Ava DuVernay believes Hollywood is changing in ways that could make it harder for independent filmmakers to get their stories on screen. She said it in three words at the 70th BFI London Film Festival on October 12, 2026. Hollywood is over.
“They’re buying each other, they’re collapsing. It’s all changed,” she said in a Screen Talk on the festival stage. She was describing consolidation, a business model moving underneath everybody, and a shrinking number of ways an independent filmmaker gets a deal at all.
The shape of it is specific. Consolidation leaves fewer buyers, and fewer buyers leaves fewer ways for a filmmaker working outside a studio deal to get a film financed at all, which is the group she was talking to.
Her answer was not to wait it out. She told the room to raise money from smaller groups of like minded investors, to crowdfund, and to recoup through festivals, online distribution and direct sales, and she pointed at the places that already make that possible. “You put your movie up there, and there are all kinds of apps and sites that allow people who are like-minded to do it.”
Then she turned it into a question for everybody still trying to get in. “What can we build now that’s new, that serves more kinds of people and kinds of stories?”
She was at the festival for 14th, her documentary on the citizenship fight, and she talked about what making it did for her rather than what it will do for anybody else. “This film saved me in a lot of ways,” she said. “The rage that I feel and the fear that I feel, I was really being able to pour it into ’14th’ every day.”
And then, on a stage, with a microphone, she said the thing women in her position are not supposed to say. “I only finished the film two weeks ago, and so I really don’t know what I’m going to do from here.”
