We Make Movies. Fandom Grows Between Them.
Audience Reality Check #6
Posters for Indie Game: The Movie, Nirvana the Band, the Show, the Movie, and Middle Life.
The Canadian film industry is urgently looking for ways to build sustainable audiences. But the screen sector often confuses “creators” with “influencers,” leading filmmakers to believe they must perform viral dances, expose their personal lives or constantly chase algorithmic trends to find an audience. That is not the lesson of the creator economy.
As Christie Marchese recently argued, filmmakers do not need to become influencers. They do need to think more like creators by communicating directly, sharing their process, providing value and building relationships with audiences before asking those audiences to buy a ticket. However, in digital spaces, relying solely on social platforms means renting reach that can disappear with a single algorithm update. Reach tells us how many people may have encountered a message. A following tells us how many people have agreed to receive more.
A true fandom goes much further. It is attention that has acquired memory, identity and agency. Fans return, recommend, gather, create and carry their interest from one project to another. To cultivate that kind of relationship, Canadian filmmakers need to adopt the enterprise mindset of digital-first creators, shifting from temporary platform reach toward direct, permission-based audience infrastructure that can survive beyond one campaign or one film.
Offer Value and Invite Audiences In
A fandom is not simply a group of people waiting to buy tickets. Successful creators frequently act as educators, curators, entertainers or community conveners. Filmmakers should ask what their projects can contribute to an intended community even before anyone watches the finished film. Educational resources, cultural context, community conversations, advocacy tools and access to the creative process can all build trust. They give audiences a reason to care when there is no immediate transaction on the table.
Digital creators also do not wait until their work is finished to begin talking with their audiences. By contrast, the traditional film industry often keeps a project hidden until a trailer appears shortly before release, then expects people to care immediately. Filmmakers can invite audiences into the journey through research discoveries, story dilemmas, locations, creative decisions and related cultural conversations. This does not mean turning every production into a nonstop stream of promotional content. It means giving people more than one doorway into the work.
Three Canadian Paths to Fandom
Three Canadian films help illustrate how differently fandom can develop. Middle Life drew on an adjacent cultural community through its connection to July Talk. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie emerged from characters and intellectual property that had accumulated a cult following across formats and generations. Indie Game: The Movie cultivated its audience while the project was still being made. Together, they show that fandom may be borrowed, accumulated or built through direct participation.
Pavan Moondi’s independently financed romantic comedy Middle Life benefited from an audience relationship that already existed. Its stars, Peter Dreimanis and Leah Fay Goldstein, brought a connection to the July Talk fanbase. That audience helped strengthen the film’s financing case. Enthusiastic responses during festivals and one-off screenings created further momentum, eventually leading to a special one-night screening at 13 Cineplex locations across Canada. The film did not manufacture an entirely new fandom. It entered a cultural relationship that already existed and demonstrated that the relationship could produce action.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie offers a different model. Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol developed a cult audience around their characters and comic world over many years before expanding it into a feature film. The movie rewarded existing fans while sending a new generation of viewers looking for the earlier series. The Canada Media Fund reported that demand for the series was 16 times higher than the Canadian market average, despite the show being almost impossible to access legally in Canada. The fandom had done the difficult work of keeping the property culturally alive. The distribution infrastructure had not kept up.
Then there is Indie Game: The Movie, whose Winnipeg filmmakers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky began cultivating an audience while making the documentary. Crowdfunding helped finance the production while identifying a highly engaged community. The filmmakers communicated directly with that audience, organized event screenings and made the film available through Steam, where gamers were already gathering. Their hybrid strategy included a simultaneous national event in 37 Canadian cinemas, a theatrical-on-demand tour and digital distribution through both conventional services and gaming platforms. They did not treat audience as the final stage of the process. Audience knowledge shaped the financing, release and long-term business strategy from the beginning.
These three films illustrate different routes to fandom. It may travel into a film through a performer or adjacent cultural community. It may accumulate around characters and intellectual property across years and formats. Or it may be cultivated alongside the project through participation and direct exchange. In each case, fandom creates leverage when it produces behaviour: financing confidence, ticket purchases, event attendance, recommendations or demand for more.
But each case also raises the same structural question: Once filmmakers activate that demand, is the Canadian system ready to meet it?
Participation Turns Interest into Belonging
Fandom becomes stronger when audiences can do more than receive promotional messages. Filmmakers can make fans feel they are participants in journey of a film. This works when people are given a genuine role, whether by sharing knowledge, hosting a screening, contributing a creative response or helping the film enter communities the filmmakers could not reach alone.
The one-night Middle Life screenings, the national cinema event for Indie Game: The Movie and the renewed demand surrounding Nirvanna the Band the Show all demonstrate that audiences do not simply consume. They gather, search, recommend and carry the work forward.
The goal is not merely to make people afraid of missing something. It is to give them a reason to participate and a reason to return.
Connection Has a Human Cost
These examples also reveal an important business reality.
Moondi and the stars of Middle Life were booking theatres, cutting trailers, editing social videos, creating posters and managing much of the release themselves. Moondi described the experience as valuable, but was also candid that he hoped never to have to do it again.
The creators of Indie Game: The Movie maintained an extraordinarily active relationship with their audience over several years. That dedication helped create cultural and commercial value, but it also required an enormous and continuing commitment.
Direct audience connection without adequate support can be exhausting. The pressure is not only operational. Strong audience relationships can also produce parasocial expectations, in which people feel personally close to a filmmaker, performer or creator they do not actually know. That connection can be meaningful. It can help audiences feel recognized, represented or less alone. But it can also create expectations of constant access, intimacy or emotional care.
Authenticity does not require the filmmaker to always be the emotional centre of the fandom. Connection can develop around the storyworld, the subject, an ensemble, a production-company voice, a community partner or the audience’s relationships with one another. Creator thinking should not become a euphemism for asking filmmakers to act as their own distributor, trailer editor, social strategist, community manager and emotional support system.
When funders encourage filmmakers to build communities fandoms, budgets must also allow for community management, moderation, digital safety, communications planning and clear boundaries.
The Infrastructure to Meet the Momentum
Building a fandom is not a marketing tactic bolted onto the end of post-production. It is an enterprise strategy. When a Canadian film demonstrates credible audience potential, the system should help turn that momentum into sustainable distribution rather than leaving filmmakers to recreate the missing infrastructure themselves.
Telefilm’s revised Marketing Program creates an important opening by allowing earlier, longer-lead activities such as impact campaigns and social content development. But it is an opening, not yet a complete solution. Supporting fandoms means investing in audience research, community partnerships and direct infrastructure that can continue beyond one release. That could include independent websites, newsletters, permission-based audience databases, accessibility, multilingual content, community management and ethical audience analysis.
It also means ensuring that the underlying work remains available when interest grows. The Nirvanna example reminds us that audience infrastructure includes catalogue access, rights management and pathways that allow people to move through a creator’s larger body of work. These assets should not disappear when a film’s marketing campaign ends. They can help a filmmaker or production company maintain relationships across several projects.
Measure Relationships, Not Just Reach
Measurement must also move beyond passive reach. A film that reaches fewer people but builds a durable and responsive community may create more long-term value than one that produces a brief spike in impressions and disappears.
Telefilm and other funders could begin tracking audience-relationship indicators such as:
Growth and retention of permission-based email subscribers
Conversion from newsletter, social or partner outreach into ticket sales, streams or screening registrations
Repeat attendance across screenings, releases or related projects
The number of community-hosted screenings and local partners involved
Referral rates and audience-generated recommendations
Participation in strategy screenings, live events or community discussions
Audience-created content, reviews or cultural responses
Movement from one title into a filmmaker’s catalogue or wider body of work
The strength and duration of community partnerships
The percentage of audience contacts retained after the formal campaign ends
These metrics would not replace box office, platform views or total reach. They would help explain how people moved from awareness to action and whether the relationship continued afterward. Reach tells us how far a message travelled. Fandom tells us whether anyone carried it forward.
Funders cannot manufacture fandom. But they can support the conditions in which it grows: time, trust, value, participation, continuity and direct connection. Filmmakers need to be identifying, earning and activating audience relationships. And when those relationships begin producing evidence of demand, the Canadian system needs infrastructure capable of meeting that momentum.
Canada cannot fund a one-week launch and expect a ten-year relationship.