Four months ago, I launched the In Development newsletter with a question: With the entertainment industry in crisis, what should we do next?
Since then, we’ve explored:
• The making and selling of vertical videos
• Filmmakers getting money from rich people
• A pay-to-play model that might make sense
• How filmmakers can own their release strategies
• How crews are learning to think like influencers
• Why living lean is business strategy
This week asks something different:
What if your success as a filmmaker is tied to the strength of your personal community?
That sounds like (and probably is) the first thing you’d hear at a TED Talk, followed by trenchant anecdotes and thoughtful homilies. I offer neither, and I am the sort of person who cringes a bit at “personal community,” but still I persist:
What if investors or buyers valued your project not only on story, cast, production team, and director CV — but also on the collective value of the communities they brought to the table?
I’m not talking about Instagram followers (though you’d probably have those, too). I mean the ability to demonstrate there’s a collection of humans with a specific affinity for your work and for each other.
We already know what this looks like: It’s what built Comic-Con and the franchises that fill it. But what if that same logic applied to you—an indie filmmaker, fledgling producer, actor, or cinematographer?
I believe this is what happens next.
Enter the Affinity Economy
It already has a name — the Affinity Economy — and credit goes to Evan Shapiro, a former TV executive with a talent for inhaling massive amounts of data to identify what’s already true but not yet declared.
Two years ago, Shapiro rattled legacy-media executives at global conference IBC when he declared they now operated in a creator economy.
“I looked at the room and I said, ‘This is the moment in time where you’re going to have to change everything or go out of business,’” he said in a recent video post, shortly before he took the stage at IBC 2025. “It pissed off a lot of people in the room to the point that there were a bunch of harrumphing old men who got up and left.”
Today, YouTube is the number-one television channel and the creator economy is a given, like gravity. Shapiro’s now moved on: He describes the Affinity Economy as “a new ecosystem where mainstream media and the creator economy have collided and melded and turned into a Frankenstein monster.”
The Affinity Economy doesn’t care if you’re indie or blockbuster, theatrical or TikTok. It doesn’t particularly care about likes, which can be casual or bought. It’s all about the thing that can’t be faked or AI’d: the community your work creates or inspires.
The Reception
When Shapiro returned to IBC this September, audience reaction was starkly different.
“The reception was very positive—from the people in the audience, from the organizers, and from the people who pay to fund the conference,” he wrote me. “It was a bit overwhelming tbh… I also had the opportunity to ask a sizable sample of delegates about what they would most want to transform if they could. The overwhelming answer—more than 2/3—was to shift from the vision-less CFO centric culture in the industry and return to vision and mission. This was across media and tech. Big companies and small.”
That’s encouraging news in a world where Paramount is preparing to swallow Warner Bros. Discovery whole.
The Affinity Economy is an aspiring buzzword, but there’s evidence that its reality is already here. When I spoke with Cineverse exec Erick Opeka last week about MicroCo, we talked about the upcoming LA vertical drama market and its fan event VertiCon, which is inspiring attendance from as far away as Australia.
Why It Matters
More importantly, he said, that devotion can translate directly to dollars. If microdrama star Kasey Esser shows that his fans convert into paying customers, he can get more money… from companies like MicroCo.
“If they build their own franchises, if they have their own characters and get popular,” Opeka said, “they’re going to demand it and they’re going to get it.”
In other words: Those who can convert fans into audience will win. However, that also demands young creators start building a fanbase now — before they’ve made the big sale, or any sale; possibly even before they’re really good.
That is some hard work, but under the Affinity Economy it’s essential — not only for future returns, but because community is the only metric that matters.
How to do that? That’s a future issue of In Development.
✉️ Have an idea, compliment, or complaint?
[email protected]; (323) 435-7690.
Weekly recommendations for your career mindset, curated by IndieWire Senior Editor Christian Zilko.
Music can make or break a movie, but indie filmmakers who pour their souls (and savings) into making a film often end up neglecting it when they get to post-production and see their budgets have evaporated. This article offers a detailed breakdown of the options available to artists looking to stretch their budgets and assemble soundtracks that make their films sound more expensive than they actually are.
A clever article that analyzes the strategies behind an expensive studio film with a massive marketing budget and then seamlessly applies them to microbudget filmmakers handling their own distribution. Even if you don’t make genre films, every filmmaker can find something in here to help give their own marketing campaign a bit of the “Weapons” magic.
If you need a reason to feel good about making your films independently (either by choice or lack of other options), this insightful look into the processes and priorities that lead to many of Netflix’s least inspired films is a great place to start.
I always enjoy seeing someone take the time to write a detailed article about the parts of filmmaking that never make their way into the spotlight. Donny Broussard’s Punk Rock Producing Substack (a favorite of this newsletter) did just that this week with this explainer on feeding crews on the smallest of films.
I’ll be the first to admit that social media marketing does not come naturally to me, but any filmmaker looking to make their bones in the Affinity Economy needs to learn it. Vora offers 26 easily digestible bits of info for any director looking to build a following for their film, making for a fun read and a resource you can refer back to again and again.
