The Fourth Path

Things start slow, and then move quickly all at once.

Perhaps you’ve heard? This past week, Evan Shapiro published a Cannes-week piece on his Media War & Peace Substack, centered on his Media Odyssey podcast interview with Republic Film’s Marc Iserlis. In the episode, Marc, Evan, and Evan’s co-host Marion Ranchet talk about a “third path” for financing films. Tristan Wirabangsa at ROYALNIFTY (a production infrastructure platform that can underlie multiple financing models) followed with his own Substack post, a smart breakdown of where Republic’s model begins and ends. Dana Harris-Bridson at IndieWire then picked up the broader conversation. The signal is flashing green: fan participation in entertainment financing is no longer a niche idea. It’s moving into the trades, into investor conversations, and into the larger debate about how independent work gets made when the traditional model keeps narrowing.

Shapiro framed three paths: traditional finance, crowdfunding and crowd-investing. Traditional finance is the familiar ecosystem of private capital, sales agents, distributors, studios, festivals and buyers. Crowdfunding, through platforms like Kickstarter, Seed & Spark, Patreon and Substack, lets audiences support creators directly, but those platforms are mostly infrastructure. The creator is still largely alone when it comes time to produce, market, distribute, and sustain the work. Crowd-investing, through platforms like Republic, lets fans buy into a financial position connected to a project or slate, but now you’ve introduced legal and emotional complexity to the creator/fan relationship.

The Fourth Path

Where I think the conversation gets more interesting is in the distinction between the different kinds of fan participation being discussed. Because not all fan-funded models are the same. They may look adjacent from the outside, but they create different companies, different incentives, different audiences and different outcomes.

I think there’s a fourth path and it begins with a simpler idea (I’m a simpler is better guy): a curated entertainment studio that uses fan pre-sales to fund the work the audience asks for, with the full production and distribution apparatus to actually make and deliver it. Fans are already buyers and artists need support behind the scenes so they can focus on being creative. Mind-blowing, right?

They buy pre-release opening weekend tickets. They pre-order books. They pre-order special edition Blu-rays of films they already have access to digitally. They pre-order exclusive vinyl pressings of albums they can stream for free. They buy merch, event passes, subscriptions, collector editions, deluxe editions, signed copies, behind-the-scenes access, festival tickets and limited releases...all these things! Most of the time before they even know what they’re in for. That behavior isn’t theoretical. It’s one of the oldest and most proven behaviors in entertainment. (Like I said, simple.)

Here's the scale of it, and most of it happens before the actual release. Tentpole films pull approximately 10-30% of opening weekend gross from Fandango pre-sales alone. Hyped game pre-orders can hit 40-70% of opening units. Top-tier pop albums see 50-80% of first-week numbers from pre-saves and physical pre-orders. Real money, already committed, by audiences who haven't even experienced the work yet.

I met with an investor last week, and their biggest question about Kyndred’s success revolved around the validity of crowdfunding at scale. In the moment, I answered the question the way I thought I was supposed to answer it. I cited examples, trying to validate crowdfunding at scale. That was the mistake, and one I knew better than to make, because Kyndred isn’t trying to prove crowdfunding at scale. (First investor pitch for Kyndred. You live and learn.)

Kyndred is a pre-sale model. More specifically, it’s a demand-validation model built around pre-sales. Fans aren’t donating to a dream, and they aren’t buying a speculative financial position. They’re pre-purchasing defined entertainment: tickets, subscriptions, books, albums, films, series, physical editions, merch, events, exclusive access and experiences.

The behavior is already proven. As I stated above, entertainment has always been built around audiences paying in advance for things they want. Kyndred’s innovation isn’t asking whether fans will pay early. The innovation is moving that proven behavior earlier in the production lifecycle, so audience demand is validated before production begins. Traditional entertainment often produces first and validates later. Kyndred validates first and produces after.

That means Kyndred only produces work after audiences signal that they want it. Not in the abstract. Not because an algorithm guessed at demand. And certainly not because an executive thinks a trend is emerging. Because real people commit real money to an idea before production begins. Then Kyndred follows through helping that idea become a reality.

That follow-through is why Kyndred is more than a funding platform. Open crowdfunding platforms have proven that audiences will support creative work. That’s valuable and shouldn’t be dismissed. But platforms like Kickstarter, Seed & Spark, etc. aren’t studios. They don’t package the work, supervise production, market the work, manage delivery, provide full distribution, build a shared audience across projects or preserve the finished work as part of a long-term catalog. A campaign can fund and still stall.

Across crowdfunding, research has consistently shown only about two-thirds of funded projects deliver on time and roughly 1 in 10 don't deliver at all. And that's just the funding stage. Marketing, distribution and sustaining the work afterward are entirely on the creator. A creator can be talented and sincere and still lack the operational support to finish the project.

That's the difference between a funding platform and a partner. Even the most successful independent creators on Substack or on YouTube usually have a team behind them. The ones doing it solo are the exception. Infrastructure is what gets the work over the finish line, and Kyndred is structurally built to be the infrastructure that helps those creators deliver. That’s the difference.

It’s a curated entertainment studio where projects are reviewed before they ever reach fans. Budgets are built. Timelines are considered. Rights are reviewed and production feasibility matters. Campaigns are designed around defined deliverables, so the fans aren’t funneling their money into uncertainty. They’re pre-purchasing entertainment they want to experience.

Outside capital funds the company and fan pre-sales fund the projects. That separation is critical. Investors aren’t being asked to finance a slate of speculative productions. They’re helping build the infrastructure that lets audience-validated projects get made and delivered.

That also separates Kyndred from the fan-investment category where companies are trying to solve a real problem. I respect that. They’re creating new ways for people to participate in entertainment financing, and there may be a real audience for that. But it’s a different audience than what Kyndred is going for. A company that promises financial returns on a film is a finance or investment company operating in the entertainment space. A company that promises movies, series, books, albums, podcasts, tickets, subscriptions, events, access and ownership is an entertainment company. Period. Those aren’t the same thing and they create different goals going in.

If the fan relationship is built around financial upside, the audience is trained to think like investors. They want return, they want liquidity and they want performance. They want to know whether the trade worked, and if the project doesn’t return what they hoped, the emotional relationship can curdle quickly.

We’ve already seen what happens when entertainment assets become market symbols. The AMC and GameStop moment was loud, fascinating and culturally revealing, but it wasn’t really about movies or games. It was about the trade. The product became a vehicle for speculation. That’s not the audience Kyndred is built for.

Kyndred is built for the audience that buys an opening weekend ticket to Obsession, Backrooms, Iron Lung or whatever original thing feels like it might become the next cultural signal. The audience that orders the boutique Blu-ray because the packaging, commentary, transfer quality, essay booklet and permanence matter. The audience that buys a special vinyl pressing because the object carries meaning when someone walks into their home and sees the album featured on their wall. Kyndred is for the audience that wants to be in the room, own the thing, follow the creator, attend the event, support the work and say they were there before everyone else caught up.

Our audience isn’t trying to exit a position. They’re trying to get closer to the work.

The danger of confusing these audiences is bigger than one project or one platform. If a fan-investment model disappoints, the industry may draw the wrong conclusion. Entertainment is very good at chasing trends and very bad at reading small sample sizes responsibly. One underperforming structure can quickly become a lazy narrative: “Fans won’t finance entertainment.”

Everyone Loves To Jump In

But that’s the wrong lesson. Fans already finance entertainment every day through all the methods mentioned above and then some. The question isn’t whether fans will spend money on work they love. We know they already do. The question is whether we’re asking them to behave like fans or behave like investors.

Look at what’s happening with Letterboxd this week. The platform is for sale, and now Ted Hope and Elizabeth Joyce have launched a campaign to organize the community to buy a majority stake themselves. A community ownership structure designed to keep Letterboxd from getting stripped for parts by whoever buys it next. That’s an audience willing to put its own money up to protect something they love. Returns don’t enter the picture. They just want the platform to survive on its own terms, and they’re willing to pay for that outcome.

Now please don’t misunderstand my message. I want Republic to succeed. I want ROYALNIFTY to succeed. I want others like those to succeed. I don’t see less for Kyndred when others win. Along with being a “simpler is better” guy, I’m also very much a “rising tide lifts all boats” type of person. This is all good news. I really appreciate Shapiro using his platform to highlight alternative paths at a moment when creators badly need them. The traditional indie financing model is strained and as he notes, streamers have backed away from mid-budget films. Studios are increasingly built around franchise protection and risk avoidance. Creators need more options, and fans have already shown they’re willing to financially support work they care about. These are all the things, among many, that I’ve been shouting from the rooftops lately. (Or saying to anyone I meet in person - big fan of meeting in person btw).

Kyndred chooses fans and that choice shapes everything else. We’re not looking for people who are excited about the money. We’re looking for people who are excited about the work where the upside is experiential and cultural: better access, better editions, better events, better rewards, closer proximity and the satisfaction of helping something exist. We’re not bending creative decisions toward speculative investor return. We’re building toward work people want to watch, read, hear, own, attend, collect and share.

It also has to stand for something. Creative ownership. Crew participation. Meaningful fan rewards. Human-made work. Production in Los Angeles whenever possible. Transparent reporting. Physical permanence. Live experiences. Fair participation. A studio that’s trying to lift up artists, craftspeople and audiences instead of treating all of them like commodities to be extracted from.

That’s the ethical studio we’re trying to build. Not ethical as a marketing pose. Ethical as an operating system.

I’ve said all this before, but I’ll reiterate because I think it’s important. The entertainment industry is consolidating. Greenlights are shrinking. Creators are being asked to trade ownership for access. Fans fund culture constantly, but they rarely get meaningful participation in what gets made or what gets preserved. Crew members make the work possible and too often get left out of the upside entirely. Finished projects can be buried, deleted or treated like disposable inventory. Kyndred is being built as an answer to all of that.

A place where creators keep ownership. Where fans help decide what gets made. Where crew can participate in success. Where production is supported with real oversight that appreciates the people who come together to make it. Where the finished work isn’t treated as disposable but a fundamental piece of our culture. Where people who love films, series, books, music, podcasts, physical media, theatrical events, merch and live experiences aren’t afterthoughts, but part of the model.

I’m glad Republic is pushing the conversation forward. I’m glad ROYALNIFTY is interrogating the mechanics. I’m glad Shapiro is using his platform to name the problem loudly. The more serious people working on alternative paths, the better.

But Kyndred isn't trying to be a better version of a Republic-style fan-investment model, and isn't a competitor to the production infrastructure layer ROYALNIFTY is building either. Kyndred is an entertainment company where human relationships to each other and their stories are the point and the purpose.

We’d rather carry the pressure of telling great stories than the pressure of maximizing speculative returns. We believe the great stories are what create the durable returns anyway. Not because every project becomes a rocket ship, but because trust compounds across all of it. Audiences, creators, crew, investors, the whole culture around the work. That’s the audience we’re building for.

That’s the fourth path. An audience that came for the work, pre-sales that fund what gets made, and a studio structurally built to deliver.

-Lauer

Correction: An earlier version of this post grouped ROYALNIFTY with Republic as a fan-investment platform. ROYALNIFTY is production infrastructure that can support multiple financing models, not a competing path of its own. Thanks to Tristan Wirabangsa for the clarification.