Your film. Your audience. Your terms.

A real screening to a real audience.

Not a streaming upload that sits unwatched. A scheduled event at a fixed time, in a shared virtual cinema, to an audience that showed up on purpose.

Direct revenue. From day one.

Every ticket sold puts money directly in your pocket. No advance against royalties. No recoupment. No distributor taking half before you see anything. The split is creator-friendly. We will share the details when we agree a screening.

Audience feedback that means something.

After every screening, the audience votes. Did they like it. Would they watch it again. Would they tell a friend. You get that data. Not a streaming platform's black-box algorithm. Real responses from real viewers who chose to be there.

No ceiling on what happens next.

If your film finds its audience on CONTRABAND and a streaming platform wants to pick it up, that is not our decision to block. We actively want that for you. The only condition is a 90-day window before your film appears free on public platforms. After that, it is yours entirely.

CONTRABAND is a virtual cinema. Scheduled screenings, real tickets, real audiences, inside a VR headset.

If you are an AI filmmaker or an indie filmmaker, the traditional infrastructure of distributors and theatres was never really built for you. CONTRABAND is an alternative that was. Your film gets a proper screening, at a set time, with a real audience in the room, without needing a distributor, a festival slot, or a theatrical deal.

The practical difference is monetization.

Every screening on CONTRABAND is scheduled and ticketed, and the price is yours to set. Want to charge $10 a seat? You can. Selling tickets to a real audience puts far more in your pocket than YouTube or Vimeo ever will — YouTube pays roughly $30 per 1,000 views, and Vimeo takes its cut in subscription fees.

Beyond the money, there is something no streaming platform can replicate: a room. When your film starts on CONTRABAND, everyone in that screening starts at the same moment. Nobody pauses. Nobody skips ahead. The experience is shared in time as well as space, which is what turns watching into an event. That is what streaming took away from independent film, and what CONTRABAND gives back.

In traditional film distribution, the production team takes roughly 15%, the distributor 35%, and the exhibitor 50% of topline revenue. We think virtual exhibition can do significantly better than that.

Our current model is a 50/50 split. We are starting there partly because early audiences will be smaller, and we want the economics to feel fair from day one.

The money never hits our bank account. Ticket revenue goes directly from our Stripe integration to yours. You can see tickets booked, revenue earned, and initiate a payout yourself, weekly, directly from the platform.

The exact ticketing price is absolutely up to you — the filmmaker. We will help you land on a number based on the film, your audience, and the size of the room, but the final call is yours.

50/50 between CONTRABAND and the filmmaker, on topline ticket revenue minus Stripe fees.

Weekly, on demand, directly to your bank account. You see the numbers in real time - tickets sold, revenue earned, what is yours. You initiate the payout. We do not hold your money.

For one-time ticket purchases, yes. After the screening, we share the ticket buyer's name, email, and city with you, so you can build a direct relationship with the people who chose to watch your film - letting them know about your next screening, for example. This does not apply to audience members who attend using a CONTRABAND membership.

The only condition is what you can do with it: reach out about your own work, and nothing else. No reselling it, no publishing it, no handing it to anyone else. You will need to agree to those terms before we grant portal access to any buyer information. Full detail is in our privacy policy.

We went live recently, so we will be honest: the audience is being built right now, alongside the platform.

The people who sign up first become First100 members. Every film that comes through gets a community screening for this group, complimentary to watch, followed by a vote. Films that score an average of 3.5 out of 5 stars or higher from those who vote get pushed to a wider public audience and listed on the platform.

The First100 are cinephiles who signed up specifically because they want to discover films that have no other home. That is your first audience, and it is a guaranteed one. We also encourage every filmmaker to bring their own community - share your listing, post the link, tell the people who already follow your work. The more people in the room, the better the vote.

We are also in conversations with filmmakers who have had over a million views on their trailers. When they bring their audience to CONTRABAND, that becomes your audience too.

We have five room sizes: 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 seats.

We start every new film with multiple screenings in 20-seat rooms. As demand grows, we move to larger rooms. The system scales with the audience rather than forcing a film into a room that is too big too soon.

Anyone can submit. There is no gatekeeping by genre, budget, or how the film was made. AI filmmakers, indie filmmakers, hybrid filmmakers - the tool you used does not determine the value of the work. The work does.

Every completed film that comes in goes to the First100 for a community screening. They watch it, they vote. Films that score an average of 3.5 out of 5 stars or higher from those who vote get listed for public screenings. Films that do not cross that threshold do not move forward, but the filmmaker gets genuine feedback from an audience that actually watched it.

The floor for submission is simple: the film must be complete, and it must meet basic technical standards for VR playback. That is it.

That depends on demand. We can run screenings once a week, daily, or multiple times a day across three timezones. As the content pipeline grows and demand builds, frequency increases. It is not a fixed schedule imposed from above - it responds to what the audience is actually asking for.

If the First100 have vetted a film and it has been listed for public screenings, the show goes on regardless. We do not cancel on filmmakers because a room is not full.

The one exception: if a 20-seat room sells fewer than 10% of tickets, we will check in with you before the screening to confirm you want to proceed. That decision is always yours.

We are live. The Quest app is available and public screenings are running, with the schedule and content library growing every week.

This is not a prototype on a whiteboard. It is a working platform, and it is open now.

You get in before the doors open to everyone else.

The First100 members shape what gets screened and what does not. If you are a filmmaker joining now, you get a guaranteed first audience in the First100, real feedback from people who chose to be there, and the chance to be among the first films listed when the platform opens to the public.

Six months from now, CONTRABAND will have a track record, a content library, and a process that is set. The filmmakers who came in early will have shaped all of that. That is worth something that a later slot is not.