Are Film Festivals Worth It in 2026? What the Latest Data Means for Filmmakers

Last week, Eventive released their latest white paper, THE RESURGENCE OF FILM FESTIVALS: Drivers of Sustainability and Growth. This built on the momentum of independent film market data we started to see in 2024 from their last white paper, alongside Keri Putnam’s study with Harvard Shorenstein. For the first time in a while, we’re not just guessing at what’s happening in this ecosystem - we’re actually seeing it, grounded in real data.

Eventive’s newest report continues that - and it’s a profound indicator to the stability of festivals. We spent the weekend sitting with the study, and what stuck wasn’t just the numbers; It’s what they point to.

Because if you’ve been anywhere close to independent film recently, you’ve felt how uncertain things have been. The path from making something to getting it seen isn’t as clearly defined as it used to be.

We’ve heard it over and over again from filmmakers - this underlying hesitation around distribution, and even questioning whether a festival run is worth it.

And underneath all of this tension, there’s been a much simpler question:

Is this still something we can count on?

The simple answer? Yes. Let’s get into it.

What the Latest Film Festival Data Actually Tells Us

The scale of this study matters. It looks at over 15 million tickets across 6,000 festival editions, which gives a real picture of how audiences are behaving across the ecosystem.

And when you look at the numbers together, a very clear pattern emerges.

AUDIENCE

• Attendance is up 34% since 2021, growing from around 5,600 average tickets per festival to over 7,500.
• At the same time, net revenue has increased 74%, nearly doubling over that same period.

This growth is broad. Even when removing the largest festivals, the data shows that revenue and attendance have increased across the board, not just at the top.

And importantly, this is no longer fluctuating year to year. By 2025, the data shows that both attendance and revenue have settled into a higher, consistent baseline than where things were before the pandemic.

REVENUE & SEATS FILLED

• Revenue per ticket is now over $13, up from around $6–7 during 2020–2021 and surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
• Capacity utilization has moved into the mid-50% range, up from roughly 48–51% before the pandemic.

Festivals are not just selling more tickets. They are filling a greater percentage of available seats and generating more revenue per attendee at the same time.

EXPANSION OF AUDIENCE

• Around 28–29% of total attendance is still virtual, even as in-person attendance continues to grow.

That means festivals are reaching more people overall than they were before, not replacing one audience with another.

Removing virtual programming would mean turning away roughly one quarter of total potential attendance.

When you put all of this together, the system looks very different, and more reliable than ever, than a few years ago.

More people are attending. More seats are being filled. More revenue is being generated per ticket. And more total audience is being reached across both in-person and virtual formats.

And this is all happening at a level that now exceeds where things were before the pandemic.

Film Festivals Are Becoming Something You Can Build Around

What this data reflects is that festivals are continuing to function as a reliable meeting point between films and audiences - and they’re doing it consistently enough that you can start to plan around them again.

Not as a guarantee, but as something with structure.

When you step back, the takeaway is simple: festivals today are attracting consistent audiences, generating steady revenue, and operating within a more predictable rhythm. That consistency changes how you approach them. Instead of a one-off opportunity, they become something you can move through intentionally, building momentum over time.

And when you look at the broader independent film market data from the past few years, it reinforces this in a very real way. Around 6.6 million people attend film festivals in the U.S. annually, based on the top 1,000 festivals alone. That’s not a niche audience; It’s a defined, active ecosystem.

Tapping into that audience isn’t just about exposure anymore. It’s a way to build a path for your film that’s grounded in real behavior, even while the rest of the market continues to shift.

The New System to Support This Shift: Hiike Independent

For years, platforms like FilmFreeway have made it easy to submit - but they’ve never really been built to help filmmakers understand why they’re submitting somewhere, how festivals actually support their goals, or how festivals can efficiently manage the scale of submissions and programming while continuing to grow their audiences (and find sponsors)!

And for a long time, that simple “click to submit” was enough. But it doesn’t really hold up anymore. In many ways, it’s actually created a fragmented process that everyone else has had to work around.

And we’ve just accepted that.

But if festivals are becoming more stable, if audiences are consistent, if attendance and revenue are holding… then this isn’t just a submission process. It’s an ecosystem. And the systems we use, and the teams behind them, need to treat it that way.

That’s why it’s so encouraging to see teams like Eventive continuing to build with real care for the people this industry depends on.

What that looks like in practice is actually pretty straightforward: hosting, sharing, submitting, screening, programming, scheduling, and even sponsor relationships all living in the same workflow. That’s how independent film scales around the stability in these numbers.

That’s exactly what we’ve built with Hiike Independent.

Something we haven’t had in a while:

A foundation you can actually build on.