Starting 2026 as an Independent Studio

We’re starting 2026 as an independent studio at a moment when consolidation has become the dominant structural force across the entertainment industry. Major players are fewer, larger, and operating under tighter financial scrutiny. For companies like Netflix, Warner Bros., and Paramount, the incentives are increasingly aligned around a simple reality: original properties are expensive to launch, slow to break through, and difficult to predict. Franchises, by contrast, come with existing awareness, clearer marketing paths, and a lower tolerance for surprise. Much of the industry response has been to consolidate what has already worked.

This is both a creative failure and a financial one. The cost of introducing a new property has risen sharply, particularly once marketing and global distribution are factored in. Even digital-first launches require sustained spend to reach visibility, with paid promotion, platform fees, and content volume adding up quickly. At the same time, the metrics used to evaluate success have become more compressed. New work is often expected to perform immediately and at scale, even though audience adoption rarely works that way. The result is a system that favors legibility over experimentation and speed over accumulation.

Public funding has historically helped offset that imbalance, especially for early-stage or culturally specific work. That support is narrowing. With institutions like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting closing, there are fewer mechanisms designed to absorb risk on behalf of the broader ecosystem. The market increasingly rewards what is already recognizable, while making it harder for new ideas to develop in public view.

And yet discovery has not stopped. It has shifted. Younger audiences, particularly kids, are finding new properties in places that operate outside traditional studio logic. Platforms like Roblox and YouTube function not just as distribution channels, but as environments where taste forms through play, repetition, and peer influence. Social platforms amplify what sticks, often long before it is formally packaged or marketed. In this context, scale does not begin with release. It begins with use.

For independent studios, this creates a narrow but meaningful opening. The constraints are real: limited capital, slower visibility, and no structural safety net. But independence also removes certain pressures. It allows work to be developed without the need to justify itself at launch, and for audiences to be found gradually rather than manufactured upfront. It favors smaller bets, clearer intent, and patience.

That is the environment we are operating in this year. We are not trying to compete with large studios on volume or velocity. We are working in the spaces their incentives no longer comfortably support, building original work at a scale that allows it to mature before it is explained.

We will use this space to occasionally share how those conditions shape our decisions. Not announcements or predictions, but notes on how independent work gets made when consolidation is the default. The people we hope stick around are those who are curious about that process, who value original work enough to support it, and who understand that independence is not an identity. It is a constraint you choose to work within.