Contraband – Ticketed VR cinema for indie and AI-made films

People who makes films don't have it easy. In a typical scenario - the team that produced the film makes 15% of the topline revenues. The Distributor takes 35%. And the theatre (the exhibitor) takes 50%.

So even in a scenario like Obsession where the movie is making a rocket ride, the filmmakers were capped at $50M (15M upfront + 15%). The Distributors and theatres get the upside of the $330 million.

In the startup world, we get upset about appstores charging 30% :)

The situation gets worse for Indie films and more so for people who are using AI tools to tell stories. Films that got made, got finished, and then have nowhere to go because the distribution infrastructure wasn't built for them. That's increasingly true for indie films. It's almost entirely true for AI-made films right now.

CONTRABAND is our attempt to fix that. It's a scheduled, ticketed VR cinema that runs inside a Meta Quest headset. Films screen at a set time, with a real audience in the room, the way a cinema is supposed to work. Nobody pauses. Nobody skips ahead. When the film ends, the audience votes on what screens next.

A few things we built that we think matter:

Ticket revenue goes directly to the filmmaker via Stripe. The money never hits our account.

We start every film in 20-seat rooms and scale up as demand builds.

The first 100 audience members who sign up become a founding community that vets every film before it goes public.

The Quest app is functional and submitted to Meta for App Store review. First public screening is before the second week of July.

We're actively looking for filmmakers with finished films and cinephiles who miss going to the movies. Both can sign up at contraband.watch.

Happy to answer anything - especially the hard questions.