Editor’s note: Martin Moskowicz is well known to many in the industry attending Berlin‘s EFM. An ever-present at major festivals and markets for close to 50 years, he is best known for his decades steering German production and distribution giant Constantin, producer of the Resident Evil franchise. In 2024, Moskowicz moved on from his role as CEO and is now producing. In an exclusive guest column for Deadline, the respected industry vet gives his take on the current entertainment market. It’s a market that some in the indie film space are concerned about due to shifts in the global business. Here’s Moskowicz’s take on the current landscape.
For the past two years, we’ve all been talking about “the downturn”: fewer greenlights, tighter streamer mandates, ad pressure, box office volatility. But I don’t think the business is simply “down.” I think it’s doing something more fundamental: it’s repricing attention.
The shift is pretty straightforward: we’re moving from an IP-led market to an attention-led one. That one sentence explains a lot of the current noise—and where the next upside will come from.
Across major markets, digital now takes the majority of entertainment time—and it keeps rising. But monetisation hasn’t followed in a straight line. Some “old world” formats still over-deliver economically relative to the time people spend on them.
That mismatch is basically the story of this moment: audiences changed behavior faster than business models changed efficiency.
We all know reach can be misleading. What matters is intent—how much the audience actually cares. In plain terms: background viewing doesn’t monetise. Emotional investment does.
In the classic model, you secure rights, package talent, sell to distribution, and monetise through windows.
In the emerging model, the order increasingly flips: build the audience relationship first, then monetise it across formats. That’s the difference between “a title” and a repeatable engine with community and real leverage. And if you don’t own any part of the fan relationship, you’re effectively renting it from platforms—and rents can change overnight.
One of the most important realities right now is how uneven monetisation is by format. Average revenue per hour varies massively, with live experiences and theatrical sitting dramatically higher than broad digital consumption.
That’s why digital-native talent often behaves like a mini-studio: use low-monetisation channels for discovery and trust, then convert into higher-monetisation businesses— events, commerce, premium, licensing. Many full-time creators now run six or more revenue streams across multiple formats.
This is where I think traditional film and TV has to adapt fastest: the project can’t just be “content.” It has to be an ecosystem.
If you want case studies for “attention-led,” multi-format monetisation done right, look to parts of Eastern Asia. Whether it’s BTS scaling fandom into live, merchandise, brand partnerships and platform leverage, Pokémon (and Nintendo more broadly) turning characters and worlds into decades-long, cross-medium businesses, WEBTOON industrialising a pipeline from digital readership into screen adaptations, or Squid Game proving how fast a cultural moment can become a global consumer phenomenon—the pattern is consistent: build obsession, then monetise across touch points.
We should study that playbook more seriously: not to copy aesthetics, but to learn the operational discipline—community management, cadence, commerce integration, and format agility.
Another uncomfortable truth: heavy viewing and heavy spending often don’t overlap. Only a small slice of users are both top consumers and top spenders—so scale alone won’t save you.
The smarter question is: who is the super-fan, and what are they willing to pay for? If you can answer that, a smaller audience can out-earn a big indifferent one.
We’re watching discovery and transaction collapse into one funnel. Social commerce is surging, and platforms are building creator monetisation into real-world merchandising. Whether you love that or hate it, the behavior change is real: audiences increasingly want to go from “I like this” to “I’m buying this” without leaving the moment.
We should stop describing the moment as a generic contraction and start describing it as a reallocation of value:
· Attention is the new de-risking tool. If something already commands focused engagement, it’s easier to finance and scale.
· “IP value” is changing. Rights still matter, but so do community, portability, and data ownership.
· The best packages will look different. Not just script + cast + director, but also: audience pathway, distribution pathway, and multi-format monetisation logic.
I don’t believe the industry has lost its appetite for stories. I think it’s gotten more honest about what a story needs today to become a business: earned attention, retained attention, and a clear plan to monetise across mediums—and there are already global examples showing how efficiently that can be done.