MARKET READ
A market assessment
You finished the film. You finished the script. Now comes the question nobody answers honestly: who would buy this, and why haven't they?
Festivals tell you yes or no. Coverage tells you whether the writing is good. Neither tells you where the money is — or whether the door you've been knocking on was ever open.
A Market Read does. Submit your project and get a structured written assessment in minutes: the realistic buyer landscape, the specific platforms and channels that fit, what's blocking a deal, and what to fix before you send it anywhere else.
Film or screenplay · Delivered in minutes · Yours to keep
SEE FULL SAMPLE REPORTS
Four complete reports.
Two fictional projects, each shown at both tiers, so you can see exactly what the deeper version adds.
Real market data throughout.
The film sample also shows what an honest "there is no sale market for this" looks like. We publish it deliberately.
MARKET READ
Eight sections. Typically 6–8 pages.
01 · Project overview
What you've actually got, described as a buyer would see it — including the facts that reshape everything downstream. Completion year. Prior festival exposure. Language. Rights status. The things filmmakers forget matter until a programmer points them out.
02 · Craft assessment
Element by element — concept, structure, genre positioning, key art, character setup — each rated Strong, Solid or Needs work, with the reasoning attached. Not a score. A diagnosis.
03 · Director / writer assessment
We check the public record. Is there already an agent, a manager, a sales company, a distributor? Is the cast a genuine selling lever, or not? Stated plainly in either direction — because building a year of strategy on an assumption about representation is how people lose that year.
04 · Positioning verdict
One paragraph. The honest version, whether or not it's the one you were hoping for.
05 · Target audience segments
Who this is actually for — described specifically enough to act on, not "fans of independent cinema."
06 · Positioning challenges and tips
Every obstacle paired with a concrete response. Not "the market is difficult." Rather: this specific thing is blocking you, and here is what to do instead.
07 · Where this project belongs
Named channels, verified currently active — curated platforms, funding bodies, festival sidebars, licensing routes, aggregators — with how to approach each one. Where a specific name can't honestly be given, you get the category plus the search terms to find it yourself.
08 · Recommended changes
The specific fixes to make before this goes anywhere else.
DEEP DIVE
For a project already going out to the market, where the question is no longer "where might this belong" but "what is actually moving, and what do I send."
Everything above, plus seven more sections:
09 · What sets it apart
The one thing that distinguishes your project with an honest answer on whether it really does, and how comparable elements were executed elsewhere, including where the approach has failed.
10 · Comparable deals
What genuinely similar projects sold for, to whom, and where the comparison to yours breaks down.
11 · Who's buying now
Recent acquisitions by the buyers that matter for your project, including the ones who have quietly stopped buying this profile.
12 · Positioning variants
Several different ways to frame the project, each built for a different kind of recipient.
13 · Alternative paths
What else this project could be: a series, a different budget tier, the IP originated elsewhere first. Each with a real precedent, who does that kind of deal, and an honest account of what it would take.
14 · Festival strategy
Not a list, but an order. Which festivals first and why, with current deadlines, the eligibility rules that could disqualify you, what your premiere status is worth, and where not to spend.
15 · Outreach kit
Ready-to-send approaches written for your project specifically, not a template with your title dropped in.
Fifteen sections in total.
Neither tier includes named contacts or introductions. Those come with LSN's human services, where a person puts their name to the judgment, and what you spend here credits toward them within 30 days.
WHAT IT ACTUALLY SOUNDS LIKE
Two extracts from real reads.
On a short film, submitted for festival strategy
The film already carries a modest festival history, all clustering around 2007–2008. That places the project roughly eighteen years past completion — a critical fact that reshapes almost every recommendation below, since most premiere-oriented festivals and "new talent" platforms will not touch work this old. The realistic path forward is not a fresh festival premiere campaign — it is legacy-appropriate online curation, archival sidebars, and educational licensing, reframed around the film's existing laurels as a credential rather than a launch.
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The same read also caught a typo on the poster.
On a feature screenplay, submitted as a drama
The project is labeled "drama" in the submission, but the material reads overwhelmingly as farce — drunken misadventures, mistaken identities, broad comic setpieces. Marketing or pitching it as straight drama would set the wrong expectations with readers and buyers.
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It then identified eight specific channels the writer had never approached, including a national screenwriter support programme and a state cultural fund.
Neither of these is what the filmmaker wanted to hear. Both are worth more than what they wanted to hear.
WHAT THIS IS NOT
This is an AI read, generated by LSN's evaluation model. No live audience or reader panel has seen your project. We state this on every report, because a market read built from submitted materials is a different thing from tested audience response, and the difference matters the moment you put data in front of a buyer.
If you do have real audience data, an LSN Audience Feedback Report, test screening results, festival reactions, you can paste it into the form and the read will use it. We say clearly that it came from you and that we did not verify it. Without it, the report states plainly that no audience has seen the project, rather than pretending otherwise.
It is not a review. It won't tell you whether your film is good. It will tell you where it can go.
And it is not a substitute for someone watching the picture. Where we haven't seen a cut, the report says so and limits its claims accordingly.
It also won't flatter you. Recent reads have told filmmakers their poster had a typo, their film was nineteen years past its festival window, and their script was labelled the wrong genre. That's the product working.
WHO THIS IS FOR
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You've finished a project and don't know who to send it to.
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You're about to spend real money on festival submissions and want to know you're aiming at the right ones.
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You've been submitting for a while and getting silence.
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You have an older title and want to know whether it still has a market.
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You want an outside read before deciding whether to invest more.
WANT THE HUMAN VERSION?
Both tiers are automated. They are fast, structured, and honest about their own limits.
What they will never give you is a name. No individual contacts, no introductions, no "write to this person." That is deliberate: access is something a person has to put their name to.
The Distribution Opinion is where that happens. Every claim verified by hand. Named contacts with the specific route in: department, submission channel, who reads what. Comparable deals confirmed with real terms. And a written verdict from LSN's founder, who has personally reviewed more than 5,000 films and screenplays since 2015.
Market Read tells you where to go. The Distribution Opinion tells you whom to write to, and what to say.
What you paid here credits toward it within 30 days.