Risky Business: “We’ve got capital inside the company,” says BondIt cofounder Matthew Helderman (right, with cofounder Luke Taylor), “that wants to take a little more risk that can have outsized returns.”
Bondit
Bondit Media Capital has spent more than $400 million to help produce hundreds of schlocky movies over the past decade. Now its founders are ready to take bigger risks and reap bigger rewards.
There’s a recurring nightmare for independent movie producers that plays out all too frequently: It’s the weekend before a movie begins shooting on Monday and the financial backing falls through. Suddenly the entire production is in jeopardy. What do you do? Who do you call?
Miguel Palos, chief operating officer and cofounder of AGC Studios, says it’s a bit like being “left at the altar.” Luckily, when this happened to him in October 2022, he called Matthew Helderman, CEO of BondIt Media Capital, and within a week, they had a term sheet in place to finance what would become Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour.
The movie, which also starred Kendrick, caused a bidding war at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and eventually sold to Netflix for $11 million. After its October release last year, it reached No. 1 on the platform globally, becoming one of the big indie success stories of 2024.
“What they offered was something that’s become more and more valuable,” says Palos. “Lenders in the space are becoming more conservative, becoming slower to agree to things they agreed to in the past, and the flexibility and pace [Bondit] operates at is crucial for us.”
For decades, taking big swings on ambitious independent film projects has been a seductive and highly risky investment strategy in Hollywood. Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony will celebrate the best of these success stories, but each year there are many more fortunes lost than trophies won.
BondIt has differentiated itself since its founding in 2013 by lowering the risk, attracting institutional money and providing more dependable returns with its low stakes, high volume approach on movies that will never score millions at the box office or contend for Oscars. The company does have one nomination (2017’s Loving Vincent, for Best Animated Feature), but the vast majority of the 500-plus films BondIt has financed are the types of low-budget genre flicks that skip theatres and go straight to streaming services and TV networks across the world—shlocky titles like Gasoline Alley, Armor and yes, Sharknado 2, that sell by attaching name brand actors like Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone to the lead role.
Much of its success has come in evaluating which deals to pursue, a process BondIt cofounder Luke Taylor, 35, likens to “kissing a lot of frogs.” The company builds its loans against predictable, projectable returns, such as the money a production receives back in tax credits for filming in a certain state or country, or its pre-sales in international markets. Other factors are less black-and-white, like a filmmakers’ ability to deliver a movie on time, the quality of the project’s sales team and how much equity capital has already been raised.
THE BEST OF BONDIT
Though its model emphasizes small, steady returns, a few movie projects have provided an outsized return on investment.
Midway
Reiner bajo
Midway
Starring: Mandy Moore, Woody Harrelson
Investment: $1.5 million
Internal ROI: 249.3%
Terrifier 3
Starring: David Howard Thorton, Lauren LaVera
Investment: $3.1 million
Internal ROI: 175%
Dual
Everett Collection
Dual
Starring: Aaron Paul, Karen Gillan
Investment: $3 million
Internal ROI: 68.4%
Becky
Starring: Kevin James, Joel McHale
Investment: $1.8 million
Internal ROI: 26.9%
Driven
Everett Collection
Driven
Starring: Jason Sudeikis, Lee Pace
Investment: $4 million
Internal ROI: 27%
Trauma Center
Starring: Bruce Willis, Nicky Whelan
Investment: $3.4 million
Internal ROI: 26%
Woman of the Hour
AGC STUDIOS / Newscom
Woman of the Hour
Starring: Anna Kendrick, Daniel Zovatto
Investment: $5.7 million
Internal ROI: 14.5%
SOURCE: BONDIT
There’s always risk in Hollywood, but because debt is always paid out first from a movie’s “waterfall” of revenue, before equity or participation partners, BondIt is first in line to recoup its money.
BondIt movies might be less glamorous, but they deliver consistent returns. In any given 12-month window, BondIt invests in 50 or more films and turns over more than $100 million in capital—a metric the company measures as its revenue—writing off less 1% in bad loans and delivering consistent 15-20% returns.
Last year, the company backed a few projects that did far better. After preselling some international rights to help fund Woman of the Hour and landing the big sale to Netflix, the movie produced a 250% return on its production budget. The company also nearly doubled its investment last year in the surprise horror hit Terrifier 3 after it grossed $88 million worldwide, a rare theatrical play.
The results were so good that Helderman, BondIt’s 36-year-old cofounder, is now considering new ways to evolve his core business model to allow for more upside.
“Terrifier and Woman of the Hour happening simultaneously is kind of the best thing and also the most inconvenient thing to happen to the company,” Helderman tells Forbes, “because you have two outliers hit at one time, with two entirely different models, and you’ve got a group of shareholders in BondIt who say, Let’s go find 15 more of these.”
Of all the transactions Helderman has looked at in the past decade, he says there have been maybe five that have that kind of potential. And given BondIt’s debt-financing model, it can hardly afford to miss on any one project. Still, emboldened by its success last year, BondIt is starting to use a portion of its resources go after more ambitious and artistically inclined projects in 2025 with big name actors such as John Krasinski, Seth Rogen, and Helen Mirren, which don’t immediately fit BondIt’s tried and true formula.
“Twelve months ago, I probably would’ve looked at them and said it’s too much risk, but now,” Helderman says, “we’ve got capital inside the company that wants to take a little more risk that can have outsized returns.”
Investors clearly believe in Bondit’s chances. In June, the company also opened a new credit line from Keystone National Group for $60 million, with the option to increase to $100 million. And a New York-based private equity firm is currently negotiating deal to buy out BondIt’s majority owner since 2017, Toronto-based Accord Financial, and provide fresh capital for expansion. The transaction will give majority control of the company and its board back to Helderman and Taylor, 35, by merging BondIt with their 100%-owned Buffalo8 production company.
Helderman and Taylor cofounded Buffalo8 between their junior and senior years of college, to produce an indie film written and directed by Helderman. (He describes the coming-of-age story as “Wes Anderson meets John Hughes, and in its execution is very far from being that.”) Taylor was a music business student at USC, but to Helderman, who was living in Chicago when his now-wife introduced them, Taylor was the closest thing to a Hollywood dealmaker he could imagine.
That summer, they set up meetings all over Los Angeles and eventually landed a modest deal for Helderman’s film, giving them the confidence to start a production company together after graduation. They found work as line producers and production managers on microbudget indies and immediately recognized a need for financing films that wasn’t being met.
“A lot of these $1 million films and under don’t have resources or relationships,” Taylor says. “So we said, Let’s get involved with as many projects as we can and do more than we’re hired for, and build the company around that.”
BondIt emerged from that philosophy just a year later, when a 23-year-old Helderman convinced the CEO of a Fortune 100 company—a longtime friend of Helderman’s father, himself a successful entrepreneur and asset manager—to invest $5 million of his own money into film and TV projects over a three-year span. The deal was “aggressively callable,” Helderman says, converting into super punitive debt if BondIt was unable to prove a sustainable business model in that time.
“I can’t believe the brazenness I had, and the power of naivety, the power of youth, thinking, Oh I can do it better—I don’t understand why they’re having so much difficulty with it,” Helderman recalls. “I had that confidence, and also was willing to take a burn-the-boats approach, like, I’m going to make this work.”
Bondit began by providing small loans around the margins—everything from covering Screen Actors Guild-mandated security deposits to gap-financing a few movies headed to the Sundance Film Festival—before settling on the more systematic and volume-based strategy it follows today. BondIt holds its capital at the company level, rather than raising funds on a project-by-project basis like most independent films. Investors trust Helderman and Taylor to deploy the funds across their 50-project slate each year, which they choose out of more than 1,500 potential opportunities.
While the system will never produce 10x or 100x jackpots, the company has found ways to create upside. In BondIt’s deal with Cineverse for Terrifier 3, after full repayment of its $3.67 million loan BondIt was entitled to 15% of all royalties earned by Cineverse on the film until it had received 1.75x return, and has the right of first refusal to fund follow-ups and ancillary projects.
Compared to super-conservative banks or one-off investors from outside the film world who can often be unreliable or even fraudulent, BondIt has become an attractive funding option because of its ability to structure unorthodox deals and close very quickly, even if it charges more than competitors on the back-end. Speed is its biggest advantage, because film projects can materialize or evaporate in a matter of days depending on the schedule of a bankable star.
David Lipper, a producer who did three projects with BondIt in 2024, says he got a call from actor Josh Duhamel in mid-November saying he would star in Lipper’s movie, so long as it could finish filming a month later, before Christmas. Lipper said he could do it as long as he could close the financing in just five days.
“I know when I’m in a situation like that, my first call is always to BondIt,” Lipper says. “Their model is more expensive, but gives you the comfort of being able to close.”
Once BondIt signs on to a movie, Helderman and Taylor see themselves as partners in its success, steering it toward Buffalo8 for post-production services and ABS Payroll & Accounting, a firm they own a 20% stake in, for payroll. BondIt’s high volume of deals has also allowed its other businesses to achieve greater scale. Buffalo8 now has 60 employees and a 10,000-square-foot studio space.
In the near future, Helderman hopes to launch a credit card for its productions to use and is exploring buying a sound stage outside of Atlanta. It’s also looking to hire international film salesmen to further exploit the overseas markets.
The end goal, Helderman says, is to grow BondIt from beyond a pure film financing company into the kind of diversified media conglomerate that would be attractive to bigger private equity or bank financiers down the road. The first example came in January, when BondIt announced it was investing in the Elements Music Festival in Pennsylvania this summer.
“Your business is either shrinking or growing, period,” says Helderman. “So I’m constantly thinking how we’re going to have to keep evolving this thing, aggressively.”
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