Hello, all 469 of you wonderful subscribers. And an epic thank you (thank you!) for your support, all in the space of a week.
For the next few weeks, I’m in NYC. I’m also attending the inaugural Uncharted entertainment summit Friday, which means I get to stop by my former colleague Eric Kohn’s stomping ground, Southampton Playhouse, for a special screening of “Taxi Driver” followed by a Q&A with Paul Schrader.
I’m excited to have an extended stay, which comes courtesy of my husband David working here for a spell. (He’s a supervising art director.) NYC production is downright zippy at the moment. Everyone here seems to be working, which is stunning when LA remains dire. Diving into that may be a topic for a future newsletter, but for now I’ll say that I don’t know if LA production can even be solved by state incentives. Your opinions welcome! [email protected].
Speaking of money in search of the right place to land, that’s what I want to talk about this week.
I can’t carbon date the moments when film, TV, advertising, creators, and platforms began their seismic changes, but they all hit the oh-shit-this-is-real register in the last two years. That tends to freeze capital in its tracks: If it looks like a downturn, investors don’t want to catch falling knives. If it looks like new growth, who knows if you can trust it?
(In our house, we subscribe to “Good luck, bad luck, who knows?” But I digress.)
By now, the pennies have dropped: Ads don’t work. Film and TV have hit a real spot of bother. Creators are real businesses. Platforms must fight for supremacy. (Welcome, YouTube!) Nothing is settled, but a certain reality has been established.
That’s when the capital gets curious again. And there’s creative opportunities aplenty, but few that make themselves bankable.
We’ve got lenders eager — eager! — to make production loans, The Ankler reports. The catch? Two words: “bankable transactions.”
Two more words are “conviction assets,” which sounds like what happens after a forensic IRS audit. However, it’s what global consulting firm FTI calls the kind of deals that investors make because their fundamentals are self evident. They’re willing to spend big on these — and a lot less interested in spending anything if the deal can’t make a compelling case. At the start of 2026, FTI said global private markets sat on nearly $4 trillion in undeployed capital.
Before anyone volunteers as tribute, moving past the oh-shit of it all is not the same thing as going back to normal. We don’t have a normal. We have a Story Economy comprised of industries that are used to running their own tables—only, as we’re watching Neal Mohan learn in real time, success now demands a certain codependency.
This is a problem. Brands want to invest in narratives that people want to watch, film and TV want to invest in the right platforms, and everyone says they want to invest in creators, but no one can agree on the metrics.
Take those creators, which sent agents scurrying after the recent “Iron Backsessions” trifecta. The ones they really want have owned audiences, durable engagement, and commercial conversion, none of which are self evident in follower counts.
Each of these industries has its own KPIs and ROIs, with no interest in adapting anyone else’s — and why would they? The Story Economy may demand alignment, but its industries are discrete. No matter how much a brand genuinely loves great storytelling, revenue will come from selling the widgets.
This issue is particularly acute for filmmakers, who belong to an industry that doesn’t really do transparent or investor-accessible metrics. Theirs tend to be ineffables like passion, belief, and relationships, supplemented by box-office statistics with a tenuous relationship to what anyone actually earned.
Yes, studios have their quadrants, franchises, focus groups, test screenings, and massive stores of proprietary data. But that intelligence is fragmented, jealously guarded, and largely unavailable to almost everyone — including outsiders attempting to assess an investment.
Startups raise money all the time without established revenue or product-market fit. They also know how to present themselves with a grammar that investors recognize: market size, growth model, customer acquisition, margins, milestones, comps, and possible exits.
Many creative pitches still begin somewhere else entirely. My friend Phil McKenzie at UK entertainment finance and production group Goldfinch recently posted a piquant LinkedIn rant on this point:
Whether you're a filmmaker, a TV producer, a musician, an influencer or a games studio, stop sending investors your script because they don't want to read it & stop leading with your reel because they don't want to watch it. Not because they don't care about the creative but because they need to understand the business before they can appreciate what the creative is worth.
We've reviewed hundreds of creative sector pitches this year and I can count on one hand how many presented like a professional investment opportunity.
Teams that can share a pizza are raising billions of dollars right now with a deck and clear fundamentals, while our sector is still walking into rooms hoping someone falls in love with the story enough to write a cheque.
The biggest barrier (IMHO) is a mindset shift from thinking like an artist to thinking like a founder…. whether you're a filmmaker, a TV producer, a musician, an influencer or a games studio.
This doesn’t mean creatives should contort themselves into tech founders, or pretend a movie behaves like SaaS. A beautiful deck and an AI-generated financial model can make a proposition look professional; it may or may not make it investable.
A film is a project with bounded revenue. A production company is an operating business. A library or franchise is an asset with the potential for recurring monetization. Those propositions require different capital, different metrics, and different expectations.
The creative sector needs to learn the grammar of capital without surrendering what makes creative assets distinct.
Money is there. Stories are there. What’s not there: a shared way to see where the value lives. And that’s part of what Flamingo intends to build.