Making film got cheap; paying for big film did not. All Kickstarter film funding ever is $525M, and 15 projects passed $1M.

The claim

Cheap production and distribution have not opened up the financing of large-budget film. By Kickstarter's own statistics (January 2026), every successfully funded Film & Video project since launch raised $524.72M in total across 35,015 projects, and only 15 of them ever raised $1M or more. The strongest counter-example, Angel Studios, gives its audience a veto over every greenlight (its chief content officer "cannot greenlight a film unless it is first approved by our Guild members. There are no exceptions") and part of the financing (equity crowdfunding), but it does so inside one listed company, not as an open market.