When I last posted on Substack, Original Sound was about to open in theaters.

Fifty-eight screens. Nationwide. One guaranteed weekend. A marketing campaign that had been running for months. A team pushing every button we could find. Press, screenings, social posts, soundtrack drops, theater listings, ticketing links, showtimes that appeared and disappeared and frequently made no earthly sense.

At the time, I wrote about the strange loss of control that happens when an indie film finally leaves your hands and enters the world.

Then I disappeared for a few weeks.

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I mean, I was still working. Working a lot. But I stopped writing about it in real time, partly because there was too much happening, and partly because I needed a hot minute to metabolize the whole thing.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from pushing a creative project toward its public life. You spend years trying to get it made (this particular project came onto my slate in 2018). Then months trying to get it seen (we pitched to both insiders and outsiders for about 14 months before finalizing the rollout). Then we had that super intense stretch trying to persuade people to leave their homes, check showtimes, buy tickets, and walk into a theater.

And then, once it happens, you realize the project has moved into a new phase whether you are emotionally ready or not.

The theatrical release happened. The movie met audiences. Some people found it in theaters. Some didn’t. Some people told us how much they loved it. Some posted about it. Some people brought friends. Some discovered the soundtrack. Some people really, really meant to go, but then life intervened, as life rudely insists on doing.

And now we’re here.

Original Sound is coming to Apple and Amazon starting June 26. And starting tomorrow, we’re doing a Flash Sale on Apple, which means there’s a short window to grab the film at a special price.

So, if you missed the theatrical release, or if your local theater gave it a 9:00 a.m. screening time in a location where no emotionally stable person should be before coffee, this is your chance. It means the world for indie films to have those pre-sales on Apple. The algorithm must be fed! So please buy during this flash sale if you’re at all inclined to see this movie.

I am, of course, thrilled. I am also learning, again!, that distribution is not one event. You think the finish line is production. Then the finish line is post. Then it is the theatrical opening. Then the holdover. Then–go downstream!--the finish is online platforms. Then the finish line is getting people to notice that the film is streaming on those platforms. And then we wade through international sales.

The glamour is relentless.

And I still have no control over most of it. As I write this, the Apple Flash Sale is supposed to go live in about eight hours. Do we have final confirmation that this will happen? We do not.

This, apparently, is how distribution works now. You make a plan. You announce it. You apologize that the plan didn’t quite work out and/or you rejoice that you do not look like a total idiot because the flash sale happened when you said it would.

So if you click over to Apple and the discount is there: wonderful. Please enjoy our brief and beautiful moment of operational success.

And if you click over and there is no discount yet, bear with us. Check back. Maybe give it a few hours. And whisper encouraging things to the algorithm while you’re checking.

During my weeks away from this newsletter, I started asking myself a question that a lot of creative professionals are asking: what am I doing with all of this?

The writing. The advising. The producing. The marketing. The posting. The platform maintenance. The “being visible.” The constant attempt to explain what is happening while it is happening.

I started Showbizing Strategies because I wanted to help people in the entertainment industry navigate careers that are, by nature, unstable, opaque and frequently absurd. That still feels useful to me.

But the world has changed. The industry has changed. Attention has changed. Career advice is everywhere now. You can ask an AI tool to generate a five-step plan for almost anything. You can find a coach, a consultant, a guru, a thread, a webinar, a downloadable PDF, and a person on LinkedIn telling you to “own your narrative” before you’ve had breakfast.

So the question becomes: what is actually valuable now?

I don’t think the answer is more content.

I think the answer is judgment. Not generic advice. Not “build your brand.” Not “network more.” Not “just put yourself out there,” which remains one of the least helpful sentences in the English language.

I mean the kind of judgment that comes from knowing how the entertainment industry actually behaves. How projects stall. How opportunities appear sideways. How people say “yes” when they mean “maybe”. They say “maybe” when they mean “no”. They say “no” when they actually mean “ask me again when someone more powerful is attached.”

I mean the kind of judgment that helps you decide what to do next when there is no obvious next step.

That is still needed. Maybe now more than ever.

So what happens to this newsletter? I don’t think I’m going back to writing every week just because Thursday has arrived and the internet is hungry. That model starts to feel like feeding a nasty dragon. The dragon is never full. And yet, the dragon also does not pay for Zoom or LinkedIn Premium or IMDb.pro or the dozen other services and trade publications to which we subscribe to keep in sync with the industry and sustain our careers in this tech-driven era.

For now, I’m going to treat this newsletter less like a publishing obligation and more like a place to think clearly about the work: producing, career strategy, creative momentum, distribution, reinvention, and the increasingly strange business of the entertainment industry.

Sometimes I’ll write about Original Sound and other projects on my slate. Or I’ll write about what I’m learning as a working, indie producer. I’ll write about career strategy for actors, writers, producers, directors and other entertainment professionals trying to make sense of a changing industry. Sometimes I may use this space to work through ideas that belong in a book. (Yes, the book is still lurking. No, I have not yet wrestled it to the ground. We are circling each other politely.)

But I want the writing to be useful. Useful. That’s the bar.

And for the many of you who have booked one, if you need a strategy session, well, the one thing that has stayed very clear to me is that people still need focused, practical, experienced guidance. Not forever. Not always in some giant coaching container.

Sometimes what you need is one hour with someone who can help you untangle the question in front of you. Should I take this job? Should I leave this rep? How do I talk about this project? Am I actually stuck, or am I avoiding the obvious next move? What should I do with this script, this film, this offer, this career pivot, this weird email, this person who keeps saying they “love it” but has not done anything measurable since February 2024.

These are the conversations I like having.

So I’m still offering a limited number of strategy sessions each month.These are $250, focused, practical, and designed to help you leave with a clearer plan than the one you came in with.

For today, though, the main thing is this: Original Sound is heading to Apple and Amazon on June 26. The Apple Flash Sale begins tomorrow. Or so we hope. (See above re: control and lack thereof.)

If you watch it, thank you. If you share or favorably review it, thank you twice and thrice. If you missed it in theaters because the showtime was scheduled during what I can only describe as raccoon hours, I totally get it, no worries.

The important thing is that Original Sound is still very much alive. And apparently, so is this newsletter. Thanks for being a part of it.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

We’re opening Original Sound this weekend. On 58 screens. Nationwide.

I’m excited. Truly. After many years in the making, this is the moment where the film finally meets an audience in a theater, with all the energy and unpredictability that comes with that.

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The run-up to our opening weekend has been a whirlwind in the best possible way.

On Monday, we held simultaneous screenings on both coasts—one hosted by the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and another by Collider in Los Angeles. The rooms were filled with industry and influencers. There was popcorn, there were photos, and there was that unmistakable buzz that happens when something is actually connecting.

People stayed after. They talked. They posted. Social media lit up in a way that felt organic and earned.

We’ve had a strong wave of press all week, much of it hitting right now to align with our opening. Our marketing campaign has been running since mid-February, when we identified our DMAs and began geo-targeting both paid and organic social. The team has been exceptional, and the cast has been incredibly generous in helping amplify the film.

One of our top-performing posts—a video with David Lambert and Laura Marano having a lot of goofy fun—pulled over 83,000 views and thousands of interactions. We’ve been dropping singles from the soundtrack on Spotify and Apple Music. Everything has been building the way you hope it will.

We definitely have some momentum going into this weekend.

But is it enough?

Because getting an indie film into theaters is a crazy process. Next-level crazy. Cray-cray-crazy.

Over half of our 58 theaters didn’t confirm their bookings until Monday. Five days before opening. Which, if you’re trying to make sure that the people living near the cinema know about your film, is not ideal.

Then there’s the ticketing. We told everyone tickets would go on sale April 20. April 20 arrived. Again, over half the theaters didn’t even have the film listed on their site yet. Regal Theatres, which booked us into eleven of their cinemas, still doesn’t have our screen times listed, and we open tomorrow.

Even the idea of an opening date—normally a concrete concept—is fluid. We’ve been telling everyone for months that our opening is April 24. That’s the date printed on the posters we sent to the theaters. So why are some theaters are starting to show the film on April 23? How will anyone know to show up for it?

And then, of course, there are showtimes.

AMC Empire 25 in New York City has our film screening on Saturday at 9:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. Which is objectively hilarious. Going to Times Square at those hours is less “let’s go have a great movie-going experience” and more “how did I get here and why is Elmo harassing me.”

And here’s the kicker. We are only guaranteed one weekend. That’s it.

If our box office is strong enough this opening weekend, then we may get held over for another week. Then the following Monday, we find out if we’ve earned another week after that. And then again the next Monday. Each individual exhibitor decides week by week which films will live to see another day.

And if an exhibitor—who is, very reasonably, in the business of making money—believes another film will perform better, they will adjust. A studio film like Michael opens stronger than expected and suddenly the calculus shifts. If they think it will generate more revenue, they move it into better slots on more screens.

Which means you move out. Maybe to 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday. Maybe off the schedule entirely. So opening weekend isn’t just a milestone. It’s a test.

Which brings me to the second thing I cannot control.

You.

After months of building awareness, running campaigns, doing press—after all of it—there is still one simple question sitting at the center of this weekend:

Will people actually go? Will they look up a showtime (assuming it’s listed), fork over the bucks, and walk into a theater?

That’s the leap. That’s always the leap in the entertainment industry.

So here’s what I’m doing. I’m pretending I don’t care about not having control. Instead, I’m leaning into the momentum we have built. And I’m inviting you in.

Go see Original Sound this weekend.

Find a theater near you on our website. (Refresh if needed. Possibly more than once. Consider it part of an immersive experience.)

If you’re in New York City, on Friday, April 24 I’ll be at the Village East on Second Avenue and 12th Street for the 6:30 p.m. screening (a normal, human time). Come say hello and then escape for 98 minutes into the fun, music-driven world of Original Sound. No violence. No politics. No nudity. (Although we do make very good use of the word “f*ck”.)

Because at the end of the day, this is what all of it is for. You build momentum. You get your creative project as far down the field as you possibly can. And then, at a certain point, you have to let it go. You have to let other people touch it. Interpret it. Support it. Or not.

Having the appearance of control is part of the job. But having no control is also the crazy endgame of the entertainment industry.

See you at the movies!?

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

Last week I recorded an interview for a terrific podcast called Get Set!, hosted by Monique Schwaneman and Jessica Payne. We had a lively conversation about creativity, careers and the strange ecosystem that is the entertainment industry.

I highly recommend the show, although I cannot recommend the episode I will be on. Because oh man, about halfway through, I realized I was blithering.

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At one point, the discussion drifted toward career paths. And that’s when it happened. I started listing things. Producing. Touring. Coaching. I invoked the pandemic at least 50 times. And on and on. All true. All part of my journey.

The problem was that I had forgotten something that I coach people on all the time: you have to edit the story.

Otherwise, you’re blithering.

The Multi-Hyphenate Reality

The entertainment industry no longer runs on tidy job descriptions.

Most pros are doing many jobs at once or juggling a slate of projects. A writer also edits. A producer also consults on small business strategies. A director also teaches. Those multiple hats are simply part of the modern creative economy.

Talk to almost anyone who has stayed in this industry long enough and you’ll hear a similar pattern. The work evolves. The roles expand. Opportunities appear in unexpected places.

The challenge isn’t that you do many things. The challenge is that when someone asks what you do, your brain tries to explain all of them at once. You want to be accurate. You want to give context. You want people to understand the full range of your experience.

But most people aren’t asking for your entire biography. They’re asking for the headline. And when the answer becomes a rapid-fire list of titles, projects and pivots, people stop hearing you.

You do not need one exclusive answer to the question, “What do you do?” In reality, the best answer depends entirely on the situation.

At a networking event, your introduction should be simple and memorable. I myself have used “Squirrel Whisperer” as my title on many occasions.

In a pitch meeting, you emphasize the role that gives you credibility for that particular project.

On a podcast, you might share a longer narrative about how your career evolved. But please…don’t blither.

A Simple Exercise

If you’re struggling with how to describe your work, try this. Write down everything you do professionally. Every role. Every skill. Every type of project.

Then, seriously, take a moment to acknowledge the depth of your resilence and the scope of your accomplishments.

Now circle the one identity that best represents the work you most want to do going forward. That becomes your headline. Everything else becomes supporting material. You’re not erasing your multi-hyphenate career. You’re simply making it understandable.

So while I was kindly assured by the Get Set! hosts that I was far more coherent than my internal commentary insists upon, the moment was a good reminder. The more experience you accumulate in this industry, the more important it becomes to edit your own story.

And hey, duly noted that even the teacher occasionally needs a refresher course.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

Early in my career, I stumbled into a job at Actors’ Equity Association.

I can assure you I wasn’t plotting a strategic path toward a life of union rules and welfare contributions. I was simply trying to survive in the entertainment industry and figure out where I belonged.

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I didn’t stay long, but what I learned about contracts, labor law and production administration turned out to be incredibly valuable. Decades later, those lessons still influence the way I produce theater and film projects.

Later in my career, I realized something that surprised me: this stumbling phase is the norm. It wasn’t just me! Most people in showbiz start their careers by wandering around in the dark. Some wander for many years. There’s no manual. You take one job, then another. You meet people. You learn systems. Slowly the fog lifts.

And over time, I also noticed something else.The people who eventually find their footing in this industry tend to have a really impressive toolkit. They collect knowledge, resources and strategies that help navigate an unpredictable business.

And those tools are evolving quickly.

I’ve seen this firsthand while distributing my film Original Sound. In the past, filmmakers could hand their projects to a distributor and step aside. Today, creators are expected to understand the machinery of distribution and marketing themselves, especially if they have any interest in recoupment.

Which means discovering a whole, new universe of tools.

Regardless of where you’re at in the lifespan of your creative projects, here are a few resources that are worth adding to your toolkit.

Tools That Help You Find Work

Let’s start with the obvious one: jobs.

In a post last year, I shared a long list of industry-specific job boards that can help you track legitimate opportunities across film, television and theater. That list includes:

Showbiz Jobs
The Mandy Network
Production Hub

Not on that list (because I didn’t know about it at the time) is Film Local, which sends a weekly email with geo-targeted job listings.

All of these sites are super useful for understanding what skills employers are currently seeking. Based on that research, you can re-tool your resume to highlight in-demand skills. (And if you need help with your resume, hit me up and I’ll send you a free tool to help you optimize yours.)

Still, I always remind my clients that your next job is far more likely to come through someone you know than through a website listing. Networking remains the single most reliable job board in the business. The job boards help you stay informed. Relationships help you get hired.

Tools That Help You Stay Sane

Another set of resources focuses on something the entertainment industry historically ignored: mental health.

This business can be exhilarating. It can also be unstable and psychologically demanding. Thankfully, there are organizations dedicated specifically to supporting entertainment professionals.

Behind the Scenes and the Entertainment Community Fund provide counseling resources, emergency financial assistance and other support programs tailored to people working in film, television and theater. (In other words, help that doesn’t require you to spend your first three therapy sessions explaining what a tech rehearsal is or why your income isn’t always predictable.)

Tools That Help You Understand the Business

While navigating distribution for Original Sound, I discovered The Numbers, which escaped my attention for decades, and I confess I spent an embarrassing amount of time on the website upon discovery. It provides detailed box office data, theater counts, weekend predictions and marketing analytics.

If you want to understand how films–whether franchise movies playing on 4,000+ screens or indie films playing on only four–actually perform in the marketplace, the site is an extraordinary amount of industry intelligence in one place. (Playbill tracks Broadway grosses.)

Another useful resource is Letterboxd. On the surface it’s a social network for film lovers. In practice, it’s a fascinating window into how audiences are responding to a project. Producers, distributors and marketers monitor Letterboxd to see what films are gaining momentum, how viewers interpret certain genres and which titles are becoming cult favorites.

Tools That Help You Make Things

Of course, data is only helpful if you’re actually creating something. A number of platforms now help streamline the practical logistics of production.

StudioBinder helps teams manage call sheets, shot lists, schedules and production communication. It’s widely used by film crews and can also be useful for theater teams coordinating complex rehearsal or touring logistics.

Another very handy tool is ShotDeck, a visual search engine built from thousands of film stills. Directors, cinematographers and production designers use it to build lookbooks, study visual styles and spark ideas for everything from film scenes to stage design.

Newer to this category is Storiara. They claim to transform a script into production planning materials such as breakdowns, schedules and budgets. I’ve explored it briefly, so the jury is still out. But it sits alongside a growing ecosystem of script-to-production tools that seem to compete nicely with the pricier traditional options like Movie Magic.

Tools That Help You Distribute Your Work

Finally, there are tools designed to help projects actually reach audiences.

Cinema Cloud Works helps filmmakers manage theatrical bookings and cinema delivery, making it easier to coordinate screenings with theaters.

Another platform that rose to fame during the pandemic is Eventive, which many film festivals and indie distributors now use to manage virtual screenings, ticketing and hybrid release strategies. For creators experimenting with event-based distribution or community screenings, it has become an increasingly important tool.

Bitmax is a distribution platform used by a rapidly-growing number of indie creators to deliver film and television content to streaming services. As the technical side of distribution grows more complex, companies like Bitmax are now playing a central role in getting content from creators to audiences without an expensive middleman.

In an era when creators must take a more hands-on approach to distribution, platforms like these are becoming sexier by the minute.

The entertainment industry has never come with an instruction manual. But the toolbox available to creators keeps getting bigger, and half the battle is simply knowing these resources exist.

Whether you’re making theater or films, the people who sustain careers in this business tend to share one routine:

They keep learning.
They keep experimenting.
And they keep expanding their toolkit.

Because in showbiz, longevity rarely comes from having the perfect plan. It comes from knowing which tool to reach for next,

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

A funny thing happens when you release an indie film in 2026. You start the week thinking you’re a producer. By Friday, you’re a CEO of a small but complicated retail empire.

When we decided to launch the Original Sound merch store, I was thinking about aesthetics. The curve of a hat brim. The weight of the t-shirt fabric. Whether the logo should feel downtown cool or retro.

What I got instead was a crash course in interstate tax law. Because you no longer just make a film or stage a piece of theater. You run a business.

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Which means you start thinking about things you never imagined caring about: protecting the margins.

Let’s say you sell a $30 t-shirt through a print-on-demand partner like Printful. On paper the math looks clean. Maybe the shirt costs about $20 to produce and ship. You clear around $10.

Lovely. Except.

If you don’t have your paperwork in order, the tax system can really mess you up. First, Printful charges you sales tax on the wholesale cost of the shirt. Then you’re legally required to collect sales tax from your customer on the retail price. Suddenly that $10 margin starts shrinking, and you go from having a clever additional revenue stream to owning a hobby that loses money.

So how do you avoid double taxation? Paperwork of the bureaucratic variety.

Since we shot the film in New York, we had already registered our LLC with the NYS Department of Taxation & Finance. It took around two weeks for us to receive our “Certificate of Authority”, which allowed us to be tax exempt on some purchases during production.

That same Certificate meant we were authorized to file a different form with Printful. The form itself has all the glamour of a DMV waiting room. It’s called ST-120. It took me three times to get it right, but once our ST-120 was accepted by Printful, it functioned as what they call an “alternative document” in roughly 30 other states.

In other words, by uploading one piece of paperwork, we unlocked tax-exempt wholesale purchasing across most of the country.

It felt like finding free money in the couch cushions of the internet.

If you’re a remote seller and your revenue stays under the Economic Nexus threshold (usually about $100,000 per state), this is a golden ticket to protecting your margins. (And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how fun it was learning what an “Economic Nexus” is.)

Trucker hats and t-shirts turned out to be the easy part. The real adventure was the vinyl.

We wanted a limited run of 250 records of the Original Sound soundtrack. The kind of artifact someone might still own twenty years from now. I don’t even own a turntable, but vinyl is apparently all the rage with Gen Z, and they are a meaningful part of our target audience.

After getting the tracks mastered, we had to get “electro-formed stampers” made by a place called The Bakery in LA. They helped us find a pressing plant called Physical Music Products in Tennessee that could handle the high-fidelity pressing we needed for the Erik Blicker and Glenn Schloss score.

We’re taking pre-orders now for our late April ship date, because pre-orders build the tribe early. We had our first three orders within the first 15 minutes of it going on sale. When those 250 fans spin that record, they aren’t just listening to music. They’re invested in the film’s theatrical and downstream runs.

Of course, once you’ve built a small interstate retail operation, the next question becomes: how do you turn merch into a marketing strategy?

Now that the store is live, we’re sending merch boxes to our principal cast with simple instructions: Open the box. Film your reaction. Pretend you are extremely excited about a trucker hat.

Those clips will give us fun social media fodder. Suddenly the merch promotes the film, the film promotes the merch and everyone gets to watch professional actors who are super jazzed about a trucker hat. Marketing departments used to pay a lot of money for this kind of content. Now it arrives via UPS.

Getting the store online was not glamorous. There were approximately 72 hours of staring at Squarespace fulfillment profiles, re-sizing photos, creating return policies and ticking off legal checkboxes required for Google marketplace listings. It was less “indie filmmaking” and more like managing a regional warehouse.

But once the heavy lifting is done, something magical happens. The system runs itself. Our vinyl ships from Tennessee. Our t-shirts ship from the cloud. Orders appear while I’m off creatively solving some other problem.

Three Lessons From Merch-land

If you’re launching a creative project in 2026, here are three things worth knowing when setting up your own online empire:

1. Protect your margins.
Get your state’s sales tax certificate and find out which other states will accept it. Avoiding double taxation can save you up to 12% on every order.

2. Price for the strict states.
Some places, like California, don’t honor certain certificates. Bake that tax into your retail price so you’re not eating the cost.

3. Automate everything.
Your goal is not to become a full-time merch manager. Your goal is to build a system that runs while you’re busy creating things.

In an earlier Distribution Diary post, I talked about how publicity campaigns unfold like a string of dominoes. One move activates the next. Press leads to awareness which leads to audience momentum.

Merch is another domino. Except this one also helps pay for the next round of dominoes.

Now that the store is up and running, we can turn our attention back to the next big question: how do you engineer a boffo opening weekend for an indie film?

That, my friends, will be a future installment of this distribution diary.

P.S. Check out the store!

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

I am one of the many citizens of the USA who claims to be Irish, usually after a whiskey and a story from my touring days that gets less reliable with every telling.

And Irish or not, I would like to say that Ireland is really on to something.

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Its Basic Income for the Arts pilot gave 2,000 artists €325 a week and the results were strong enough that the Irish government moved toward making it permanent. Because for every €1 invested, the good people of Ireland got €1.39 back. Participants spent eleven more hours per week on their creative practice than the control group and were less likely to leave the arts.

And let’s be clear: €325 a week (about $377 USD) is not a lot of money. It is not some glamorous life in a villa in Tuscany with a personal chef named Luca who brings you espresso while you ponder the fate of indie film.

It is rent help. Grocery money. Breathing room. That’s all.

And yet look what happened. Artists made more work. Society got more value.

That, to me, is the real point. Not only that artists struggle less when they have support, though of course that matters. It’s that all of us gain more when artists have a net. We get more music, more films, more poems, more plays, more paintings, more stories that help people make sense of being alive. We get work that deepens community, sharpens empathy and reminds us that human beings are more than consumers dragging ourselves from one expense to the next.

Ireland understood something most governments and industries forget: artists are infrastructure.

Especially in the United States, we define “useful” as people who make bridges, balance budgets, fix boilers and renovate, yet again, the Kennedy Center. And truly, I enjoy a functioning boiler as much as the next person.

But artists build things too. They build inner life. They build memory. They build meaning.

They build the stories a culture tells about itself when it is falling apart and trying to remember what matters.

Human beings do not claw their way through history sustained by quarterly earnings reports and Dow averages. We want a dark theater and a story that wrecks us in exactly the right way. We want songs and murals, protest posters and comedians that explain us to ourselves.

That was true in ancient civilizations. It was true in the United States during the New Deal, when federal arts programs funded writers, actors, directors and painters during the Depression. Culture was understood to be a meaningful part of public life.

Which raises an awkward question.

Five days of war spending at $1 billion a day is enough to fund about 255,000 artists for a full year at Ireland’s rate. (And that $1 billion per day figure is super conservative; estimates put the price tag for the first six days of the Iran war at over $11 billion.)

A culture that can spend that kind of money on destruction can surely afford to spend something on creation.

So no, this is not about whether the money exists. It does.

The real question is what we value, and whether we have enough imagination and courage to invest in the people who make life more human.

Now, while I would love the rest of the world to copy Ireland immediately, there is also a practical lesson here for indie creatives.

If nobody is handing you a net, build one, starting with your own finances.

“Side hustle” can sound like a LinkedIn bot who refers to coffee as a performance enhancer and wants you to wake up at 4:12 a.m. to optimize your mindset. But for indie creatives, a side hustle can be the difference between creative freedom and forced compromises.

Your side hustle does not have to be in the entertainment industry. In fact, it should not be. When strikes happen, pandemics erupt and AI disrupts, then buyers freeze, streamers merge, audiences pull back and investors vanish. Creatives with income coming from somewhere else have options. They can keep writing. Keep developing. Keep meeting. Keep making choices based on vision instead of fear.

And creative projects need nets too.

I’ve been thinking about this as we work on distribution for Original Sound. Our vinyl and DVD sales strategy is part of building a wider revenue net around the project. Physical media is finding its audience again, especially among Gen Z consumers who are tired of paying for five streaming services and still not being able to find the movie they want. They want to own what they love. They want access that does not disappear because a platform changed its mind on a random Tuesday. Our strategy is designed to meet them where they are at.

The net for your project might include a podcast, merchandise, collector editions, educational licensing, live events or marketing partnerships that expand the reach of the work.

Some of the best producing I know comes from refusing the false choice between art and strategy. The challenge of finding multiple paths for a project is its own creative act. It forces you to understand your audience more deeply. It forces you to think about how a story can reverberate in multiple formats. It forces you to build something that can sustain itself.

Build your net.

Build it for your life with an income stream that does not collapse every time the industry convulses. Build it for your projects with multiple ways for the work to reach people and generate value. Build it because when artists have a net, they make better work, take better risks, and give the rest of us more of what makes life feel livable in the first place.

Ireland ran the experiment. The results are in. Let’s all be Irish.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

Last year, Netflix said movie theaters were dead.

At the Time100 Summit in April 2025, co-CEO Ted Sarandos called the theatrical model outdated. Most people, he argued, don’t live close enough to a multiplex for it to matter.

Around the same time, in an interview at the Paley Center, he pointed to declining box office numbers and asked: what is the consumer trying to tell you?

The implication was clear. Streaming wasn’t just winning. It had already won.

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And then this week, in a Politico interview, Sarandos said something very different. He explained that Netflix has been having “really healthy conversations” with exhibitors. He expects a “much more creative relationship” with movie theaters going forward.

So, just to recap:

1. Theaters are dead.

2. The theatrical model is outdated.

3. We will collaborate with theaters.

If your head is spinning a little, like you just got dropped into the middle of Everything Everywhere All at Once, you’re in good company.

What do we learn from this? Not that Sarandos was wrong last year. And not that he’s right now.

Just that in this business, things spin quickly. The job is to keep your head on straight.

There’s a version of the entertainment industry that we all wish existed. In that version, things move in clean lines. One model replaces another. Old systems fade out. New ones take over. You pick a lane, commit, and then build your career or make plans for your project accordingly.

Of course, what actually happens is much messier. The industry doesn’t evolve in straight lines. It overcorrects, experiments, doubles back, and then rediscovers the very things it declared obsolete two years earlier.

Streaming didn’t kill theatrical. It disrupted it. Theatrical didn’t disappear. It got clobbered by the pandemic and is figuring out how to adapt. And now, the two are starting to collaborate.

Which isn’t really a plot twist. It’s just another turn.

And I’ve been getting a front-row seat to this lately.

I’ve been spending a lot of time learning more about theatrical distribution on a feature film of mine called Original Sound. And let me just say this: booking a theater is not for the faint of heart. It’s not a system you plug into. It’s a maze you navigate. A lot of moving pieces. A lot of people trying to make it work.

I’m still in the middle of it, so I’ll share more once I see where the maze ends. But even at this stage, one thing is already very clear: distribution is not a set of lanes. It’s a constantly shifting landscape.

So if Netflix is now exploring theatrical partnerships after publicly dismissing the model, it’s not because they suddenly had a change of heart. It’s because they’re responding to reality as it unfolds.

Audience behavior is fragmented. Attention is spread across platforms. Live experiences are gaining momentum. Digital distribution is still dominant. None of these things cancel each other out.

And increasingly, they overlap. Everything is happening everywhere, all at once.

The creators who are gaining traction right now are the ones building work that can move within this fluid landscape. Projects that aren’t locked into a single outcome. Stories that can live in more than one form. Ideas that can meet an audience in different ways, depending on the moment.

That doesn’t require a massive budget or a multi-platform empire. It requires a shift in mindset. Less “where does this belong?” and more “where could this go?”.

If the head of Netflix can pivot, it’s a good reminder that none of us need to be quite so rigid. The wall between streaming and theatrical wasn’t torn down. It was never as solid as it looked. The appearance of permanence was just a simplified, soundbite-y story of a very complicated business.

So don’t feel the need to pick a lane. Build something that can travel. Because in this version of the entertainment industry, flexibility isn’t just helpful. It’s how you keep your head on straight.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for creatives. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

If you don’t Google yourself regularly—once or twice a year—you’re essentially outsourcing your professional biography to a group project between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, large tech companies and artificial intelligence systems. Billionaires with murky goals. That’s a bold strategy.

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So I Googled myself the other day. And that’s when I noticed the Google Knowledge Panel.

The Knowledge Panel is the tidy little box that appears above or to the right of your search results in Chrome. It presents a supposedly authoritative snapshot of who you are and what you do.

My panel describes me like this:

Julie Crosby is a theater producer, advocate for women artists, and author. She was most recently the artistic director of Women’s Project Theater, where she produced 25 off-Broadway plays written and directed by women.

Now, I’m very proud of that work. My years at WP Theater were meaningful and formative, and I’m still deeply invested in the advancement of women artists.

But the phrasing “most recently” caught my eye. Because I left that role in 2014.

In internet years, that’s roughly the equivalent of people buying DVDs at Target, Facebook being at the center of the universe, and the cloud being an abstract concept.

The source for that summary turned out to be a HowlRound interview that P. Carl conducted at the end of my tenure at WP. Out of curiosity, I re-read the interview for the first time in twelve years. And you know what? It’s fantastic!

The conversation dives deeply into women in leadership, systemic bias in the arts, and the challenges of producing work by women. It’s thoughtful, substantive and a meaningful record of that chapter of my career.

No complaints. The problem is not that the source was bad.

The problem is that the internet decided this excellent interview from 2014 represents my entire professional life.

But I was busy before and after life at WP. Since 2014, I’ve produced other theater, a web series and independent films. I’ve built a career strategy practice for indie artists. I’ve been writing this Substack for more than three years.

None of that appeared in the panel. The internet has simply frozen me in time. Which matters more than you might think. Because before meetings, collaborations, hiring decisions, press coverage or investment conversations, people often do the same thing I did.

They Google your name.

And within about three seconds they form a mental category for who you are.

The catch is that Google’s Knowledge Panels are not written by you. They’re generated by algorithms pulling from sources Google considers authoritative. Those sources often reflect the moment when your public visibility was highest, or the version of your career that is easiest for the system to verify and summarize, not necessarily the work you’re doing now.

In other words, Google is not asking: “Who are you now?”

It’s asking: “What story about you can I assemble fastest from sources that have traffic?”

Now layer AI on top of that. AI systems summarize, interpret and recombine information from across the internet. But AI does not magically correct outdated or inaccurate source material. More often, it amplifies it.

Think about that.

If the internet has an incomplete or outdated understanding of your career (or history or current events), AI is most likely to simply package that misunderstanding in smoother, more authoritative language.

Which is why it’s worth remembering that technology is powerful, but it is not omniscient. And there is no reason to hand over authorship of your professional identity to whatever the internet happens to infer.

Fortunately, there is a small step you can take today: claim your Google Knowledge Panel.

If one exists for your name, you can verify ownership and evenutally gain some ability to suggest updates or corrections. Here’s how to proceed.

1. Google your name while logged into your Google account. Do not go incognito. If you have a Knowledge Panel, it will appear above or to the right of the search results.

2. Scroll through the panel until you find those three little dots and then find the link that says “Claim this knowledge panel.” Google will ask you to verify your identity by showing that you control official websites or professional profiles associated with your name. Be sure the screenshots show your name and the site owner (e.g. Squarespace, LinkedIn). Once approved, you can begin suggesting updates.

Fair warning: I am currently about two weeks into this process and getting mixed results, probably because I’m attempting to update more than a decade of accumulated internet residue.

And while you’re in this “branding” frame of mind, do one more useful thing.

Keep a running list of the places where your professional identity lives online. I keep mine in Google Keep so I can update them quickly: LinkedIn, IMDb, personal and business websites, Substack, alumni platforms, industry directories.

Your online presence exists across dozens of platforms. If you don’t occasionally align them, they drift apart. And eventually the internet starts telling a story about your career that you didn’t write, or about an experience that you don’t recall in the manner implied, or about some blip on your professional timeline that you’d rather forget.

So please Google yourself twice a year. Think of it as routine maintenance for your professional identity. It’s like getting your teeth cleaned. Just do it.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for creatives. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

Last Friday night, I was doing what one does in Buenos Aires on a balmy summer eve: drinking excellent and ridiculously low-priced champagne, eating Chinese and watching a movie with friends.

And about when Brad Pitt hit yet another snag in F1, my producing partner David Youse (five hours behind me and still at work in California) started texting what can only be described as excited producer dispatches about the press launch of our feature Original Sound.

“50,700 views on Instagram.”

“70,000 views on IG. Insane.”

“122,000 views. Off to rehearsal. Good night.”

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Because I’m not on Instagram, his updates included screenshots and rapidly escalating enthusiasm.

Within that first day, we racked up 597,000 views, 24,000 interactions, 759 saves and 445 shares.

Okay, these aren’t Mr. Beast or Markiplier stats, but these are very good numbers. (David assured me several times.)

And where, you may ask, did those numbers actually come from?

They came from the very first move in our release campaign: an exclusive “first look” with Playbill. Because distribution campaigns don’t have to begin with the biggest outlet. They begin with the first domino.

Why Playbill Was the First Move

We first placed an exclusive “first look” of the film’s poster and stills with Playbill, which published the story on their website. To amplify it, cast members Laura Marano, David Lambert and Constantine Maroulis collaborated with Playbill on an Instagram post promoting the article.

For those outside the theater ecosystem, Playbill might not immediately sound like the obvious starting point for a feature film campaign. But for us, it was perfect. Because Original Sound didn’t begin as a film. It began as a play at off-Broadway’s legendary Cherry Lane Theatre, a space with so much theatrical history that A24 recently purchased the building.

So the project already had a natural community around it. People in the New York theater world knew the title. Some had seen the play. Others had heard about it through the Off-Broadway grapevine, which remains one of the most joyfully disorganized communication systems ever invented.

Instead of trying to launch everywhere at once, we started where the story already had roots.

Playbill has about 1.2 million readers, and the collaborative Instagram post with the cast expanded the combined reach to more than 11 million people.

That first domino activated an audience that already understood the project.

Expanding the Circle

The next morning we widened the lens. Our trailer debuted exclusively with Entertainment Tonight Online, which immediately expanded the conversation from theater insiders to general entertainment audiences.

The announcement was widely distributed across entertainment outlets and picked up by other publications. On social media, amplification from Entertainment Tonight, Broadway World and others created a combined reach of roughly 28 million people.

Different outlet. Different objective. Playbill built credibility. Entertainment Tonight built scale.

Then on Monday morning the campaign moved into another lane when Collider debuted new images from the film as part of their spring preview. Collider reaches a slightly different audience again, mainly people actively tracking upcoming movie releases.

This kind of sequencing matters. Distribution campaigns rarely begin with one giant splash. They’re built like a string of dominoes. Community credibility tips into mainstream entertainment awareness tips into film audience discovery.

What Indie Creators Can Take From This

If you’re launching a creative project—a film, a play, a podcast, a book—the instinct is often to ask: how do I reach the most people?

But scale without context rarely converts. Momentum usually starts somewhere more specific. A play about a missing show dog might bubble up in Modern Dog. A horror flick might first target Bloody Disgusting, where people actually enjoy being terrified. A documentary about tech bros might launch through Wired or TechCrunch. A theater-born movie might start with Playbill, as we did.

You’re not trying to reach the entire internet. You’re trying to wake up a corner of it that already understands your story.

Of course, the press and social posts are only the visible part of the campaign. Behind the scenes, our shared Google Drive marketing folder is expanding faster than a teacup pig over a five-year growth spurt (HT WSJ), and our brains are wrapping around influencer outreach, soundtrack rollouts, paid media strategies, and our new best friend from merch world, Printful.

It’s not a red-carpet premiere, but it’s where distribution actually lives.

Awareness, of course, is only the first step in distribution. The real excitement now is betting on which domino falls next.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

There is a very specific kind of meeting that happens before a movie gets released.

It involves many intelligent adults staring at spreadsheets. Budget projections. City-by-city theater grids. Social media calendars mapped down to the hour. Influencer rollout timelines. Publicity beats.

It is deeply strategic. It is not remotely artsy.

As we move toward the April 24 theatrical release of Original Sound, our Tuesday team call now includes: a theatrical booking agent, a theatrical marketing expert, a social and digital marketing team, an influencer marketer, a publicity team, a music team for the soundtrack release. And a marketing guru coordinating all of it.

There are more people on that Zoom than we had at any point during development or production. I half expect someone to bang a gavel and request a point of order.

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And unlike Broadway, we cannot sell a single ticket yet.

On Broadway, you put tickets on sale months in advance. You track the numbers. You watch which groups are buying. You panic responsibly when necessary and adjust your marketing as you go.

In film, tickets go on sale a week or two before the release date. So right now we are building momentum for something no one can actually buy. It is a fascinating psychological exercise.

On Broadway, Opening Night is an event. Champagne and reviews, festive dress and photo ops.

A Broadway run, on the other hand, is a machine. Payroll and union benefits, ad spend adjustments, midweek promotions and making sure the mezzanine is not completely empty on a random Tuesday in snowy February.

Film distribution has the same split personality. Getting a film made requires creative endurance, and there are many celebratory occasions along the way. Martini shot. Picture wrap. Investor screenings.

Releasing a movie, on the other hand, requires operational stamina. Establishing partnerships. Refining messaging city by city. Coordinating influencer drops. Timing press hits. Adjusting creative assets.

In both film and theater, it’s that unglamorous infrastructure that ultimately determines whether your project survives. And once the machine turns on, the details get very specific very quickly.

For example.

One nicely absurd moment this past week happened while we were plotting the parallel release of the soundtrack for Original Sound.

Go ahead and Google “original sound soundtrack.” I’ll wait while you do.

Exactly. Every soundtrack in human history is labeled “Original Soundtrack.” And now cut to the multiple conversations about how to differentiate ourselves from the entire concept of film music.

Distribution once meant handing your film to a few festivals and a distributor and then waiting for the checks to clear. Now it means metadata strategy, search term differentiation and making sure your soundtrack does not disappear into the abyss of perfectly optimized sameness.

This is the granular reality of distribution today. It is not about discovering who your audience is, because you determined that during development. It’s about showing up for them consistently, intelligently and repeatedly in a marketplace that scrolls past everything.

Broadway producers understand that an opening is an event, and a run is a commitment.

Film distribution is also a commitment. A big one. An expensive one.

It asks you to be present long after the martini shot. It asks you to care about audiences you want to attend in Detroit as much as you do in your hometown of New York City. It asks you to sit through meetings about Instagram posts and metadata with the same seriousness you once reserved for casting and craft services. It asks you to think relentlessly about how to keep the momentum train moving once it finally leaves the station.

Making the work is one muscle. Running the work is another.

If you want longevity for your creative project, you cannot fall in love only with Opening Night or the martini shot.

You have to build the muscle for the run.

Because that is where the giddy romance of our industry meets math.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career strategist for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

Last week, I got off a Zoom with my producing partner, David Youse, and two of our leading actors. We had walked them through the launch of Original Sound. Trailer timing. Social strategy. Publicity beats.

The first wave of momentum.

They were excited. Not polite-industry excited. Actually excited. You could feel it through the screen.

When the Zoom ended, I just sat there. Relieved. Grateful. Proud that we are doing this.

And then, out of nowhere, a thought landed:

I will probably never get to do this again.

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Before you picture me in full Sarah Bernhardt mode, draped over a chaise lounge whispering my final, tearful monologue, hear me out.

We all know someone who had a job on Monday and was deemed redundant by Friday. Someone who got thanked publicly one evening only to be cut privately the next morning. Someone who was hot, then warm, then suddenly running a taco truck in Los Angeles or herding goats in the Algarve mountains.

Why should I be any safer? Any more immune? Any better equipped to survive the entertainment industry’s slow-motion zombie apocalypse?

I produced through 9/11. Through the Great Recession. Through a global pandemic. Through strikes, freezes and sudden pivots that threatened to ground everything mid-flight. Chaos is practically in a producer’s job description.

But this moment feels different because we are no longer simply adjusting our altitude. We are building the plane while we are in the air.

Financing structures shift mid-conversation. Distribution plans evolve between drafts of the same email. Technology turns today’s expertise into tomorrow’s nostalgia. Audiences flood the theater for one title and then retreat to their sofas for everything else. The runway lights flicker, but no one agrees which landing strip we’re aiming for.

So yes, after that Zoom, I let myself consider the possibility that this might be the last feature I ever produce. And then I did what any seasoned producer does: I spiraled, romping through several stages of grief:

Denial. (“The industry can’t sustain this Wild West mode of operating forever.”)

Strategic bargaining. (“People will say, ‘You know what we need? More experienced women producing features.’”)

Obituary spin. (“Over 100 credits. Cue the tribute reel.”)

Premature memoir drafting. (“Chapter One: Entertainment. How Hard Could It Be?”)

And then the drama exhausted itself.

If this is the last flight, I thought, then let’s at least fly the thing like we mean it. If this is the last one, I am not apologizing, hedging or holding back. I am laughing when the tech glitches. I am dropping names. I am savoring the late-night texts, the creative debates, the tiny victories that no one outside the team ever sees.

I am going to enjoy the hell out of the turbulence.

And here is what I realized in my post-spiral haze: most creatives do not stall because the industry is a chaotic mess. They stall because they assume there will always be another takeoff. Another season. Another financing round. Another chance to be bolder, bigger, louder, weirder, wilder.

They polish instead of pitch. They wait instead of launch. They shrink their ideas to match the perceived market.

But what if this were the last script you ever wrote? The last show you ever staffed? The last project you ever had the nerve to push into the world?

Would you still play it safe?

You and I cannot control what the industry looks like next year. We cannot control which platforms survive, which companies merge or which revenue models collapse. Heck, we can’t even control Wi-Fi.

We are already in the air.

Over the coming months, as we move toward the theatrical release of Original Sound on April 24, I am going to document this flight in real time. The strategy. The surprises. The doubts. The moments when we hit turbulence and the moments when we catch a tailwind.

Not as a victory lap. As a cockpit log. Because whether this is my last feature or not, I refuse to behave as if I have unlimited departures left.

This one matters.

And if this were the last time you got to do the thing you love, how would you fly it?

Better yet, what would change if you stopped waiting for clearer skies and flew that way now?

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career coach for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

A million years ago, when I was younger, scrappier and significantly more self-righteous, I wrote an essay comparing theatrical unions to medieval monastic communities.

I meant it as a takedown.

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At the time, I was fighting the structure. The hierarchy. The rigid division of labor. The sense that once you took vows as a company manager, director or designer, you were expected to remain in your cloister forever. My side hustle then was working on a Ph.D. in medieval drama, so I was reading a lot about how monasteries worked. Vows. Obedience. Routines.

Theater, I argued, was the same. Guilds masquerading as modern institutions. Devout believers in a higher power called Broadway. Carefully guarded patronage networks. Clear jurisdictions. And heaven help you if you wanted to cross crafts or challenge the elders.

It was a tad blasphemous at the time.

Of course now, on the other side of my career, the medievalness of our industry persists. The unions and guilds still negotiate wages, enforce jurisdiction and largely protect members from evil overlords. Entertainment remains one of the most unionized industries on the planet.

So the monastery is still standing.

What changed is that an entire marketplace sprang up beyond its walls.

Creators build audiences on YouTube. Writers launch newsletters and peddle podcasts. Filmmakers crowdfund budgets. Artists monetize direct relationships with fans. No vows. No lifetime appointments. No Mother Superior skillfully managing a pension plan after vespers.

Just speed. Access. And risk.

Those are not typically medieval qualities.

So what era are we in? The digital age? The algorithmic economy? Late capitalism? The attention marketplace? Post-postmodernism? There’s a growing scholarly preference for “metamodern,” a term suggesting we oscillate between irony and sincerity, hope and despair, structure and collapse.

That sounds suspiciously like the entertainment industry on any given Tuesday.

Streamers merge and unravel. Artificial intelligence rewrites workflows in real time. Social media fractures attention into glittering shards. Distribution is democratized. Revenue models feel magical.

We are no longer operating in a single system. We are straddling two.

When I first wrote that essay, I was rebelling against rigidity. I wanted mobility. I wanted cross-specialization. I wanted to question the old guard without risking excommunication, also known as unemployment.

Now I watch creators build careers entirely outside institutional frameworks. No apprenticeships. No long arcs of mentorship. No pension plans. They are expected to be artists, brands, technologists and distribution channels at the same time.

Freedom is exhilarating.

Freedom is also a full-time job.

Medieval monastics took vows of stability. They remained in one house for life. That sounds suffocating until you consider what stability provided: community, institutional memory, a shared identity and a structure that took care of you when you were old and no longer profitable.

The medieval model concentrated power. It also concentrated responsibility.

The creator economy disperses power. And it disperses responsibility.

You can build an audience without permission. You can finance projects outside traditional systems. You can invent a career path that did not exist five years ago.

You are also responsible for your own benefits, your own retirement, your own long-term durability. There is no abbey managing the future for you. There is no vow that guarantees continuity. Platforms rise and fall. Algorithms shift. Revenue streams–poof!--evaporate.

The safety nets of the past were imperfect, bureaucratic and often maddening. They were still nets.

If this is a metamodern moment–one foot in the monastery and one in the algorithm–then perhaps the real question for independent creators is not which system is superior. It is how to account for the cost of progress.

Yes, access is cheaper. Tools are faster. Distribution is broader. But, by my troth, stability hath taken holy orders elsewhere.

The industry will continue to swing between hierarchy and disruption, consolidation and fragmentation, vows and volatility. That tension is not going away.

We will likely spend the rest of our careers walking this tightrope.

Call the era whatever you like.

Gravity still applies.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career coach for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

I just finished making a feature film that went into development in 2022. (And you will be able to see it in 2026. Details soon, promise.) Like any producer who enjoys sleeping at night, before we made it, we sat down and made a plan.

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Actually, we made three.

Plan A was flawless. Absolutely flawless. It was built for 2015, when the world made sense.

We premiere at Sundance. A bidding war breaks out. Netflix wins with their big fat check that makes our investors giddy. Our publicist gently turns our attention to awards season.

Plan B was more sober, but it felt attainable. And in 2018, it would have been.

Okay, not Sundance. Maybe it’s SXSW. Still great. Still cool. We get strong reviews from well-known media outlets. There’s a sales agent who can deliver a solid run on a reputable platform, followed by a downstream strategy that involves words like “windowing.” The investors keep smiling, knowing that they’ll recoup, eventually.

And then there was Plan C.

Plan C was designed for a future that felt dramatic at the time. A little paranoid. A little “are we overthinking this?”

Plan C assumed festivals were optional, sales agents might ghost, platforms could disappear or pivot to selling shoes, and revenue would have to come from more than one place if we wanted the project to have a life.

Guess which plan we’re using.

We’re not the only ones playing Mad Libs with our distribution strategy. The entire industry is swapping nouns and verbs mid-sentence, not because it’s amusing, but because the old story stopped paying the bills.

Netflix and AMC spent years treating each other like mortal enemies. Now AMC is screening the Stranger Things finale to packed houses. Turns out they share an audience. Turns out ideological feuds are expensive.

Studios are also widening their comfort zones when it comes to financing. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has become a serious player in entertainment, including reported involvement in a potential acquisition tied to Paramount. When capital tightens, values get tested.

Even the physical footprint of the industry is wobbling. Soundstages built during the peak years are sitting empty as production slows or heads overseas chasing tax incentives. Buildings once treated like permanent assets are now very expensive question marks, even as the landlords test ways to repurpose these spaces into theme parks, concert venues and parking lots.

What looks messy and feels chaotic is actually the industry stress-testing new combinations to see what survives.

Meanwhile, I keep meeting a lot of indie creators who are still clinging to Plan A. They’re building projects like the industry still runs on guarantees. One distributor. One outcome that has to work or the whole thing collapses.

That model was risky even when money was flowing freely. Right now, it’s exhausting.

Plan B isn’t much better, unless you’re Neon and can casually spend $18 million marketing your “indie.”

When we built Plan C, it wasn’t because it sounded innovative. It was because we wanted the project to survive contact with reality. That meant thinking early about audience ownership, alternative release paths, and revenue streams that didn’t depend on a single yes from a lofty gatekeeper.

Not old-school sexy. But thus far, effective.

As someone who has preached the “showbiz” (not “show show”) gospel for decades, I’m encouraged that revenue is finally part of early creative conversations. It has to be. Treating distribution as someone else’s problem is no longer an option.

Studios are redesigning projects to bend instead of break. Instead of greenlighting one-off films, they’re prioritizing IP that can live across formats: a movie that can become a series, a podcast, a live experience, or a licensed brand extension into gaming or perfume or Marty Supreme Wheaties. As the market shifts, no project is tied to a single outcome.

Indie creators can do the same. Build projects that can live in more than one place. Create or acquire IP that can expand. Treat distribution as deserving of as much thought and development as the script itself.

And this style of strategizing can be surprisingly liberating. When your project isn’t relying on a narrow path to success, everything shifts. You get more creative. You pitch with more confidence. You negotiate with less panic. You stop treating every meeting like it’s your last chance at oxygen.

If Netflix can rethink exclusivity, if AMC can rethink competition, if studios can rethink where money comes from, then indie creators can do it too. And frankly, they can do it better, because they can adapt faster, think weirder and design smarter. Because they’re indie.

Let’s face it: Plan C is the new black. It’s practical, it’s confident, and it goes with everything the industry is throwing at us. And hey, we all look marvelous in it.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career coach for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

I’m writing this from Buenos Aires. The sun is out. The cafes are full. Life feels remarkably normal. Often joyful.

Meanwhile, my friends in New York City are layering sweaters, reading the news, and asking me a question that would have sounded absurd not that long ago. Is there any reason to come back?

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We are living through an extraordinary moment of upheaval. When a federal government deports five-year-olds as part of a campaign to rid the country of “the worst of the worst,” when United States citizens who protest are met with state-sanctioned violence, when those with enormous wealth and insulation respond with delicately worded requests for the government to “de-escalate,” something fundamental has shifted.

Fear, in this context, is rational.

And right now, fear is being rewarded. Withdrawal is praised as bravery. Silence is reframed as integrity. Artists who refuse to engage with institutions are celebrated as heroic, while those same institutions tighten their grip on what and who are deemed acceptable.

When fear becomes ambient, artists feel compelled to respond to it. To contextualize. To take a position. The work becomes less about reaching an audience and more about asserting authorship over chaos. Making “art” becomes a way of reassuring ourselves that we still have some control.

This is where a line from Steve Martin becomes less a provocation and more a diagnosis. He once said, “I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you’re an idiot.”

I’m fairly certain he wasn’t aiming to insult artists when he said it.

When people set out to “make art,” what they often mean is that they want legitimacy. Approval. Moral authority. They want to be seen as serious, correct, on the right side. Under sustained political and cultural pressure, that impulse curdles into self-censorship. The work becomes strategic. Then predictable. Then hollow.

Entertainment, by contrast, has always been dangerous precisely because it reaches people where they actually are. It slips ideas past defenses. It entertains first and lets meaning land later. Medieval drama wasn’t created to be preserved, canonized or taught. Mystery plays were loud, communal events staged in public squares by guilds who needed to hold an audience’s attention. (Enter farting devils!) Everyman wasn’t written with the expectation that it would be analyzed by high school students in 2026. It was meant to help ordinary people confront their own mortality in language they could grasp, in bodies they could recognize, in real time.

The same pattern repeats across history. The Marriage of Figaro was a hit because it was funny, fast and scandalous, not because it aspired to cultural sanctity. Early film was treated as disposable amusement; The Great Train Robbery thrilled audiences long before anyone imagined cinema studies as a legitimate undergraduate degree.

And today, reality television—whether it’s one of the Housewives franchises or Keeping Up with the Kardashians—is dismissed as cultural junk even as it reshapes global ideas about labor, gender, capitalism, celebrity and power. It is mocked precisely because it is legible. Because it reaches people directly. Because it refuses the aesthetic codes institutions rely on to signal seriousness.

None of these works were trying to be “important.” They were trying to move people. To fill seats. To grab eyeballs. Meaning followed later. Prestige followed much later. What we now canonize as high art survived because it connected. History conferred its status, not politicians, boards, donors or institutions guarding their endowments.

Which brings us to the current flashpoints.

The Kennedy Center is not a villain. It’s a symbol. So is late-night television turning individual hosts into lightning rods while the corporations behind them stay insulated. Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert aren’t controversial because comedy has suddenly become dangerous. They’re controversial because institutions are no longer willing to stand between their talent and political blowback. The performer absorbs the heat. The company issues a statement.

We’ve seen the same dynamic play out in journalism. The turmoil surrounding 60 Minutes wasn’t a philosophical debate about objectivity. It was a case study in how quickly once-esteemed institutions hedge, revise or delay when power pushes back hard enough. The language is always procedural. Editorial standards. Internal review. Balance. The chilling effect is anything but subtle.

And then there is a more insidious kind of interference. Boots, the Netflix dramedy based on Greg Cope White’s memoir about a closeted gay teenager who joins the U.S. Marine Corps, was critically acclaimed and strongly viewed. It did the thing corporations claim to want: it connected. And yet it was pulled after one season, widely understood to be the result of political pressure amid Hegseth’s calls for a “new breed of warrior.” No public reckoning. No artistic defense. Just removal.

So now public broadcasters pull or delay episodes to appease politicians. Festivals revise lineups after “internal conversations” everyone knows involve donors and sponsors. Theaters issue carefully worded statements about “safety” and “community values”,” while declining to name what, exactly, is unsafe. The pattern is consistent. When pressure arrives, institutions narrow the aperture and call it responsibility.

Programming decisions are rarely made by artists. They are made in boardrooms, legal offices and development meetings where risk is modeled and controversy is treated as a cost to be minimized. Artists are asked—often expected—to absorb what remains. To withdraw. To decline. To make a statement with their absence. The institution keeps its funding. The board keeps its seats. The donors advocating for the changes can remain anonymous.

This is the unspoken bargain of the moment: institutions preserve their power by outsourcing courage to artists, and then we call those artists brave when they disappear.

From my privileged perch here in Argentina, it’s tempting to ask whether the United States is over. I don’t think it is. But I do think it is largely unrecognizable. And when a place becomes unrecognizable, artists face a choice. You can flee it. You can sanctify it. Or you can tell the truth about it.

So here’s the path forward, imperfect and unglamorous as it may be. Stop trying to make art. Stop chasing approval. Make something honest. Make something entertaining enough to survive contact with real people. Trust craft more than institutions. Trust time more than press cycles.

This moment will undoubtedly be litigated, rebranded and archived. And long after it has been explained away, the honest stories that also entertained us will still be doing their job.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career coach for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

For the past six months or so, I have been living inside a very specific kind of limbo. The kind where you reread a perfectly normal email and start wondering if “Dear” made you sound cold, “Warmly” made you sound needy, and “Thanks so much!” made you sound apologetic.

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I produced a feature film. I brought it through post. And I am super proud of it. During the next month or so, I’ll have real news to share about where it’s landing and what’s coming next.

But getting here has been a slog.

A long parade of submissions and inquiries followed by the digital equivalent of tumbleweeds.

No replies from distributors, from sales agents, from people who were introduced to me warmly and professionally by helpful colleagues.

And if I’m being honest, it messed with my head. Because when nothing comes back, my brain does what it does loves to do: spiral. Instead of “ah yes, a clogged pipeline and competing priorities,” those nasty little inner voices say “they hate it” and “I don’t know what I’m doing!” or “I will never work again.”

Ghosting has become such a loaded topic lately. When you’ve poured years of your life into a project, a lack of acknowledgment can feel personal. Dismissive. But of course, a lack of response is not the same as feedback. No response is not judgment. No response is not the final verdict.

The people I reached out to are not villains cackling over inboxes they refuse to open. They are simply overwhelmed, over-solicited or buried. They are juggling mandates, markets, internal politics, external pressures and a volume of incoming material that would make any sane person build a very tall wall and hide behind it.

And they fear that if they respond, they are opening a door. And doors come with expectations. Responding creates access. Access creates obligation. Obligation creates labor.

I’ve been on the other side of this too. The friendly reply that turns into daily follow-ups. The quick pass that sparks a lengthy debate. The reasonable boundary that somehow escalates into a manifesto.

So people stop engaging not because they’re cruel, but because it’s the only way they know how to survive the volume without losing their minds. That doesn’t make the experience feel any better. But it does perhaps make it easier to ignore.

What I’ve learned over these months is that our industry does not reward persistence with politeness. It rewards persistence with alignment. When a project doesn’t land right away, it’s tempting to assume it’s unwanted. More often, it’s just early. Or inconvenient. Or wrong for that moment, that mandate, that market or that very specific Tuesday when everyone’s dealing with something else on fire.

And the most dangerous thing you can do during long stretches of non-response is decide that the absence is telling you who you are. It’s not.

Your job during this phase is not to chase reassurance. It is to stay connected to the project. Keep refining. Keep building. Keep your nervous system regulated enough that when the door finally opens, you can walk through it without resentment, apology or a speech you’ve been rehearsing in the shower for six months.

Today’s non-response does not predict tomorrow’s momentum. I know this because the same project that sat unanswered in inboxes for months is now very much alive. Not because I pushed harder, but because timing shifted. Context changed. The right people finally had time to take a look.

If you’re in a season of unanswered emails right now, I want you to hear this clearly: you are not failing. You are not invisible. You are not being secretly rejected by the universe while everyone else gets a parade. You are simply moving through the long middle of the process that no one posts about.

So stay steady. Keep your dignity. Do not confuse access with worth. And do not let the absence convince you to abandon work you believe in.

Sometimes what feels like nothing is just the moment before the story turns.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career coach for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

About halfway through a feature film shoot, time stops behaving like time.

I don’t mean it feels fast. I mean it becomes untrustworthy.

I was 11 or 12 days into a 22-day shoot when my producing partner and I sat down for our nightly debrief. You know the one. What went wrong. What almost went wrong. What is absolutely going to go wrong tomorrow unless we fix it right now.

I referenced something that had happened “last week.”

He stared at me and then burst out laughing, because the thing I was referring to had happened that same morning.

Same day. Same set. Same coffee still in my bloodstream.

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That’s what happens when you are making a hundred decisions a day. Your brain folds in on itself like bad origami. Time stretches. Memory smears.

This is the part outsiders don’t understand about producing. It’s not just the workload. It’s the volume of judgment calls. Casting tweaks. Schedule changes. Location problems. Budget tradeoffs. Creative notes. Personality management. Crisis triage. And that’s before someone’s truck breaks down or a prop disappears or an actor decides today is the day to explore a brand new emotional choice.

The only reason this doesn’t fully melt your nervous system is because you are not inventing your decision-making criteria from scratch every time.

You already know what you’re making.

You know the story. You know the tone. You know the audience. You know what matters and what absolutely does not. That framework does most of the work for you. It narrows the field. It gives shape to the chaos. It lets you say “no” without convening a summit.

When that framework is missing, everything feels like an emergency. Every decision takes 10 times longer. Every conversation circles the drain. You feel behind even when you’re technically on schedule.

Now, here’s the part where producing turns into a career lesson, whether you asked for one or not.

I see the same kind of mental exhaustion all over the entertainment industry right now. Writers, directors, producers, crew. Smart, capable people who are worn down by constant decision-making. Not on set or in the rehearsal room, but in their own careers.

Every day features a parade of micro-choices. Take the meeting or skip it. Chase the opportunity or ignore it. Pivot formats. Learn that new platform. Rebrand. Wait. Push. Follow up. Pull back. Post it. Don’t post it. Say “yes”. Say “no”. Say “WTF!” (and schedule time to later regret it).

No wonder everyone is tired. They’re producing their careers without a creative brief.

In production, you would never start shooting or rehearsing without clarity about what you’re making. You wouldn’t spend money, hire people and worry about craft services without knowing what the project is.

Yet plenty of people are doing exactly that with their professional lives.

A career vision doesn’t have to be lofty or rigid. It just has to exist. It answers basic, grounding questions. What kind of work do I want to be doing at this stage of my career? Who is it actually for? What does progress look like right now (not in some imaginary future when everything will be perfect)?

Once those answers are in place, decisions stop feeling existential. You don’t have to interrogate every opportunity like it’s a referendum on your worth. You know that some things simply don’t fit the project you’re producing at the moment.

Back on that film shoot, I laughed alongside my producing partner about my warped sense of time and then went back to work and made another dozen decisions before calling it a day.

That’s the job.

But the reason I could do it, day after day, without completely unraveling, was clarity. I knew what movie we were making. So even when time bent and days collapsed into each other, the direction held.

Your career deserves that same anchor.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career coach for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

There’s a moment in an entertainment career when many folks stop cheering and start squinting at you.

You already have credits. You’ve survived bad bosses, lousy feedback and at least one project that was “definitely happening” until it wasn’t. You know how sets work, how fundraising works, how development works (which is to say you understand that a lot of showbiz is waiting around).

And while mid-career is the longest phase of any career, it can surprise you just how sneaky it is most of the time.

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Early career comes with a very specific tone of encouragement. It’s warm. It’s patient. It’s parental.

People say things like, “you’re learning.” “Everyone starts somewhere.” “Just keep showing up.” “It takes time.”

You’re allowed to be messy. You can PA, assist, intern, understudy, test drive departments, work for free and proudly call yourself “emerging.” Emerging is charming. Emerging can take meetings with zero leverage and be thanked for their enthusiasm. Emerging can wear weird shoes to pitch meetings and people find it endearing.

The middle is a completely different vibe.

The questions start changing. “So… what’s next?” “Where do you see this going?” “What’s your lane now?” “Interesting that you’re still doing that.”

And of course, “interesting” is not a compliment. It’s the industry’s version of raised eyebrows followed by a long sip of cold brew.

In early career, potential is enough. In the middle, people want a narrative. They want to understand you quickly and they want it to make sense. Ideally in one sentence they can repeat to a buyer, a funder or a producer with actual money without needing to explain the backstory.

People in mid-career are usually working harder than ever. You’re developing projects that take years to move. You’re packaging, rewriting, attaching talent, chasing financing and sitting through “great conversations” that don’t turn into deals. You’re mentoring assistants who are now getting staffed while you’re still waiting for momentum to click.

You are better at your craft than you’ve ever been.

But the encouragement drops off. You’re no longer considered fragile. Your parents think you’ve made it because you have IMDb credits. Your agent/therapist thinks you’re fine because you’re not panicking on the phone on a regular basis. Your peers think you’re booked and busy because you stopped posting about the stress and started posting about festivals.

Meanwhile, you’re staring at your calendar thinking, I did everything I was told to do. Why does this part feel harder?

Because no one claps for development. No one hands out awards for staying power (until you’re too old to leverage the prize). No one throws a parade for “still getting meetings.”

Another shift happens here too. In early career, ambition is celebrated. You can say, “I want to write, direct, star and produce,” and people respond as they would to a kid who dreams of being an astronaut-dinosaur-princess.

In the middle, ambition suddenly needs footnotes.

You’re supposed to be focused but flexible. Confident but not intimidating. Strategic but not calculating. Passionate but realistic. You’re expected to have a clear brand while also proving you can pivot when the market shifts, which it now seems to do every other full moon.

You’re supposed to know what you want while remaining endlessly open to opportunity. It’s exhausting and, if you zoom out far enough, patently absurd.

This is usually when people start thinking, “I must have missed something.”

You didn’t.

What’s actually happening is that momentum stops coming from outside validation and starts coming from discernment. There are fewer greenlights, fewer obvious signals and fewer moments where someone else tells you you’re on the right track. You have to see it for yourself.

It’s also when many people realize they’ve been telling themselves the same career story for years. The same definitions of success. The same timeline. The same rules that made sense earlier but now feel oddly restrictive.

That’s usually when it helps to have someone else in the conversation, because it’s hard to reframe a story from inside it. A smart outside perspective can help you recognize progress you’ve dismissed or forgotten, identify patterns you’re too close to see and separate real opportunity from familiar distraction.

But the good news? You are no longer emerging.

Which means you don’t have to pretend everything is exciting. You don’t have to chase every general meeting like it’s a golden ticket. You’ve earned the right to politely shut down the “mansplaining” about the industry when you need to. You’ve seen enough to know the difference between momentum and noise.

You can also smell a bad deal faster, recover from disappointment quicker, and waste less time convincing yourself something is “fine” when it clearly isn’t. That’s not cynicism. That’s experience.

And you finally get to stop proving you belong. You’ve already done that. Now the work is deciding what you actually want to spend your time on.

The upside of the middle is simple and deeply underrated. You know more. You need less. You spot nonsense faster. And you’re finally allowed to admit that not every opportunity is for you.

So, yes, emerging gets applause. But mid-career gets clarity. And in this industry, that’s a serious upgrade.

Julie Crosby is an indie producer and career coach for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2026, All rights reserved.

There’s something about this stretch at the end of the year that messes with people in the entertainment industry.

From a professional standpoint, things usually slow down. Meetings, if they happen at all, feel a little giddier. The inbox grows suspiciously still. Deadlines seem further away than they probably are.

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And if you’ve been operating on caffeine, ambition and low-grade panic for most of the year, the slowdown can feel less like relief and more like a setup.

As in: shouldn’t I be fixing something? Posting something? Reinventing my entire career?

That itch to stay busy is a well-known side effect of working in an industry that rewards motion, even when motion isn’t always the answer.

Some people respond to that pressure by walking away. Some by burning out. And some by staying put.

If you’re one of those who are staying put—one of those who are still calling yourself a writer, producer, director or creative of some ilk, even as the industry shape-shifts yet again—then this one’s for you.

This past year thinned the herd.

People left. Some with dramatic posts on LinkedIn. Some without saying a word. Careers pivoted. Long-held plans got shoved into a drawer labeled “Let’s revisit this when things make sense.” And more than a few wondered if staying was terribly brave or undeniably foolish.

And yet.

You stayed.

Maybe not with clarity. Maybe not with confidence. Maybe with a running internal monologue that sounded like, “I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, but I know I’m not done yet.” Which, by the way, is a completely legitimate stance in this business.

I’ve been around long enough to know that sustaining a showbiz career isn’t about pushing harder every single year. It’s about learning when to push and when to stop gripping the wheel like everything depends on this one decision. It’s about staying curious instead of growing cynical. It’s about not setting yourself on fire every time the industry announces a new rule and expects immediate enthusiasm.

There have been more than a few stretches in my career that didn’t come with any big wins or obvious success stories. On the up side, these were usually the times when I finally slept. (Hugely underrated.)

So I can say from experience, if you’re tired right now, it means you should take a well-deserved nap. And it also means you’ve been paying attention. Because, let’s face it, this past year has featured a relentless parade of things that were hard to ignore.

And if you’re unsure about your next move as a result of that parade? Well, you’re in good company.

So when Uncle Joe or that former work acquaintance hits you up with some variation on the “what are you doing with your life?” question, please know that you don’t need a polished answer. You don’t need a five-year plan delivered confidently between bites of pork and black-eyed peas.

Sometimes the best response is the honest one: “I’m figuring it out. And I’m not doing it alone.”

Because you aren’t alone. You’re figuring it out with the rest of us. You’re talking things through. Comparing notes. Asking questions. Admitting when you don’t know yet. Letting people see you mid-thought instead of fully resolved. That’s how perspective gets built.

None of us can see the whole board right now. Big systems are shifting. Old paths aren’t lining up the way they used to. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make anyone more prepared.

What does help is having people you can think out loud with. People who understand the terrain. People who can say, “Yes, that’s happening,” or “No, you’re not imagining it,” or “Have you considered this angle?”

So if you find yourself having to reassure family, friends or yourself as we usher in this new year, you don’t have to promise certainty. You can point to something more durable: you’re staying. And you’re in the company of other creative humans who are staying with you.

Before I wrap this up, I want to mention that I am ending this year having posted to Showbizing Strategies fifty-two weeks in a row. One essay every week for a full year. No skipped weeks. No “I’ll get back to it when things calm down” nonsense. Just showing up and telling the truth about this business as clearly as I can.

If you’re reading this, you’re part of why that happened.

This Substack consistently has an open rate north of fifty percent, which tells me you’re not just skimming subject lines. You’re actually reading. That means more to me than I can easily summarize without getting mushy, so I’ll just say thank you.

Truly. It means the world to me.

And since it’s the end of the year and we’re all making decisions about what we want to carry forward, I’ll be direct: if this Substack has helped you feel steadier, smarter or less alone in this industry, I’d love for you to stay with me.

I’m offering 50% off an annual subscription through midnight on 12/31. I’m not trying to manufacture urgency, but this does feel like a reasonable moment to say, “Hey, if this has been useful, here’s an easy way to support it.”

Get 50% off for 1 year

No pressure. Just an invitation. Possibly a nudge.

And please, as the glasses are raised and someone inevitably starts singing Auld Lang Syne with far more feeling than pitch, celebrate the fact that you’re still here, still creating, still willing to keep going.

You’re still in it.

And that matters.

Julie Crosby is an entertainment producer and career coach for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2025-2026, All rights reserved.

It’s that time again, when I ponder what’s coming in the new year.

The entertainment industry is more unhinged than usual, so I also consulted some sources beyond my crystal ball, including tarot cards, astrological charts and tea leaves (Earl Grey. I wasn’t playing around).

I am happy to report that the results are not apocalyptic.

Showbiz isn’t doomed. Work is still being made. Audiences are still showing up. Money is still moving.

But it is an industry in flux. Some things we thought were temporary will stick. Some things we think are permanent will dissolve. And a few shifts that once felt theoretical are now very much here. Here are my five predictions:

End of season savings. Happy Holidays!

1. Live, Experiential Events Expand

In 2026, live, experiential events will continue to grow for one simple reason: audience demand is increasing for entertainment that calls for participation rather than passive observation. And this demand cuts across generational divides.

This is about experiences that ask audiences to put down their phones (unless they’re snapping a selfie), get off the couch and encounter entertainment in a physical space. That could be an immersive musical, a pop-up performance, a parade or a happening that doesn’t yet have a tidy label.

Film and television companies are already leaning into this hard. “Netflix House” is an immersive playground where fans can step inside their favorite shows. Hallmark staged a live Christmas Experience at its headquarters in Kansas City. Luxury cinemas are turning movie-going into a curated social evening, complete with food, conversation and control over the environment. Landlords with under-utilized soundstages are openly exploring live events and themed attractions as alternative revenue streams.

Even indie films are getting in on the act. Earlier this year, a screening of Bugonia convinced audience members to shave their heads in public prior to attending. It was a brilliant publicity stunt that turned a small-ish film into a participatory event and reminded everyone that sometimes the experience is the marketing.

What is changing isn’t the value of live performance. It’s who is willing to invest in it.

For creatives who understand how to work with a live audience (pro tip: it’s a learned skill), manage energy in a room and ignite shared experiences, this trend could open new doors across sectors.

2. Projects With an Audience Attached Will Move Faster Than Projects Without One

2026 is not the year that underlying or adjacent IP suddenly becomes important. It already is.

What is new is how early decision-makers expect evidence that someone is already paying attention.

The dividing line is no longer original versus adapted. It’s projects that have an audience versus projects that don’t. A small but demonstrable following, a sold-out limited run, an email list with a healthy open rate, a community that reliably shows up. These things reduce uncertainty, and uncertainty is what everyone is trying to manage/avoid right now.

In a cautious industry, proof beats promise. Every time.

This is another reason why live events matter. They don’t just build buzz. They remove guesswork.

3. A Workforce Facing Permanent Instability

The entertainment industry has always been filled with gig workers. Actors waiting tables is an industry cliche, and the “don’t quit your day job” jab dates back at least to Milton Berle.

What has changed is the disappearance of the structures that once made gig work survivable over time. There used to be staff jobs that bridged projects. Longer contracts that allowed people to plan a few months ahead. Development pipelines that created continuity, even when work came in bursts. Health insurance that was neither a puzzle nor a privilege. Representation handled at least part of the hustle.

Those stabilizers have eroded.

In their place we have shorter contracts, fewer guarantees, longer gaps between paid work and a constant expectation of self-promotion, networking and brand maintenance in the unpaid hours.

Gig work is no longer a phase you pass through on the way to stability. For most people in this industry, gig work is the structure. And in 2026, remaining visible and viable within that structure requires sustained energy, emotional resilience and continuous self-management.

The result is a workforce that looks busy from the outside and feels perpetually on edge from the inside.

This is what happens when companies reduce their own risk by pushing uncertainty onto individuals and rebranding that shift as flexibility. “Be your own boss” used to be optional. Now it’s mandatory. And naming that shift clearly is the first step toward successfully navigating it.

4. AI Becomes Invisible Infrastructure

In 2026, AI stops being a headline and starts being background noise.

Not because it’s harmless, but because it’s absorbed. Like email. Like scheduling software. Like editing tools. Sometimes useful, sometimes wrong, but rarely avoidable.

The people who stay competitive will be those who decide when to use these tools, how to guide them and where human judgment still matters. The people who refuse to engage at all won’t be making a principled stand. They’ll just be slower.

Do not let AI tools dictate your workflow in 2026, but don’t pretend you can avoid them. They are already everywhere.

5. Faster Burnout Makes Career Support Essential

Burnout isn’t new. What’s new is how quickly it arrives.

In 2026, careers will require more self-direction, more visibility, more flexibility and more emotional labor than they used to, with fewer guarantees in return. That accelerates exhaustion.

As a result, support services need to become career infrastructure, not emergency relief.

Service organizations like the Entertainment Community Fund that offer financial assistance and mental health resources will matter more than ever. Membership organizations like Film Independent and Women Independent Producers will provide increasingly essential peer support.

And with the decline of full-service representation from agents and managers, we will see a rise in industry-specific career coaches and consultants who help people reframe their skills, reconfigure careers that no longer fit neatly into old boxes, and propel their creative projects forward in this rapidly evolving landscape.

Burnout is no longer a breaking point. It’s a diagnostic tool. It’s a signal that something needs to be redesigned. This doesn’t make the industry any kinder. But it should make you feel comfortable about asking for help when you need it.

So let me repeat this, because my crystal ball was super clear: the entertainment industry isn’t ending in 2026.

It is reorganizing around different values. Presence over scale. Proof over promise. Adaptability over brute-force endurance.

The old assumptions won’t carry as much weight, but the work isn’t disappearing. What’s required now is more honesty about the landscape and more intention about how to move through it.

But first, take a breath. Hug your people. Close out the year by celebrating everything you survived and accomplished in 2025. We have all earned a little good cheer.

Julie Crosby is an entertainment producer and career coach for entertainment pros. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2025 Showbizing, All rights reserved.

The CEO of LinkedIn recently said that having a five-year career plan is “a little bit outdated” and even “a little bit foolish.”

I (sorta, kinda) get what Ryan Roslansky is trying to say. The world is changing fast. AI is reshaping entire industries. Corporate career ladders are disappearing. And predicting a tidy, linear trajectory five years in advance can feel like a waste of time. And maybe that is especially true if your goal is a career at LinkedIn.

But for those of us in entertainment, that is terrible advice. Our industry has always been chaotic. There has never been a singular route to success. The idea of stability is rarely the primary goal. And there has never been a moment when you could confidently say, “Ah yes, now I can see exactly how this will unfold.”

So when the head of a platform built for career development tells people it’s foolish to have a career plan, I suspect he is confusing rigidity with vision. Planning with stubbornness. Direction with inflexibility.

But dude, those are not the same things.

When I moved to New York City, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

My goal was simple: live in Manhattan. That was it. I had a vague notion that I might be a writer, or maybe I would work in showbiz, but no real plan for how that would happen or what that even meant. So I stumbled around. And most everyone I met was stumbling around too.

We waited tables. We took random gigs. We chased opportunities that sounded impressive without really knowing why. We told ourselves that winging it was part of the process and not knowing what comes next was normal.

Later in my career (because eventually I had one), when I was running a program for early career writers, directors and producers, I became obsessed with figuring out why some people seemed to move forward faster and with less anguish. I looked for patterns. I studied who advanced, who stalled and who disappeared altogether.

And what I came to understand is that the people who consistently got further ahead were not the most rigid planners. They were not psychic. They did not have the future mapped out in perfect detail. But what they did have was a clear sense of direction.

They knew what they were trying to build, even if they did not know how long it would take. They knew which opportunities were aligned and which were distractions. They knew how they wanted to be seen, not just what jobs they wanted to land.

Understanding what you want isn’t foolish. Visibility is not just about being seen by others. It is also about seeing where you are going. A long-term vision does not lock you into a single outcome. It gives you a compass to continue moving forward, even when the road is foggy and filled with pot holes.

When you know what kind of career you are trying to create, you make better short-term decisions. You know which rooms to walk into and which ones to skip. You know who belongs in your network and who does not. You know which skills are worth investing in and which ones are just noise.

Without that vision, everything looks equally urgent. Every opportunity feels like it might be “the one.” Every skill you don’t have must be the one you need to succeed. That mode of thinking is exhausting. And it is how people burn out while technically staying busy.

The entertainment industry rewards momentum. And momentum comes from intention, not from waiting to see what happens next. I am a career coach now precisely because I have seen what having direction can do. Not certainty. Not guarantees. Direction.

So no, I am not suggesting you carve a five-year plan in stone. But abandoning your long-term vision altogether is not flexibility. It is surrender.

Plan lightly. Dream boldly. Adjust constantly.

You do not need a rigid plan, but you do need a vision. In an industry this chaotic, knowing where you want to go is not a limitation; it is a powerful advantage.

Julie Crosby is an entertainment producer and founding partner at Cromono International and Showbizing Strategies. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2025 Showbizing, All rights reserved.