The Film-Buying Market Has Changed... But Make Your Movie Anyway

If you're into movie-making (which we guess you are, because you're here right now), you know that the way independent films get financed has shifted hard in the last few years.

So if you're putting a movie together, it pays to understand the new terrain. Writer/director Jason Eric Perlman spent that stretch making his sci-fi thriller Site the scrappy, indie way, and he recently sat down with Film Courage to walk through what's changed and how he adjusted.

Perlman is a WGA screenwriter and USC grad whose debut feature, Threshold, went out through Sony in 2017. Site, starring Jake McLaughlin and Theo Rossi, was released in theaters and VOD in August 2025. So when he talks about the buying market, he's speaking from inside it as someone who ran the gauntlet himself.

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The Foreign Presale Playbook Is Drying Up

For decades, a big chunk of a movie's budget could come together before you'd even really done anything. A recognizable actor attached to a marketable genre was often enough to lock in foreign buyers who'd pay upfront for the right to distribute in their territory.

"Hollywood movies used to kind of get their finance up and going by way of foreign presales," Perlman said.

Foreign presales are licensing agreements where filmmakers sell distribution rights for a movie in international territories before the film is produced. That well has gone a little bit dry. He points to a simple reason, and it's that audiences abroad increasingly want homegrown stories, not exports.

"Other countries and regional cinemas are making their own content now that is more relevant to their people, more relevant to their national and cultural and political interests at a given time," he said.

This tracks with what dealmakers reported out of recent markets, where presales have slowed across the board, and more projects are financed fully upfront, according to FilmTake. If you've been counting on international presales to float your budget (a route we've broken down before), Perlman's advice is to treat that money as far less certain than it used to be.

Why Co-Productions Are a New Deal

So where does the money come from now? Perlman said he and many colleagues have started thinking internationally in a different way. They're not selling to foreign territories after the fact, but partnering with them from the start.

"There are opportunities to work with countries that have great shooting resources, great crews, great tax incentives," he said.

He points to the usual suspects like Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Hungary, with Australia and New Zealand in the conversation too. These are places where crews run deep, facilities are strong, and rebates can cover a serious slice of the budget.

Co-productions aren't identical to chasing a tax rebate, though the two are often linked. We've mapped out the countries with the best incentives if you want the specifics. The larger shift, in his words, is learning to "mosaic finance into place," piecing a budget together from several sources instead of one big check.

Domestically, the math is moving too. California just expanded its film and TV tax credit to $750 million a year, per Variety, a bid to pull production back home after years of losing it to cheaper states and countries.

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The Case for Shooting Far from Home

Perlman shot Site entirely in North Carolina. Nothing in California, which is increasingly common these days. Part of that was cost, and part was a necessary look. He wanted rural woods and a small-town feel. But the surprise benefit was creative. Being yanked out of his routine, away from his own bed and his own kitchen and his own distractions, kept him locked inside the film.

"I found shooting out of state and in a region I was not particularly familiar with was actually kind of creatively good juice," he said.

Film Courage framed it as constraints feeding creativity, and Perlman agreed. Displacement removed the comfortable off-ramps that normally pull a director back into ordinary life.

We've heard about embracing creative limitation before, and it's a theme that comes up again and again from directors who've made something out of very little in the indie space. Perlman's version is geographic, but the principle is sound whether you're talking budget, schedule, location, or all of it at once.

No Budget? Shoot Where You Already Are

Not everyone can afford to move a production across the country, and you don't have to. The same immersion Perlman got from displacement, he's also gotten from the opposite direction.

"I actually shot the bulk of a movie I was making in a house that I was renting and living in," he said.

He describes creeping to the fridge in the middle of the night, sneaking around the set to grab a snack. It was a lot, he admits, but it made the movie impossible to escape.

That's the ultra-low-budget approach. If you have one location you already control, let the walls close in. Directors have pulled off entire features shot almost entirely inside a house or two, and that kind of limitation tends to show up on screen as focus.

"There's interesting ways to do it each time around," Perlman said. "I think you take each one on its own rules."

Learn from the Indie Path

There's an obvious difference between taking the indie road and a studio deal. With a studio, you have departments, lawyers, and money to solve problems when a location falls through, or a scene goes sideways.

"When you're in the indie path, you have to fight all of your battles yourself or with a very select team," he said.

That pressure, he said, builds a specific muscle. You learn to make fast calls and trust them. He's rewritten scenes on set when a child actor's hours ran out, or a location vanished.

"I've been through so many instances where I had to rewrite scenes on the fly," he said. The route, in his words, "forces you to become a tactician decision maker and very, very cool and collected under pressure."

Going indie doesn't mean going it alone, either. Perlman credits Blue Fox Entertainment with backing Site early, for example. If you're building an indie genre film on limited means, other directors have detailed the same balancing act for us.

Perlman isn't romanticizing scarcity, because of course most of us would take a studio's resources tomorrow for the right project. But at the same time, being intentional in your decisions can be a wise move, too.

"If you have a buffet laid out in front of you, you're not as specific about what you want to eat," he said.