What Is Independent Film?

The definition of "independent film" is both straightforward and woefully inadequate. When speaking of the American film industry, an independent (or "indie") film is one that is produced by a company that is not a "major studio." The term "major studio" is not a generic term; rather it refers to the current configuration of big Hollywood studios, which has been different depending on the historical era.

For example, in the Hollywood "Golden Age," the so-called "Big Five" studios were Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, MGM, and 20th Century Fox. (These entities, like those of today, had also absorbed previous studios. For example, MGM was created by the merging of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Mayer Pictures.)

At that time, in addition to the Big Five, there was also the Little Three: Universal, United Artists and Columbia.

Disney, at that time, was an independent production company!

Of the former eight Big/Little studios, RKO is long gone (its library largely held by Warner), and MGM and United Artists are owned by Amazon, Columbia is owned by Sony and 20th Century Fox is owned by Disney. Universal, while still operating as a stand-alone studio, is owned by Comcast.

Today, the Big Five are Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney and Sony.

So, going by the classic definition, an indie film is one that was not produced by any of those five studios (or by whichever entities were considered the Big Five, Big Eight or Big Six of a particular time).

The original Star Wars (1977), by this definition, is one of the most successful independent films of all time. After all, while it was famously distributed by 20th Century Fox, it was produced by an independent company called Lucasfilm. But this is a good example of the complexities of categorizing films in this way. For many, a film that was independently produced, but distributed by one of the Big Five, cannot be fairly considered an independent film.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Daniels' Oscar-winning mind-bender, is an example of what's called an indie film. It was produced by four independent production companies and distributed by A24, a beloved producer/distributor of many well-known indie films, and became that company's first $100M+ hit.

Everything Everywhere had a budget reported to be in the range of $15M to $25M. Now, film budgets are notoriously difficult to suss out, since the reported figures are nearly always wrong. It's safe to assume that the budget was minimally $25M, and whethet or not that figure includes marketing is anybody's guess. Further, one of the production companies, AGBO, is the shingle of Joe and Anthony Russo who are also co-directors of films like Avengers: Endgame and of three other Marvel movies (to date) and directors and producers of broadcast television hits.

Is it reasonable to call anything the Russo Brothers produce "independent?" Maybe, maybe not.

Films, of course, are produced at a wide-variety of budgets. These budgetary levels are a bit confusing, because different groups have named and defined them in many different ways. For example, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), a union that has formal agreements allowing members to work on feature films of various budgets, breaks them down like this:

Theatrical - a film with a budget over $2M

Low Budget Theatrical - a budget under $2M

Moderate Low Budget - under $700K

Ultra Low Budget - under $300K

Micro-Budget - under $20K

And, for IATSE, the union for the majority of film artists and craftspeople, there is the tier system:

Tier 1 - under 6M

Tier 2 - 6M to 10M

Tier 3 - 10M to 14.2M (14.2? Why?)

There is also an unofficial Tier 0, which is just a colloquialism meaning really low budget (under 6M).

You will notice that none of these budget levels apply to Everything Everywhere. It is not a low-budget film, in terms of being able pay union members less than their standard rate. However, Avengers: Endgame had a reported budget of $400M. Compared to that film, Everything Everywhere is definitely "low-budget" and definitely "indie."

But, then, what do you call it when compared to a film like Sean Baker's Tangerine (2015), which was shot on iPhones with a budget of $100K? Or the 2007 mumblecore film Hannah Takes the Stairs, directed by Joe Swanberg, with a $60K budget? Or the feature films of YouTubers like Joel Haver, whose 2024 YouTube feature, Anyone But Me, cost $4K? (It's one of the 12 feature films Haver is making and releasing in 2024.)

Or For Lovers Only (2010), by the Polish Brothers (Twin Falls Idaho), made for around $500, which went on to make $500K in streaming rentals (with no theatrical release).

This is not a competition for most indie, or something, but the range of budgets that so-called indie movies are made for suggests that the term may need some revisiting.

Like indie music, indie film is not only about how much it costs and who actually makes it, but also connotes certain artistic conditions and modes. A24, with its catalog of relatively risk-taking and idiosyncratic auteurist movies, is the current aesthetic embodiment of "indie film," for many fans. Yet its "independence" from mainstream Hollywood is arguable—Everything Everywhere won the Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Editing, as well as three acting Oscars.

The reason any of this matters will be obscure to many movie fans; but for truly independent filmmakers, it's an existential matter.

The logic of the bigger film festivals, which theoretically exist to promote the very best in independent filmmaking, today will often refuse to even program narrative features that fall into any of SAG's lower-budget categories.

There have been countless brilliant feature films made for less than $1M, and even far less money than that, but the conventional routes to market—to an audience of any size—have shrunk to next to nothing for even IATSE's Tier 1 films. The big festivals—essentially the only way for smaller films to find distribution, or even a screening—are less interested than ever before in most of the truly independent films and filmmakers out there.

The American film industry in 2024 is in dire straits. The rate of production in Los Angeles is at record lows. Employment across the industry is cratering. The Big 5 make fewer and fewer theatrical films all the time, and what they do release are films almost universally considered to be candy-colored junk.

Many point to this ongoing collapse as more evidence of a stagnant culture. That may be the case, although it's certainly not the first time the Hollywood studios were making crap because they didn't know what else to do. The difference today is that there's no path for the true independents to shake up the system, as they once could, and little to no chance for the passionate artists at the bottom to rise.