When Should You Start Over on a Film?
How to Know When It's Time to Pivot
At some point in almost every film project, something stops working. Maybe the edit feels like it's dragging. Maybe audiences aren’t responding the way you expected. Maybe the format that seemed perfect when you started is suddenly making the film harder to watch, market, or submit to festivals.
The difficult question isn’t always: “How do we fix this?”
Sometimes it’s: “Do we need to start over?”
In this episode of Indie Film Podcast, filmmaker Jordan Gore joins us to talk about exactly that problem. After producing Smokin’ Saga as a 12-episode web series, he and his team realized the episodic format was creating problems they hadn’t anticipated, including audience drop-off and difficulty positioning the project for film festivals. But their solution wasn't to abandon the story, or the project. It was to tear apart the finished episodic version and rebuild it as a feature film.
When Is It Time to Start Over on a Film?
There’s an important difference between a project being difficult and a project being fundamentally misaligned with the way you’re making it. Indie filmmaking is difficult by nature (if you've made a movie, or even been on a set, you can probably relate to that). A bad shooting day, a frustrating edit, a budget problem, or one piece of negative feedback doesn’t automatically mean you should scrap everything.
But repeated problems can tell you something. Ask yourself:
Are audiences consistently disengaging in the same place?
Is the format making the story harder to experience?
Are you struggling to explain what the finished project actually is?
Is the format limiting your distribution or festival options?
Are you keeping something because it works, or because you already spent months making it?
That last question is particularly important, because it leads us to something that plagues filmmakers of every experience level.
Beware the Sunk Cost Fallacy in Filmmaking
The sunk cost fallacy happens when previous investments of time, money, or effort influence a decision that should really be based on what will work best going forward. For example, let's say you're putting together a piece of IKEA furniture with their tiny, but included, allen wrench. It would be so much faster to just get up, find your toolbox, and snag an adult-hand-sized tool or power tool to get the job done. But here you are, with a half assembled coffee table, thinking to yourself, "I'm this far already, I might as well just finish it with what I have. I don't want to spend the time trying to hunt down my hex key drill bit anyway." And you will build that table, complete with wasted time and excruciating blisters on your index fingers from that allen wrench. That's the sunk cost fallacy. (And a lovely retelling of our own personal IKEA horror stories.)
In filmmaking, it can sound like:
“We already shot all of it.”
“We spent months editing this version.”
“We already paid for the music.”
“We’ve come too far to change it now.”
But none of those statements answer the most important question: Is the current version actually working?
Jordan describes being deeply attached to the episodic structure of Smokin’ Saga. By the time the team changed course, the episodes had already been assembled, music had been written, credits had been created, and picture locks existed.
Rebuilding the project as a feature added roughly four additional months of work. The existing work made changing direction painful, but it didn’t make changing direction wrong.
Sometimes the Film Is Fine, the Format Isn’t
This may be the most useful takeaway from Jordan’s experience. The team didn’t decide Smokin’ Saga was a bad story. They realized the web series format was creating friction between the story and its audience.
Early episodes attracted viewers, but viewership declined dramatically as the sequential series continued. The format also created problems when considering film festival submissions: Individual episodes didn’t completely stand on their own, while combining all 12 with separate intros and credits disrupted the flow of a feature-length experience.
So they changed the container instead of throwing away the contents. "But I'm not writing an episodic!" you say...don't worry. This principle applies to every single film project:
A feature might actually be a short.
A short might have enough story to become a feature.
A web series may work better as one continuous movie.
A traditional live-action idea may become something more experimental because that’s what the available resources make possible.
The story doesn’t owe your original plan anything.
Don’t Pivot Because You’re Frustrated. Pivot Because You Learned Something.
Creative work becomes frustrating (inherently). Filmmakers get tired. Cuts look terrible before they look good. Sometimes you genuinely do need to keep pushing through the tough parts. Don't immediately assume you need to scrap a format (or a project entirely) because something is difficult. Filmmaking is difficult. But if something is feeling consistently off-putting, get some evidence before you commit to a major change.
Show the film to people whose opinions you trust and watch where audiences disengage. Pay attention when several people independently identify the same problem. Separate feedback about personal taste from feedback about confusion, pacing, structure, or accessibility.
Jordan specifically points to outside perspective as an important part of recognizing what wasn’t working. He also discussed the format change with his core collaborators before committing to the rebuild. A pivot should ideally come from new information, not one awful afternoon in the editing bay.
Starting Over Doesn’t Always Mean Starting From Zero
When filmmakers hear “start over,” it can sound like every previous hour of work gets thrown in the trash. Usually, that isn’t what happens.
The Smokin’ Saga team still had the performances, photography, story, sound work, and experience they had already created. The challenge became reorganizing those ingredients into something that served the project better.
Starting over can mean:
restructuring the edit
removing material
changing the runtime
abandoning an episodic structure
reordering scenes
changing the release strategy
reconsidering what kind of film you’re actually making
Sometimes the best way to save a film is to stop protecting the version that isn’t working. And yes, that can hurt (you've probably spent months, if not years, of your life on this project). But four more months spent making the right version may ultimately be a much better investment than years spent defending the wrong one.
Check out all of Jordan Gore's work with Pineapple Productions on YouTube.
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