When I started film school last year I learned that an independent filmmaker is someone with a camera and an empty bank account.

This caricature comes to life in a new study estimating that $3 billion is spent each year to produce independent feature films and that only 2% is ever recouped in box office revenues.

By this production spending yardstick, the indie film industry is as big as the major movie studios (Warner Bros., Disney, Sony/Columbia, Lionsgate, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount), though each of the indie films is laboriously financed one at a time.

For want of a better methodology, the estimates are based on US and international submissions to the Sundance Film Festival. The study authors felt this was a good enough measure of the most viable indie movies produced each year. (They assumed that the average cost for a film is $750K (admitting that $1m+ is probably more realistic, so they are low-balling the total spend) and that around 400,000 people work on these films each year.)

No wonder indie filmmakers are looking to technology for new distribution models.

Thanks to Ted Hope's blog for alerting me to these numbers.