The filmmaking brothers behind Spencer and Jackie just launched a new streaming service designed to fix a massive problem in cinema. Pijama, their new VOD platform, launches today as a direct answer to what directors Juan de Dio and Pablo Larraín call a cultural crisis - eighty percent of independent films made each year never find distribution, vanishing from the festival circuit before audiences ever get to see them.
There's a brutal math to indie filmmaking. A director spends months making a film, it premieres at Sundance or Berlin or Cannes, critics praise it, and then... nothing. The film disappears. No distribution deal materializes. No theatrical run happens. No streaming offer comes. The audience that might have loved it will never know it existed. This happens to roughly eighty percent of festival films every single year, according to the new Pijama team.
Now the brothers trying to fix that are the same filmmakers who gave us Spencer (the Kristen Stewart portrait of Princess Diana in crisis) and Jackie (the audacious Kennedy political drama). Juan de Dio and Pablo Larraín launched Pijama today as a VOD platform built specifically for the films the traditional studio system leaves behind.
The pitch is clean and compelling. Filmmakers pay a flat one-hundred-dollar fee. Pijama handles hosting, encoding, and streaming for up to two years. Creators set their own rental prices between $3.99 and $9.99. Viewers get a 72-hour viewing window spread across thirty days. And here's the part that matters most: Pijama takes just 20 percent of revenue, sending 80 percent back to producers, sales agents, and distributors after transaction costs and taxes. That economics-first approach signals the Larraíns aren't trying to build a content empire - they're trying to build a distribution utility.
"Eighty percent of films never get distribution, and we see a cultural crisis rooted in the end of physical media and the current logic of the market," the brothers said in a statement. "We ask ourselves how audiences can see most of the films that played festivals like Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto last year when, in most cases, it simply isn't possible." It's a problem born from technological obsolescence meeting market consolidation. Physical media died. Streaming services consolidated around major studios and franchises. Independent films, which once had a fighting chance through limited theatrical runs and DVD releases, found themselves trapped in a distribution purgatory.
The timing matters. Pijama lands just weeks after Letterboxd, the beloved film-rating platform, launched its own Video Store with a curated selection of independent and international cinema. Two platforms making nearly identical bets - that there's an audience hungry for films beyond the algorithmic recommendations of Netflix and Disney Plus - suggests we're watching the beginning of a real shift.
