Welcome back to Plumb News, your weekly deep dive into high-intensity storytelling, curated for the believer who loves genre films—from action to sci-fi, and everything in between.

I've been in the stunt world for decades, most recently coordinating the action on an intense thriller called The Last Story of David Allen, a film about a hitman who undergoes a crisis of faith. Stunts are great, but the real thrill now is figuring out how to get more thoughtful, values-aligned stories made and seen.

I've been wrestling with the dark truth of indie filmmaking: 97% of independent films do not make a profit. I'm determined to figure out why, and how we can change that by building the audience first.

The answer isn't better distribution—it's owning your audience. It's not about begging streamers for 5 cents per hour of viewing; it's about connecting a niche, passionate community directly to the films they want to fund and watch. And I believe the most underserved, yet most powerful, niche is precisely the one that interests us believers: great genre films without compromise.

-Ian Max

Terrence Malick's beautiful, meditative epic about an Austrian farmer who, guided by his Christian faith, refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler during WWII. It is a profound, non-sensational exploration of moral courage, conscience, and sacrifice that showcases the high cost of standing firm in conviction.

An incredibly tense, nearly silent horror film that is fundamentally about sacrificial, protective parental love. The monsters represent the constant threat of a fallen world, while the family unit's unity and selflessness are the only successful defense. High suspense, deep moral core.

The biggest challenge for an indie filmmaker isn't making the film; it's the post-production exhaustion that leaves them with no money or energy to market it. They trade their passion project for a lousy distribution deal because they lack an audience asset.

This is why we're building the Plumb News community.

The secret to negotiating a strong distribution deal is having a built-in audience, or as they say, attaching an audience—whether by casting stars, telling a well-known true story, or most crucially, owning your fan email list.

The question I'm pursuing is: What if a niche of values-aligned filmmakers and fans worked together to share resources and build that audience? More we, less me. That is the mission of this newsletter: to connect the films we champion to the audience that actively looks for them, and collaborate together. How can we work together to raise up more movies we love?

My recent trip to the theater for Final Destination: Bloodlines got me thinking. If you strip away the gore and the Rube Goldberg death traps, the series is essentially a secular meditation on a deeply Christian question: How much control do we truly have over our timeline?

I wrote a blog post wrestling with this: “How Could Christians Have Made Final Destination: Bloodlines?”

The core fatalism of Final Destination—that Death's design always wins—is what makes it existentially terrifying. However, a Christian worldview provides the only true answer to this cinematic panic: Sovereignty is not fatalism.

The point of the genre, then, isn't to avoid death, but to live fully, and in integrity, now—a powerful, counter-cultural message that can be beautifully explored in any genre film.

My job on set for The Last Story of David Allen involved designing the stunts. You spend hours calculating the exact physics of a fall, the timing of a car crash, the precise angle of a staged punch. You control the outcome so that it looks chaotic, but is fundamentally safe.

This is a beautiful parallel to God’s sovereignty.

In an indie film, the distribution feels like chaos—unpredictable, rigged, and often leading to failure. The plot of a thriller often feels like chaos—a character’s life spinning out of control.

But just as a good stunt coordinator has calculated the safe landing, the Christian life is lived under a sovereign design. Our job is not to be the stunt coordinator of our own lives, trying to control every variable. Our job is to be the actor—to perform with conviction, passion, and integrity in the scene we're given, knowing the Director has already accounted for the landing. This frees us to engage with all genres of art, embracing the risk on screen, because our ultimate outcome is secure.

Until next time,

THE PLUMB NEWS TEAM