Director Alexander Ullom and producers Carrie Carusone and Evan Barber arrived at South by Southwest in March 2025 with low expectations. Their scrappy horror-hangout movie, It Ends, had been a rollercoaster ride to make, but after five years of spotty funding and multiple reshoots, their sheer willpower ensured the film was finished. “We were just a bunch of children that were like, ‘Let’s go make a thing,’” Ullom tells me over Zoom. “And so, of course, the first time it didn’t fucking work at all.”
The premiere at SXSW was one victory, but securing distribution was a longer battle. It Ends finally arrives in theaters this weekend via Neon, about a year and a half after the SXSW premiere. Since the pandemic, the traditional path for a successful independent film—premiering at a festival, securing theatrical distribution, and eventually releasing on home video or VOD—has become less accessible. Without a robust distribution infrastructure to count on, and when it takes more energy for your film to stand out from a crowded field of new titles, many independent filmmakers must also be their own producers, social media managers, publicists, and theatrical bookers—usually for free. “I was living in a one-bedroom with three other guys so I could cut down on rent and be able to take more time off [work],” says Ullom, looking back on It Ends’ production and completion period.
A world premiere at a buzzy festival sounds like the golden ticket for a low-budget horror movie by three recent graduates of Florida State’s film school, all the more so given the rave reviews that It Ends received from both critics and audiences afterwards. Barber remembers seeing the queue for the film wrapping around the Alamo Drafthouse building, with some people getting turned away. So far, everything that was supposed to happen was happening. Until the momentum stopped.
Even though the reception at South by Southwest was “very positive,” says Ullom, “what we didn’t expect was the kind of marketplace we walked into…I don’t think I heard of a single MG [minimum guarantee] that was over $50,000, even from mainline distributors.”To Ullom’s point, he and his producing partners heard no word of interest from distributors for months following their successful festival premiere. Further awards and accolades on the genre circuit—including New Orleans’ Overlook Film Festival, Montreal’s Fantasia Festival, and even an opening night slot at Film at Lincoln Center’s Scary Movies Festival—didn’t seem to move the needle.
“At that point, this blow-up of Gen Z filmmaking hadn’t happened,” Carusone reminds me, alluding to the recent success of Obsession and Backrooms (both 2026). But, Ullom adds, “distributors also hadn’t realized that Gen-Z was inheriting the economy and mainline viewing habits.” It’s easy to overlook the fact that Gen Z has not had any semblance of a firm foothold in the film industry until a few months ago, and films like Backrooms have had an impact on where production companies go to scout for new talent. Now, distributors and production companies are trawling the depths of Reddit to seek out fan communities built around specific sub-niches, on the hunt for the idea or meme that might yield the next box-office miracle.
At the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Letterboxd announced a new venture that could potentially circumvent this mire of traditional distribution. Their nostalgically titled project, the Letterboxd Video Store, was, in CEO Matt Buchanan’s own words, “a potential new path to audience connection for filmmakers and sales agents seeking visibility and momentum.” Using a traditional VOD model, it would offer a wide range of films for rent directly through Letterboxd’s desktop interface.
Since Letterboxd is a social network, it’s easy to gather information about what its members are talking about, what they’re watching, and, crucially, what they want to watch but can’t. To find films for their Unreleased Gems section, an aptly named “shelf” reserved for new films caught in the limbo between their festival run and a distribution deal, Letterboxd took a more emotional curatorial approach in selecting films for their inaugural drop. Rather than harness wider market data, Letterboxd looked inward and conducted what essentially amounts to a very detailed vibe check. As Buchanan told The Hollywood Reporter, “the selection process is directly tied to specific films our members are asking for—via watchlists, ratings, reviews and so on.”
Letterboxd announced the first “drops” on December 8th, 2025, which included a selection of repertory titles, like Todd Haynes’s second feature, Poison (1991), and recent festival films with strong community support that were still awaiting distribution, all available to Letterboxd users in 23 countries including the US, UK, and Canada. Pricing varied, too, with older films set at traditional VOD rental prices (between $3.99 and $9.99), and new films fresh off or still on the festival circuit set at a premium (around $19.99) and only available for a one-month window to “extend the film’s festival life.”
Meanwhile, through the summer of 2025, Ullom and his producers were still hoping that the amazing turnout at SXSW and ongoing outreach by their executive producers, who Carusone says “were pushing for us in the background,” would be enough to make something happen. What they hadn’t factored in, initially, was a well of online support that had yet to be tapped.
During a meeting on the Universal lot, Ullom happened upon a Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) promotional event populated with prominent movie influencers he recognized and followed online. “I call my manager and I’m like, ‘Hey, if I get kicked off the Universal lot for hopping a fence, is that bad for my career?’” he recalls. On an impulse, he convinced security he was an influencer who got lost on the lot and suddenly found himself on the inside, amongst these new movers and shakers that studios rely on to generate online hype and, hopefully, ticket sales. It turns out, Ullom recalls, they had been wondering when they would be able to finally see It Ends in theaters.
Ullom hadn’t expected this interest in the first place, and he certainly didn’t expect for those same influencers to take up an unofficial campaign of online support for It Ends. “The online horror community really championed and uplifted us,” he said. “They started posting about it, which they spread to each other.” One of the influencers at the event was the popular horror creator and screenwriter, Nicolas Curcio. On July 12th, shortly after the event, he posted a glowing video endorsement of It Ends on his Instagram and TikTok that went semi-viral. In the video, he calls the film the reason “why I love doing what I do. This is why I love independent film.” As of this writing, the video has been viewed over 970 thousand times across both platforms. Compare that number to the seven thousand and 35 thousand views on different videos he posted around the same time, offering everything from screenwriting advice to hot takes on the new Superman movie, and you can understand how much the shoutout meant to Ullom and his producers. And, Ullom recalls, it wasn’t long after this that Buchanan, Letterboxd’s CEO, saw the influencer Kit Lazer’s emotional Letterboxd post about the film.
To those who aren’t regularly trawling the platform’s comment sections, the Letterboxd Video Store looks like an experimental hodgepodge. The periodic announcements of new Letterboxd Video Store titles (following the December drop, a second set of titles were added to the Unreleased Gems shelf on April 29th, and a third arrived on July 1st) are not always the films that have won the splashiest awards at festivals or have major stars attached. The whole point of the Unreleased Gems shelf is to spotlight films that are struggling to stay in the conversation or, in the case of It Ends, are just beginning to drive conversations on the platform.
The news that It Ends would be included in the first Letterboxd Video Store drop came on December 8, 2025. Ten days later, on the 18th, Neon announced it had acquired It Ends for theatrical distribution in the summer of 2026. “A lot of it was Letterboxd and the people posting about the film online,” he said of the rapid turnaround with these announcements, “but a lot was also Neon wanting to support an up-and-coming team and filmmaker.” For now, It Ends remains just one of two solitary cases in which Letterboxd’s unconventional VOD opportunity preceded a theatrical deal (earlier this year, Altered Innocence distributed the Chilean Cannes prizewinner The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, 2025, in a handful of theaters) and, thanks to Neon’s industrial footprint, it will certainly have the largest reach.
This unorthodox trajectory from VOD to theatrical raises questions about audience retention. “An equivalent to seeing the line wrap around the Alamo Drafthouse was seeing that the film was one of the four top trending movies on Pirate Bay,” says Barber of this unintended byproduct of their film’s sudden online availability. At one point, where and how people watched the film was less important than people’s ability to see it at all; Carusone adds, “Alex used to talk about dropping it on YouTube.” On the subject of whether people who’ve already rented It Ends will turn up to watch it in the cinema, Ullom takes the wider view. “I’ve never been super nervous about it because our Letterboxd debut wasn’t a smashing success—it’s not like all of America has seen this movie or heard about it. [But] if you’re tapped into what’s going on in the indie film scene or the festival market, then you’ve probably heard of it.”
Ultimately, they want the film to speak for itself. “Hopefully, we’ve made a package deal, where the reason to go see it in the theater is so that on the walk back to your car, you’re having a conversation with your friends about it,” says Barber. Carusone is optimistic that the appetite for the theatrical experience is widespread. “I’ve seen in the film industry, in general audiences, and in distribution companies this desire to go to theaters again. There’s such a saturation of online content that we’re being pushed into wanting to be in physical spaces experiencing things.”
“I think we’re in the midst of a large turning point with audiences,” concludes Ullom. “It helped that our film is kind of a genre movie…I don’t think there’s institutional support for independent filmmaking that doesn’t have genre in it yet. I would put us like three to five years out [from that]. This new wave of independent filmmaking is coming, and we just got lucky that the door’s opening is for genre movies right now.”
Awesome story, I’ve been waiting on this movie forever. Very excited for the screening/director Q&A I got tickets to this Saturday!