimum guarantees, the current moment can look like pure contraction. But the work continues. If anything, there’s more of it. What’s missing are systems that reflect the reality of how films are now being made.

For now, Community Center is best understood as a signal of where product development is heading in a post-studio, post-gatekeeper landscape.

Over the next few years, I expect we’ll see more tools like this: early-stage, participatory, and designed around continuity rather than scale. Some will fail. Some will evolve into something else entirely. But they point toward a new operating system for creative work that’s built around sustainability.

Whether or not Community Center ultimately becomes a foundational layer is almost beside the point. It’s part of a growing category of tools trying to solve the same problem: how creators maintain continuity in a system that keeps resetting them to zero.

As Joyce said: “People asked me, ‘You’re choosing to start a business in the film industry now?’ Absolutely. I spent 20 years in academia and nonprofits. I’ve written countless policy papers — and maybe four people read them. But art and culture? That’s what actually moves people.”

As always, tips and feedback: [email protected], (323) 435-7690

FUTURE OF FILMMAKING TOP 5

Weekly recommendations curated by IndieWire Managing Editor Christian Zilko

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