What Kyndred Makes

Part 1: Movies

What Kyndred Makes - Part 1: MOVIES

We’ve talked about who Kyndred is for. Now let’s talk about what we’re actually going to make. Starting with movies, because that’s where it all started for me.

I grew up watching movies and loving every minute of them. Repeating movie quotes was how I learned to socialize with the kids at school. I couldn’t always afford to go to the theater, or have cable TV with movie channels, but we could rent a VHS from time to time at the local pizza shop (yes, pre-Blockbuster, our corner pizza shop had a little movie rental section), and when I could go to the theater I was blown away by the scope of it.

For a little while near the end of high school, I somehow convinced myself I wanted to be a physical therapist. So that is where my early college applications went. Then somewhere around the start of senior year, I had my Ralphie on Santa’s slide moment and snapped out of it. I had always loved my art classes, and I really loved animation (Making it home after school in time to catch Batman: The Animated Series & X-Men was a thing). I had always loved movies, too. So I started over, changed course and went to a small local college with a communications program, where I learned the trade of filmmaking. Loading 16mm camera mags in a black bag (we were timed on this for our final). Cutting on flatbeds (changing the bulb felt like changing your oil). Then moving onto the early non-linear systems (anyone remember jazz drives?), and learning Photoshop and After Effects back when even that felt like the future.

I was hooked.

My career has taken some twists and turns along the way, but creating narrative works has always been my passion.

I have never been precious about what qualifies as a good film…okay, maybe a little bit precious. But not in the way some people mean it. Mass appeal, at least the way I think about it, does not mean dumbed down or beneath anyone’s taste. It just means enough people got to see something and it connected. Those are two very different things. I think there are far more movies out there that could have real mass appeal if they were actually given the opportunity to find an audience. (Y’know…maybe if they had a distribution plan and some creative marketing, or any marketing, behind them?)

Steven Spielberg and John Hughes occupy the same shelf in my head as the Coen Brothers and the Daniels. I love Arrival and I love Space Jam and the fact that those two films have absolutely nothing in common doesn’t bother me at all.

Good films can come from anywhere and be about anything.

What connects the movies I love is not genre or scale or budget level. It’s point of view. A filmmaker with something specific they want to say, the craft to pull it off, and the ability to hold an audience and take them somewhere. That is the test.

The Conversation is one of the great American films and it’s basically a guy walking around San Francisco being paranoid for two hours. But every second of it is riveting because Coppola understood exactly what that paranoia felt like and built the entire film around making you feel it too. No Country for Old Men works as a thriller, but it’s really a film about the moment you realize the world has stopped operating by rules you understand, and the Coens never once explain that to you, but they get you to feel what it’s like to live it. Moonlight tells a story about identity and tenderness in a culture that punishes both, and Barry Jenkins shoots it like every frame is something fragile he’s trying to protect. Parasite…oh, my…Parasite. It’s a commentary on class inequality that starts as a satire but keeps peeling back the layers until the comedy is revealed to be a horror that ultimately ends in tragedy. And you can’t look away or forget what you saw.

These films trust you. They don’t over-explain. They don’t pull their punches. They have a perspective and they commit.

That’s what I want Kyndred to make.

When I tell people I’m starting Kyndred, one of the first questions they ask is what kind of films I want to make. Sometimes I say “character-driven narratives,” which is true, but does not quite cover it. Sometimes I jokingly say “yes,” which is probably more honest. I want to make all kinds of movies. I’m building a studio, not a niche label. It’s “The Studio for Everyone.” And I mean that in a lot of ways. Not just for creators, crew, and fans, but for creators, crew, and fans with all kinds of tastes. We don’t have to be one thing for a narrow audience, or make narrow things for a broad one. We can make a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and they’ll always feel well crafted. Their own version of prestige.

Kyndred is not going to be a company that only makes dramas, or only horror, or only family films. I want all of it. Dramas. Horror. Thrillers. Sports movies. Romance. Crime stories. Science fiction. Fantasy. Big emotional movies. Strange little movies. The kind that leave a mark. The kind that make people argue in the parking lot after. The kind that become part of someone’s life.

The point is not genre. The point is that a certain kind of professional film is disappearing right in front of us, and I think people feel that loss whether they can name it or not.

What’s vanishing is the low-to-mid-budget movie made at a serious level. Not the giant franchise machine that costs the same amount of money to make as the GDP of a small country. Not the micro-budget first feature that premieres at a festival and vanishes before most people ever get to hear about it. The movie in between. The one with enough support behind it for the filmmaker to really execute the vision, but not so much money riding on it that every decision gets watered down by committee.

That used to be a real lane. It still exists here and there, of course, but it is getting harder to find. Harder to finance. Harder to release. Harder to give oxygen to once it is finished. That matters because a lot of great films live in that space.

Rocky is a perfect example. Stallone wrote it himself and refused to sell the script unless he could star in it, which every studio told him was insane. What he made, was a character study about a lonely man trying to prove to himself that his life means something, disguised as a boxing movie. The whole thing is people talking in small rooms and walking through cold Philadelphia streets. The fight is the last fifteen minutes, and (spoiler) Rocky loses it in a split decision, but he accomplishes his goal of going the distance and showing the world that he’s not a “bum.” By the time the fight starts, you’ve almost forgotten you’re watching a boxing movie. It works because the whole thing is built around dignity, longing, and the need to matter.

That is not really the kind of movie the current system knows what to do with anymore. Or if it does make one, it often does not know how to support it, market it, or give it time to find its audience. And that is the larger issue.

A lot of the movies people say they miss are not gone because audiences stopped caring. They are gone because the business got narrower. More consolidated. More risk averse. More dependent on obvious pre-awareness, existing IP, and models that can be explained in one sentence on a spreadsheet.

Lost in Translation. Manchester by the Sea. Sing Sing. City of God. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There Will Be Blood. Do the Right Thing…and so many, many more…films that took real swings and connected. Different decades, different genres, different countries. What they share is a refusal to be conventional. Every one of them could have been softened or broadened or made more “marketable” by someone in a suit with an LLM, and every one of them would have been worse for it.

The pipeline that used to produce these films consistently has narrowed. The companies that championed them have been consolidated and infiltrated by people who never intended on making movies. They just wanted the business and the access. The theatrical infrastructure that gave them time to breathe has been compressed and is collapsing. But the filmmakers who make this work haven’t gone anywhere, and the audiences who love it haven’t either. The demand is there. The foundation has been destroyed by the people on the top floor of the building.

But audiences are still audiences. People still want to feel something. They still want surprise. They still want specificity. They still want work made by filmmakers who are actually trying to say something, not just fill a slot on a platform.

That is the opening I see.

Kyndred is not here to make one flavor of film. It is here to help rebuild a lane for professionally made, filmmaker-driven movies across genres. Movies that trust the audience. Movies that do not need to be giant to matter. Movies that can actually be made, released, and supported without being stripped of what made them interesting in the first place.

There are a couple categories that feel especially neglected right now, and I think their absence says something important.

One is comedy.

The theatrical comedy used to be a regular part of movie culture. Not once in a blue moon but regular. Raising Arizona. Best in Show. Office Space. The Big Lebowski. Super Troopers. Beverly Hills Cop. These are not all the same kind of funny, and that is exactly the point. They are specific. They come from distinct sensibilities. They are funny because the people making them had an actual comedic point of view.

Comedy also benefits from a room. From strangers laughing together. From timing that lands differently when the audience is part of it. A good comedy in a theater is not the same experience as a good comedy at home, and I think we have lost something by letting that whole category shrink.

The other is family films.

And I do not mean factory-built product designed by committee to move merchandise. I mean filmmaker-driven work that happens to be appropriate for younger audiences while still respecting adults. The Iron Giant. Paddington. Fantastic Mr. Fox. Kubo and the Two Strings. Movies with craft. Taste. Emotional intelligence. Movies that are not lesser because they are accessible.

Having kids changed how I think about this. Once I started watching more things with them, I became even more aware of how wide the gap is between the best family films and everything else. The great ones do not talk down to anyone. They’re full-craft, full-vision cinema that work on multiple levels simultaneously. They are just good movies. Made with care. Made with standards. Made by people who understand that younger audiences deserve real artistry too.

So yes, comedy and family films are part of what I think is missing. But they are not the whole point. The whole point is that the industry keeps abandoning entire categories of good professional filmmaking whenever those categories stop fitting whatever the current corporate logic happens to be. And every time it does that, culture gets smaller.

Kyndred pushes in the opposite direction. I want us making movies for adults. Movies for families. Movies for horror fans, thriller fans, romantics, weirdos, sports movie lovers, comedy people, and anyone else who still wants to walk into a theater or hit play at home and feel like somebody actually made this for a human being who’s actually watching rather than for an algorithm.

I also care deeply about how these films are treated once they exist. Not just what gets made, but what happens to it afterward. One of the things that has become normal in recent years is work being buried, pulled, deleted, or treated like disposable inventory the second it stops serving a short-term business objective. I hate that. I think a finished film deserves better than that. I think audiences deserve better than that. I think creators definitely deserve better than that.

So when I think about what Kyndred should make, I also think about stewardship. A real theatrical life. Physical media. A platform home. A chance for a movie to keep finding its audience over time instead of being tossed aside because it did not explode instantly. It’s about building something that lasts longer than a release cycle. Some films arrive like a thunderbolt. Others take time. Both matter.

And then there are the movies nobody sees coming. Every decade has a few. Movies that sound impossible on paper and then connect so deeply they become part of the culture. Films like Being John Malkovich and Everything Everywhere All at Once. The thing that made those films work was not that they were safely engineered. It was that they were bold, specific, and fully themselves.

I do not know what the next one of those is. Nobody does. But I know there is probably someone out there right now with a script that would blow people’s minds if it got made, and they can’t get traction because it does not fit a corporate template and there are fewer places to take it to. Kyndred should be for those filmmakers too. So when I say “yes” to the question of what Kyndred makes, this is what I mean.

Filmmaker-driven movies with a point of view. Movies across genres. Movies made at a professional level, especially in the low-to-mid-budget range that keeps getting hollowed out. Movies that trust the audience. And movies that get a real chance to live.

That’s the goal.

Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.

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Your Turn

I’ve told you what I love and what I think is missing. Now I want to hear from you.

What kinds of movies do you wish someone was making right now? What genres feel underserved? What was the last film that genuinely surprised you and what made it work? Is there a type of story you keep looking for and can never seem to find?

Tell me in the comments. If Kyndred is going to build a slate with its community, this is part of where that conversation begins.

Next up: television.

Thanks for reading.

-Lauer