Sorry, Baby sale is HUGE NEWS for Indie Film!
Sundance Award-winner goes to A24
Congratulations to Sorry, Baby team, Eva Victor, Big Beach, Pastel, all of them.
$8mm sale out of Sundance to A24 off of what I’d estimate (completely guessing) was $1-2mm budget.
Big news for the entire ecosystem of independent film. Eva Victor has achieved what countless before her pitched and failed to deliver. A previously hypothetical model for a filmmaking career is now made real. Sorry, Baby is the first success of its kind:
Speculatively developed new filmmaker
Low budget independent financing
Huge recoupment on sale
exclusively tied to value of movie being great
Exclude talent, genre, topical, gimmick, IP driven. Exclude streamer press / sub grabs
It’s a STOP THE PRESSES moment for indie film. Everyone should pay attention and adjust. It’s a massive, massive achievement, and a beacon of inspiration for all of us. In a time of peak despair and confusion, loss of hope and inability to see how we possibly move forward, this means we can focus on making great movies, and actually expect to have a career…if we truly make great movies.
Crazy to write an emergency post about something other than Luka Doncic by the way. Go to my IG for those thoughts. Holy cow now Wemby got DeAaron Fox as I was writing this, the NBA script is better than anything Sundance could possibly do.
Historical context:
It’s become a cliche to put Little Miss Sunshine on an indie film fundraising deck as the case study. This is a 2006 movie made for $8mm, premiered at Sundance, sold for $10mm..that generated $100mm at box office alone. In 2025, it’s still on the speculative fundraising decks. In 2025, 90% of indie movies pitch a speculative business modeled on this, that requires all of this to happen to succeed. Not only get into Sundance, not only be one of the top 3 sales of the festival, but also generate significant hockey stick box office that has literally only happened once (twice I guess if you count Blair Witch Project). Every year, there are 1-5 movies that satisfy a version of this that recoups investment, nothing ever to this scale though.
Now Big Beach, the company that set the model, and have been invoked for 20+ years since…achieve this (2/3 of it at least, theatrical tbd) in 2025. Big Beach has done a ton of cost plus deals since Little Miss Sunshine, made a lot of good movies, and a lot of good profit, but I would call this their biggest success since Little Miss Sunshine. I have no inside information on the budget, but I would guess it was $1-2mm budget. The proportionate return is incredible, and usually reserved for streamers dumping money for a PR mention (like Netflix last two years of ridiculously overvalued buys, and Apple’s $25mm for Coda for no reason, which eventually actually somehow inexplicably worked out better than any Netflix deal ever).
Recent context:
The best recent comparison is The Brutalist, which ties in even more perfectly than the obvious. Another movie that’s on every single pitch deck is It Follows. Not on the same scale of Little Miss Sunshine, but a $1mm movie that generated $20mm+ in BO alone. Genre movie. No stars. It’s a template. One of the main architects of that movie just launched his new venture with The Brutalist, he’s the literal brutalist style logo before the titles. $6mm movie sold for $10mm (again, no inside info, but I assume the original quoted $6mm Brutalist budget turned into $10mm with deferrals or something like that, so the sale becomes a round number, and everyone gets paid back quick for their labor and belief).
It’s cool to see these two producers who invented this wheel in many ways, ride better than anyone else right now.
Two filmmaker paths that do not rely on money, nor celebrity, nor trending topics, nor even the industry:
Brady Corbet: devote yourself to the art and craft of cinema at a world class level starting day one. Take it more seriously than anyone else alive. Watch six movies a day at Venice Biennale when you’re 13 years old and become a philosophical and formalistic encyclopedia. Seek out your auteur heroes and ask them pointed questions and follow them around. Film is life or death, not in the way people quote in interviews about how they haaaad to make their movie, etc. etc. Brady is the most uncompromising, most ambitious of all. Decide what cinema means to you, and seek making the most important film in the world every single day of your life.
Eva Victor: develop your creativity through various media, build a following, constantly iterate on your craft, allow it to adjust in form as the ideas evolve. Find your voice, find a voice that resonates above the rest. Recognize when you come to your big chrysalis moment and the big idea is formed, and it feels like cinema. Lock into that ambition and hold fast to your vision of the most important movie in the world at that moment. Surround it with partners who understand this and empower you to realize that vision. Make sure you’re making the best thing in the world though, or else the whole model falls apart. Are you Eva Victor? This only works if you’re ready to achieve what she just achieved.
The diversity of these two films’ paths to success is remarkable. The Brutalist is the hardest possible path one could imagine, which in itself is aspirational and a template. An example of the group of people most dedicated to the art and craft of filmmaking, making the biggest thing possible, with the least resources possible. If you take film EXTREMELY SERIOUSLY…there are rewards. The Brutalist tells us if you are an extreme exception, doing the most with the least, a generational usage of the form, people will respond.
Sorry, Baby is an entirely accessible example to follow. It’s a regular indie film, just a really, really great one. A singular original voice with something really meaningful to say, said skillfully and emotionally, can resonate without any bells or whistles or celebrity cosigns. This is the beacon, every filmmakers north star.
Why I love Sorry, Baby:
Sorry, Baby [VERY SOFT SPOILER AHEAD, BUT I’M VAGUE, I DON’T THINK IT RUINS ANYTHING, BUT PLEASE SKIP PARAGRAPH IF YOU WANT TO REMAIN 100% UNAWARE LIKE I WAS] is an example of the best idea winning regardless of the environment. Eva Victor is great. Period. She’s one of those generational talents. We’ve watched a million movies, at this year’s festival even, about the same subject, yet nobody ever had the taste and skill to construct something as effective as the house sequence. It’s the precise counterpoint to the tunnel sequence in another movie I won’t mention to avoid spoilers, but you know right away what I mean if you know. It’s brilliant. It’s revolutionary.
[NO MORE SPOILERS]
People see this movie and know there’s a difference between Victor’s blend of dread and humor that transcends the put-upon ironic blend of dread and humor that’s pervasive within boring stupid lazy scared cynical Sundance movies that go in one ear and come out the other. Sorry, Baby will stay with people. Market-wise, Past Lives is a good comparison. It will be the adult movie adults talk about and tell other adults to go see to have adult thoughts and times and conversations. That did $40+mm box office. [To be clear, Past Lives was not developed and packaged speculatively the way Sorry, Baby was, and neither was Aftersun (government backed), which is why this piece is about Sorry, Baby, which I called an unprecedented success above.]
There is a market out there for thinking people art, thinking people movies. It’s been starved and put out to the margins not for lack of demand. Thinking people have been alienated. Burned too many times. Culture has tried to turn thinking people into followers. Many have converted, but most resist. Most don’t fall for it. We go to repertory films, read books, talk to one another. And we wait for thinking people movies. When they come though, we identify them, we talk about them. We send our thinking signals out and other thinkers respond. There is a market for thoughtful cinema. If we build it, they will come.
How speculative indie films get developed:
Lemme go backwards a bit and talk very briefly about how movies of this type are set up. Someone writes a script, they bring on some collaborators. Maybe producers, maybe DP, maybe some actors. They send out a pitch deck with the concept, synopsis, vibes, some actor references (attached or targeted or vibes; sidenote, it’s a red flag when the pitch deck just has vibes on it I think), the collaborators involved already, and some comparisons to previous films that this one aims to replicate the business case of. The deck will talk about budget range, genre, talent and general similar feeling films, and argue why it will make cultural impact and profit financially. The reason you see a million Executive Producer names on movies like Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, is after the main producer (in that case David Gonzalez), everything is independently financed. Money is money is money. There’s no studio backing it, so they take investment at different levels, from experienced investors or brand new ones. Sometimes $25k, sometimes $1mm. Rich people or strategic investors. Often, these movies have one main producer putting everything together, but they get 10 different people to put in $25-100k to make up the budget. I have no inside information on Sorry, Baby (feel free to message me to correct if I’m wrong and it matters), but my guess is that Pastel (Mark Ceryak, Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski, Catalina Rotjer) developed the script with Eva Victor. They brought on Big Beach (Michael Clark, Tim Foley, Turtletaubs). Then they went out for independent financing, with the support and guidance of those two, but not the money. There are a bunch of other EPs listed because I imagine the movie was set up entirely independently, not financed by either production company. It’s a much stronger pitch with incredible partners like Pastel and Big Beach, but it’s still entirely speculative. You have no idea what’s going to happen. The movie might not get into Sundance or any festival, it might not get sold for distribution, it might not make any money.
What this means for you, why I decided to post this immediately instead of waiting til Friday:
This sale marks a course adjustment to the general strategy of developing, fundraising and packaging independent film. The Brutalist sale is a tremendous success, but it’s an example few can follow. Brady is a singular individual who has put decades into his craft in a way few can replicate. The lesson there is if you dedicate your life to cinema in a world-class way, you will get somewhere. But that’s more like a life adjustment than a project adjustment.
Sorry, Baby is an example people can mimic right now.
Make indie films the way you were already making them…just make them great. If that means taking more time, put it back in the oven. If that means make fewer films, make only the best. If that means collaborating more than being in driver’s seat, look around. This does not happen without Eva Victor.
Returning to the idea of speculative business models in independent film…this has been nonsense for years. Despite every movie essentially pitching itself as the one that will achieve this, there has not been a movie without generic value markers selling for significant return exclusively because it was so good. Every example is either talent driven, genre, or some kind of topical issue.
This sale for Sorry, Baby is a STOP THE PRESSES moment. I mean, everyone’s got to adjust their pitch decks.
But more importantly, everyone’s gotta adjust their creative. Go back in, break out each scene. Is the dialogue popping? Are the characters lived in? Are the jokes hilarious? Are the heavy pithy lines gut wrenching? Is the visual presentation innovative and beautiful? Think about your indie movie like how comedies get punched up. Punch everything up. Make it incredible. Is this location memorable? Where could you put the camera in this scene that nobody’s ever done before?
Broader though, is this a major major idea? Is this a thing every adult needs to watch, and will leave thinking about for days, be compelled to tell all their friends about? Sorry, Baby is the adult movie that adults who don’t go to the movies anymore, will go to the movies for. Is yours one of the one, two, or three movies they’re gonna go to the movies for this year? Is your movie going to be somebody’s new personality? Is your movie going to save someone’s life?
Sorry, Baby Sundance sale tells us there is upside of major creativity alone. The path surrounding stars, capital, topical issues, industry fixers, cultural relevance, all that stuff, it’s still there. It’s still going to be what generates 90% of the movies. This doesn’t impact that. If you are truly going to make one of the best movies of the year, you have a path. Don’t worry about stars. Don’t worry about capital I Important topics. Don’t worry what the industry tells you. Break new ground. Make a great movie. You can impact culture, and you can even make a living doing it.
