Sometimes I look up the strangest things. This time, driven by annoyance that films increasingly aren't distributed in my country, I looked up how much it would cost to be a film distributor, expecting it to be millions. Turns out it's free? There are different models and some expectations, but in one model you pay the production 30% of gross revenue without an upfront fee. You pay for marketing and investment in e.g. producing a batch of dvds, but what if you don't? Don't (agree to) do any marketing and just stick the file on a server, or use manufacture-on-demand.

Sure for streaming it may cost 100000 to millions per film (what I read). And sure they would expect you to do marketing. And maybe subtitles are nice. And film ratings. And packaging.

And for a production company, even if a film is still looking for a distributor in a territory, signing a single media deal for that territory would loose them the ability to later sign with a real distributor that wants to have all (cinema, dvd, digital, streaming, tv, film clubs, etc).