Can you make a living making movies independently?

By KO’D
Posted 2026-01-15

If you have any kind of artistic aspirations, you probably want to spend most of your time creating your art. Ideally, you want to do it full-time. Alas, you will find that you still have to pay for a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, etc. — the daily expenses of being alive. One of the cruelest questions you can ask a creator is, “But how do you make a living?”

The good news

We live in marvellous times for movie-makers!

The advent of affordable digital-video production — digital video-cameras and digital NLE systems — drastically lowered the econonic barrier to entry into movie-making. As recently as the 1990s, you had to buy film stock and pay a special lab to develop it; and you had to cut and splice strips of film together in a dark and smelly room. This cost tens of thousands of dollars for even the smallest project.

Today you can shoot a movie on your cellphone. It won’t look or sound very good, but the very possibility is incredible. And you can rig a phone with extra gear to improve both video and audio. Hollywood movies have been shot on cellphones, eg. Tangerine (2015).

Professional-quality video cameras no longer cost hundreds or even tens of thousands of bucks. Shot-on-film purists still exist, but audiences today neither know nor care about film vs. digital acquisition.

And affordable editing software that will run on off-the-shelf computer hardware lets creators cut their footage into movies. Indeed, digital NLE (non-linear editing) systems offer dramatic improvements over the old cut-and-paste approach; you can try something, undo it, rearrange it, swap in a different shot or take — all much more easily than dealing with lengths of film in bins.

Further, the creation and development of the World Wide Web enables any creator to place their movie before a worldwide audience. Of course, attracting that audience has become an increasingly difficult challenge; in a world where anyone can make a movie, everyone does, so it’s harder to stand out from the crowd. But you don’t have to sell your movie to a distributor (on their terms), or “four-wall it”, driving cans of film from independent theatre to university auditorium to church basement. Indeed, you don’t have the expense of striking prints and shipping them at all; digital video is infinitely reproduceable.

In short, today anyone with a middle-class income can make a professional-quality movie.

The bad news

You need that middle-class income — a day job. The title of this article asks, “Can you make a living making movies independently?” The answer is, “No.”

This fact really shouldn’t come as a surprise. This is always the case, in every artistic field. There are more people who want to be creators than there are audiences who support and sustain them. How many painters do you think make a living from selling paintings?

The median income authors made from their books in 2022 was $2,000 a year. If you add writing-related, non-book income (editing, ghostwriting, ad copywriting, etc.), that rises to $5,000 a year. And remember that’s the median; fifty percent of authors make less than that. Furthermore, newbie authors are losing ground; income is down from 2018 for newbie authors.

Fewer than two percent of actors in North America make a living from acting. Only 12 percent of SAG / AFTRA actors make more than $1,000 a year. They subsidize their acting careers with other jobs: they teach, they coach, they narrate audio-books, they entertain at corporate rah-rah sessions, they play costumed characters at amusement parks; they’re waiters or bartenders or admins or delivery drivers or realtors; they’re independently wealthy, or they’re supported by their parents (and that doesn’t even include “nepo babies” whose parents are already industry insiders).

In Canada, two-thirds of people who work in film, video, and television production do so only part-time. Only one-third work full-time. The median wage for a movie Director or Producer in BC is $43 an hour in the Lower Mainland (mostly Vancouver) and $38 an hour on Vancouver Island (mostly Victoria); there is no movie-making industry elsewhere in the province. And the industry that exists is providing support services to Hollywood projects that shoot here, not creators making their own movies.

And don’t forget, those figures are heavily skewed by survivorship bias; they don’t count the much greater number of people who try for a career in movie-making and fail out. These figures are for people who have already broken in to the professional (i.e. “Hollywood north”) industry; the figures are even lower for independent creators. And “part time” covers a lot; one-third of Directors who make one feature-length movie never make another.

So let’s say you work half-time (a generous assumption) in the Vancouver industry — 20 hours per week, every week of the year. That gives you a gross annual income of $44,720. The average (mean) income of a full-time worker in Vancouver is $65,600, and the median income is $46,800; the “living wage” is $58,000 a year. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $33,600 a year. Run the numbers, and you can calculate how much your day job needs to pay you for you to survive.

If you make independent movies, and you earn back the money you spent to make the movie, you are doing very well — better than almost everyone else who is doing the same thing. Only two to three percent of independent movies earn back their production budgets. That’s not a fifty / fifty chance; that’s a one-in-fifty chance. And again, this figure is inflated by survivorship bias. The overwhelming odds are that you are going to lose money making your movie. You need that middle-class income.

(Do keep in mind that the term “independent” means only “not directly financed by one of Big Five (soon to be Big Three) Hollywood studios”. Some of those movies counted as “independent” have $100-million budgets and Hollywood A-list stars. The new “NonDe movement” is attempting to promulgate the term “non-dependent” movie-making for their dream of a movie-making ecosystem that is separate from, and does not depend on, the Hollywood system.)

And those figures are for people already working in The Industry! If you’re a newbie, you can’t expect to do that well If you work hard, you’re about six years away from being in that position.

If you’re a Minor Mogul and want to make movies truly independently (or perhaps “non-dependently”), that whole world is both inaccessible to you and irrelevant to you. The good thing about being independent is that you don’t have to wait for other people to hire you; you create your own opportunities and define your own success. The bad thing is that there is nobody else to pay you; you will earn as much money as you are able to make. And because you’re not playing in the Major League of Hollywood projects, you will make less money.

None of this should discourage you from making movies! For one thing, none of us would be doing this if we didn’t believe we would be the exception. Dream big — but keep one foot in the real world!

Make movies because you love movies! Make movies because you have something to say! That doesn’t have to mean some profound philosophical statement about the nature of being; maybe you just want to scare people, or make them laugh, or thrill them — that’s still a noble vocation. Ignore Hollywood and its four-quadrant demographic targets, its bean-counters and gate-keepers and corporate cowards. Make the movies you want to make — that only you can make!

However . . .

You will never make a living doing this.

Sorry to kill your dream. Now grow up and confront the world as it is, not as how you wish it was. Make a movie anyway!