You Make Magic,
Fans Earn Rewards
Pitch directly to your future audience. Get funded before you shoot a frame. Keep creative control and your share of the revenue.
A dedicated funding ecosystem designed to bridge the gap between script and screen
is the answer to Hollywood's waterfall revenue modelIn the traditional Hollywood system, a successful $30M feature film grossing $75M film might only return $1.7M to the creators and their initial backers after everyone else takes their cut.
That is only 2% of the total revenue.
Watrfall is built differently. We connect you straight to your audience for funding and use a transparent, blockchain-based system to distribute profits. This means less bureaucracy, fewer fees, and potentially much higher returns flowing directly back to you and the community that supported your vision.
The process
Howworks.
Five steps from the idea in your head to revenue in your account. No studio notes. No back-end accounting games.
Submit
Pitch
Upload a short vertical pitch. No studio meetings. No gatekeepers. Just you and the idea you want to make.
Validate
Vote
Audiences back the stories they actually want to see. The more votes, the closer you get to a green light. You find your audience before you shoot a frame.
Greenlight
Fund
Hit your target and funding unlocks. No waterfall. No percentage tricks. Every dollar tracked on-chain from day one.
Produce
Create
Shoot with full creative control. Your team, your cut, your final say. We stay out of the edit bay and out of your inbox.
Distribute
Earn
Your film ships and revenue flows. The fans who funded you earn alongside you as co-owners. Every dollar splits automatically. Every transaction accounted for.
The math
Where every dollar goes.
Same hundred-dollar ticket. Different math. Here is exactly how revenue breaks down, with every middleman named and every percentage on the table.
The old way
Hollywood
You keep
~$0.03
per dollar
Every hand takes a cut before the creator sees a dollar.
The Watrfall way
You keep
~$0.25
per dollar
Revenue splits automatically between you and the backers who funded you.
The difference
You take home ~8× more per dollar.
And your backers are right there with you as majority co-owners, earning on every stream, every sale, every license.
Methodology & citationsStephen Follows · Entertainment Partners · Guerrilla Rep Media · Wikipedia
Hollywood figures model a mid-budget studio feature’s theatrical waterfall, anchored to the $30M budget / $75M gross worked example documented by Stephen Follows. Exhibitors keep 43–49% of box office per his survey of 1,000+ film professionals. Distribution fees run ~30% of the studio’s rental share (~15% of gross). Remaining percentages cover P&A recoupment, production recoup, and studio overhead; bucket sizes vary significantly per film. The ~3% creator share is conservative relative to Follows’ example, where a $75M gross returned ~$1.8M to the production company (~2.4%). The same waterfall structure is corroborated by Entertainment Partners (distribution fees 10–30%, sales commissions 10–15% of license fees) and Guerrilla Rep Media (sales agent commissions 20–35% for independent productions).
And that 3% is often zero on paper. See Hollywood accounting for famous cases where nine-figure box office produced reported losses on paper: Return of the Jedi ($475M gross, Lucasfilm claimed the film never turned a profit), Forrest Gump (the author’s 3% net points were converted to a net loss through studio accounting), and My Big Fat Greek Wedding ($350M+ gross on under $6M, studio reported a $20M loss).
The outcome stats in the “Before / After” reveal later on this page come from a separate Stephen Follows study of 37,472 US feature films released 1999–2018: only 3.4% were profitable investments for their backers, and only ~10% reached a US theatrical release.
Watrfall splits are subject to final confirmation before launch.
Watrfall
vs
Traditional Hollywood
Ideation
Pitch your idea and let real audiences tell you if it works. You find your viewers before you shoot a frame.
Traditional Hollywood
Pitch meetings with a handful of executives whose taste you have to guess at. Most projects die in development.
Funding
Funding unlocks when you hit your target. Every dollar tracked on-chain. No back-end accounting games.
Traditional Hollywood
Studio cheques come with notes, reshoots, and final-cut clauses. Independent money comes with clawbacks.
Royalties
You keep your share of revenue from day one. Backers earn alongside you as co-owners, with every transaction accounted for.
Traditional Hollywood
Net points after distribution fees, marketing recoup, studio overhead, and holdbacks. Most creators see roughly three cents on the dollar.
Watch Platform
Release directly on the Watrfall Watch platform. Your fans already know the project. They were in on it from the start.
Traditional Hollywood
License to a streamer, hope for a slot, hand over the audience data, and hope the algorithm finds them.
The math changes everything
Same industry. Different outcome.
Your next film starts here
Ship your film. Get paid.
Keep control.
Pitch directly to Watrfall and the audiences who will fund you.
No studio gatekeepers, no waterfall math.