The Risk Question: Bet on the New
23/October/2026
Over the course of the last few months, I have spoken a lot about the funding habits of the industry and how they are taking the wrong risks. Decisions that could see us funding films that don’t take enough risks or explore more niche topics or communities. I have argued that this could lead to a stagnation within the industry, driven by audiences growing weary and bored of watching films which rehash the same old stories. The kind of films that just remake an old classic or repeat the same ‘mass appeal’ superhero story. But this year we have seen a glimmer of mainstream hope for independent and small-budget films.
Films like Obsession and Backrooms have seen new young voices emerge from films made with micro budgets, especially compared to films such as The Odyssey or Spider-Man. This should give the industry and audiences alike hope that risk can pay off not just on a small scale but also on a magnitude just as great as a blockbuster, if not greater. When a funder takes a risk on a little-known or unknown filmmaker, they choose to fund their film purely based on a great screenplay and a passionate filmmaker, investing in the possibility of launching the career of the next Christopher Nolan, Stephen Spielberg or Greta Gerwig. When this investment is taken on a smaller-budget independent film, the risk can also be spread across dozens of films. After all, you only need one film to become a great success. Take, for example, Obsession, a film made by a first-time feature filmmaker aged just 25, a relatively big risk! The film had a budget of $750,000, yet it has now grossed $522,198,470 worldwide to date, turning its micro-budget of $750,000 into a historic box office success. Compared to The Odyssey, although The Odyssey made more raw cash, Obsession had a far greater return on investment because of its small budget. Obsession had a whopping Budget-to-Gross ROI of 697x the budget compared to The Odyssey’s 7.15x the budget. Both are film history-making box office hits. But it is also the perfect example of how it only takes one small-budget film to gain success for an investor to see a big return on investment. This form of spreading risk of investment is of course something the business world has known for decades. Yet the film industry has not been willing to delve into nearly as much as it should.
The industry loves to play it safe and fund what it knows; studios are the worst offenders of this. Think of Disney with its live-action remakes of its most successful classics, Sony with its Jumanji films, or Marvel with its Avengers movies, to name a few. As I’ve spoken about in the past, an element of this is that studios see these films as having mass appeal to audiences globally, no matter their individual culture or social issues. I’m not saying these films have no place in the industry; I just believe they should have a smaller role. Studios should spend more of their budgets on smaller-budget films, funding the production of dozens of first-time feature filmmakers, splitting the risk across these to help amplify the voices of the future of cinema. They should invest that money in telling more stories that speak to specific audiences and aspects of society. For example, funding films which explore topics like living with dyslexia, being a religious minority, struggling with the cost of living crisis or neighbourhoods standing up against their community being torn apart by data centres being built without their consent. These kinds of stories should then be told by up-and-coming filmmakers who passionately understand these issues first-hand. Studios have a duty to support and invest in these new voices if the future of cinema is to thrive and not stagnate.
Audiences will only put up with the same old rehash of the same kinds of stories for so long. They will soon, if not already, long for stories that they can relate to, that make their communities feel seen and heard. I think this will become increasingly important and true if the world continues to become copy-and-paste, and cities from London to New York or Munich to Beijing start having less individual personality due to the expansion of large chains and trends, a whole issue in itself. But I feel these trends will lead people to want more individuality and uniqueness within the cinema and art they are exposed to. Especially kinds that they can relate to or are about subjects that might be foreign to them but are intriguing and engage them with something new and interesting. The biggest responsibility to take the lead with this lies in the hands of the big studios. Not only do they have the most capital to hand, but they also currently have the loudest voice in the industry. However, this may not always be the case if they don’t step up and take the lead in investing in the next generation of filmmakers. The large studios could be the leaders of a renaissance of cinema, championing the voices of the next generation of writers, directors, producers, cinematographers and so on. But are they willing to take that risk?
