The Malaysian Film Industry Runs on Three Names.

Here's how we add more.

Look at the top 10 local films in Malaysia for 2025. Seven came from Skop Productions, Astro Shaw, or Infinitus.

Check 2024. Same. 2023. Same.

If you’re not in that circle, most Malaysians simply won’t get the chance to see your film.

Part of that is structural — cinema chains run on footfall, and footfall runs on blockbusters. That’s a distribution problem worth solving, but it’s not what this post is about.

What this post is about is the upstream question: how do you build an audience before you need a distributor’s permission? Because once you have proven demand, the conversation with every gatekeeper changes.

But some films/content find their audience anyway. Let's look closer.

Imaginur (2023). Lumatic Films. Director-driven sci-fi romance. Targeted RM1M, finished at ~RM6M across Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Abang Adik (2023). Jin Ong's debut feature. RM5.2M in Malaysia in 24 days. Then NT$98M (approx. RM14M) in Taiwan and a record HK$2.5M in Hong Kong — the highest-grossing Malaysian film ever there. Roh (2020). RM360K budget. Shot in two weeks. Won Best Film at the Malaysian Film Festival. Picked up by Netflix worldwide. Tiger Stripes (2023). Amanda Nell Eu. Cannes Critics' Week Grand Prize. RM2.2M in Taiwan in three days.

None of them had Skop or Astro Shaw behind them. Each found an audience the gatekeepers didn't choose for them.

Here's the part everyone misses: those wins look like luck. They're not.

They're what happens when a story reaches a real audience before the production money is committed — through festivals, through niche communities, through a director with ten years of short films as proof of concept.

But "sometimes" isn't a strategy. It's a lottery.

The TV Network Strategy on social is how you make validation a system instead of a hope.

Run a discreet account. Test the world, the characters, the tone, the language mix. Six months of short-form before you lock a script. Find out which version Malaysians actually want to watch before you spend the money you can't get back.

By the time you're pitching for screens, you're not pitching a script. You're pitching an audience that already exists, with data to prove it.

That changes the conversation. Distributors don't gatekeep proven demand the same way they gatekeep speculation.

I produced Geng Kubur by the old playbook. 70+ screens at launch, 8 figures of marketing exposure, every box checked. The film didn't find its audience.

What I didn't have was the data. Six months earlier, I could have known which version of that story was actually the one to make. Instead, I made the best call I could with what I had — which was gut, relationships, and a distribution window. That's what everyone uses. That's the problem.

Three groups need to hear this differently.

Malaysian filmmakers: stop treating social as a trailer drop. Treat it as the R&D wing of your production company. Imaginur, Roh, Abang Adik, and Tiger Stripes are outliers because the system makes them outliers. Build the system that makes them normal.

Service companies and infrastructure builders: this is a market. Storytellers shouldn't also have to be social media strategists, data analysts, and audience-research operators. There's room — and genuine need — for studios and agencies that offer the TV Network Strategy as a service, so directors can focus on telling good stories.

Brands: you don't have to wait for the perfect script to land in your lap. Fund the world-building. Back the formats. Friends could have been a P&G show. The reason Rachel shampoo never existed isn't that the math didn't work. It's that no one made the bet. The IP you back now becomes equity that compounds. The ads you bought last quarter are already gone.

Malaysian distribution will keep favouring the same three or four producers. That's not changing in 2026.

What can change is whether the rest of us keep playing a lottery, or build the infrastructure that turns outliers into a slate.

When Malaysian content gets better, everybody wins.

That's what I'm building toward with Permissionless IP 

— a playbook for SEA creators and brand builders who are done waiting for platform permission, distributor approval, or any other kind of validation to own their story.

The first cohort gets two things: early access to the playbook before it's published, and personal sessions with me on how to apply it to their specific IP. I'm keeping it under 15 people so each one gets proper attention.

If you're done waiting for permission, get on the list.

Box office figures are based on my own research from public sources. If you have more accurate numbers, DM me — I'd rather get this right than be loud about it.