Onchain - The Film3 Feed

The Reckoning Hollywood Didn't See Coming

Apr 27
The most expensive films ever made are underperforming. Franchise fatigue is realer than real. Theatrical attendance has been declared dead so many times it’s practically a meme. And yet — somehow — a horror film made for pocket change sells out midnight screenings. A niche drama with no stars and no studio backing finds its audience and keeps it. A scrappy, weird, specific little film does what a $200 million studio film cannot. Read more

Stop Performing. Start Making.

Apr 20
There's a version of film3 that exists entirely in pitch decks and Discord threads. Gorgeous whitepapers. Detailed roadmaps that go out eighteen months and somehow never fully arrive. Projects announced with fanfare and quickly forgotten, somewhere between the bear market and the next shiny thing. I've been in the space long enough to know the difference between someone building and someone performing building. The gap is almost always the same thing: they haven't sat down and done the actual work. Read more

Film3 is Punk.

Apr 13
In 1976, the major labels owned everything. They owned the studios, the pressing plants, the distribution, the radio airplay, and the narrative about what music was allowed to be. Getting a record deal meant getting permission from people who had never picked up an instrument in their lives. The gatekeepers didn’t care about your sound or what you wanted to say. They cared about their margin. So a bunch of kids in London and New York stopped asking. Read more

Fear Without Experience: The AI Discourse Problem

Mar 30
I shared a post about a creator who trained a custom AI model at home and generated a short film in minutes. One person. One machine. Idea to video in hours, not months. The response was overwhelming to say the least. And none of it was from anyone in my network. We’re talking +2s and +3s — strangers algorithmically delivered to my comment section, armed with sweeping statements, moral certainty, and very little apparent firsthand experience with the technology they were condemning. Read more

The Book of Film3

Mar 23
People have been asking me what film3 is for years. At festivals, in DMs, after panels, at events with filmmakers who sense something shifting. What is film3? How does it work? How do I get involved? I've answered the question more times than I can count — in conversations, in twitter spaces, on stages, over coffee, over beer, in articles, the list goes on. Every time, I gave the best answer I had. But a passing conversation was never going to be enough. So I wrote the book. This is my story. Read more

You Are Now the Studio

Mar 9
IndieWire published a piece recently that stopped me mid-scroll. The headline was "Don't Call It a Comeback: How Independent Film Will Be Rewired in 2026." It's a sharp analysis of where indie film actually stands right now — not the hopeful spin, not the doom spiral, just a clear-eyed look at the new operating reality. And one line in particular landed like it was written directly at me: "Producers are asked to think like founders. Directors are expected to articulate not just vision but value." Read more

Our AI Agent Raises the Money, We Make the Film

Mar 2
Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write: our AI agent is raising funds from other AI agents to produce a human-made stop motion animated film (and even trolling us a little for being so analog). Auctobot's pitch deck has no pictures. No emotion. No sizzle reel. Just code — a machine-readable investment memo delivered agent-to-agent, onchain, returning a yes or a no. Read more

Creator-Owned Cinema Is Here

Feb 23
Last week, I wrote about how Markiplier's Iron Lung — a $3 million community/self-financed horror film — debuted at number two domestically, expanded from 60 theaters to over 4,161 through a grassroots fan campaign, and has now crossed $48 million worldwide without a studio, a distributor, or a single institutional gatekeeper saying yes. Read more

The $44 Million Proof of Concept for Film3

Feb 16
Two weeks ago, a YouTuber did something Hollywood said was impossible. Mark Fischbach — better known as Markiplier to his 38 million subscribers — self-financed a science fiction horror film called Iron Lung for $3 million. He wrote it. He directed it. He starred in it. Read more

MIXED*: 211 Films, 44 Countries, One Night in Portland

Feb 9
Last Wednesday, I found myself in a packed Tomorrow Theater for MIXED*, a hybrid film showcase curated by my friend Garett Stenson. The concept was simple but ambitious — 211 films submitted from 44 countries, distilled into a single evening in Portland, Oregon. Read more