TL;DR. AFM runs November 10 to 15, 2026 at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Century City, and it's a rights market, not a script market. The business in that building is the licensing of distribution rights territory by territory, mostly on films already finished or packaged with cast, so a spec has nothing to transact there. What a badge buys you is the catalogue, the Sessions lineup, and one week when a few hundred companies you'd otherwise cold email are standing in the same hotel. Whether that's worth somewhere between $345 and $1,395 comes down almost entirely to what you booked before you walked in.

What's actually being bought and sold in that hotel?

A film market is a licensing floor. A sales agent represents a film, or a slate of them, and licenses the right to distribute each one for a fixed term inside one country or region: Germany, Japan, the Benelux, Latin America. One picture gets sold twenty or thirty times over, once per territory, and the money arrives as a minimum guarantee, a payment the distributor commits to whether or not a ticket sells. Mark Litwak, who has spent decades on the legal end of this, puts a foreign sales agent's fee at 15 to 30 percent of gross, with third-party licenses usually capped around twelve years.

The part that matters to a writer is that this is also where films get financed before they exist. A presale is a minimum guarantee signed on a film that hasn't shot. The contract isn't cash: a lender advances against it, typically 70 to 90 cents on the dollar depending on the buyer's credit, and that advance pays the crew. What's still missing after presales, equity and soft money gets covered by gap financing, secured against the unsold territories, and gap lenders want estimates covering the loan twice over and rarely go above thirty percent of a budget.

So the posters on those walls aren't films somebody liked. They're films somebody was willing to lend against, a much narrower set.

How do you read a sales agent's catalogue?

The exhibitor list goes up on AFM's own site weeks ahead of the market. This year it runs to roughly 246 entries, each with a country, most linked through to a profile on The Film Catalogue. It's the most useful free thing AFM puts out, because a sales catalogue is a budget statement written in cast.

Read it in three passes. Genre concentration first: a company carrying nine thrillers and one drama is telling you which it knows how to sell. Then cast tier, your budget proxy, since a slate built on one recognizable lead and four unknowns sits in a different bracket than one built on two names above the title. Then country of origin, because a company in Madrid or Bangkok licenses into different territories than one in Studio City, and the stories that travel aren't the same stories.

Last year's market drew 6,132 attendees from 83 countries, with 285 exhibiting companies and 500 buying companies from 61 countries. Those aren't 500 doors for you. They're 500 data points about what this business can currently finance.

Which badge gets you into which room?

This is where the money question gets concrete, because the badges aren't interchangeable.

The One Day badge is $345, good for any single day between November 10 and 14. It gets you LocationEXPO, the AFM House and Innovation Hub, and most market screenings. What it doesn't get you is the Sessions: the Constellation Stage is open to every badge except Day badges, which is the most expensive sentence on AFM's pricing page if you skim past it.

Four days is $695, valid November 11 to 14, and that one does include the Constellation Stage. There's a 4-Day plus Sessions at $895 and a 3-Day plus Sessions at $695 if the panels are the real reason you're going. The Industry badge at $1,045 covers November 10 to 14 and adds the attendee list and a year of Cinando. Platinum sits above it at $1,395, and Platinum is the only tier that admits you to the Santa Monica Stage sessions and the AFM Pitch Conferences, Television on November 13 and Feature Film on November 14.

Two things before you click. Advance pricing ran through November 5, and onsite rates are higher across the board: Industry $1,145, four days $745, Platinum $1,495. And buyer accreditation closed on October 16, which tells you something useful about the room. Those buyers were vetted and listed weeks ago, and nobody in that building is there to discover you.

What's actually on the Sessions lineup for a writer?

AFM gave itself a theme this year, its first: The New Global Screen Economy. The Summit runs November 10 on a separate ticket, and the Sessions run November 11 to 14 across two stages with something north of 160 speakers.

The titles tell you where the business thinks it is. "The New Math of Independent Film." "Where The Money Is." "Low Budgets, High Stakes: Producing Films for Under $1 Million." "You Got the Deal. Now Deliverables?" There are several AI sessions and a run of panels on production incentives, the least glamorous and most load-bearing subject on the list, since the incentive often decides where your script gets set. If I had to pick one for a writer it's the under-a-million panel, because budget tier is the only market fact that changes what you type tomorrow.

How do you write the email that actually gets a meeting?

Litwak's rule of thumb is 60 to 90 days out, on the logic that a deal takes a month or more to close and distributors are most receptive when their next lineup looks thin. If you're reading this two weeks out, you aren't starting a conversation at that distance. You're asking for twenty minutes, which is a smaller ask and still a real one.

Four sentences. One saying who you are, with one credit or fact that places you. One naming a specific title in their catalogue and asking a specific question about it in a specific territory, not paying a compliment. One stating that you want twenty minutes at their table, with two windows offered. One with your budget tier in it, because that's how they sort you.

Attach nothing. No script, no link, no deck. A sales company running a floor won't read during market week, and the attachment is what turns you from a person with a question into a submission to be ignored. Then follow up the first week of December, when they're home and the catalogue they just sold is what they're thinking about hardest.

What does a realistic outcome look like?

The fantasy is a producer reading your pages in a hotel room. The real version: you email ten companies, three reply, two give you twenty minutes, one of those two has a slate you could genuinely write into, and in February you send that person a one-pager they actually open. That's the whole win, and it's a good one.

The second outcome is cheaper and nearly as valuable. Go one day, walk the floor, photograph thirty posters, and come home knowing the budget tier and cast level your genre is actually selling at. That costs $345 and a parking fee, and it will change what you write next.

Before you buy a badge, run this checklist

Have I pulled the exhibitor list and marked the ten companies whose catalogues sit at a budget I could write into?

Can I say my project's budget tier in one sentence without flinching?

Which stages does the badge I'm about to buy admit me to, and did I check whether a Day badge locks me out of the Sessions?

Have the emails gone out, and does any of them carry an attachment I should delete first?

For each company, do I have one specific question about one specific title in one specific territory?

Am I going to ask anyone to read something during market week, and if so, why?

What's my December follow-up, written now, while I still remember the meeting?

If I came home with nothing but a clearer sense of what gets financed, would the badge still have been worth it?

Nobody sells a screenplay at AFM, and that's a reason to walk in with the right question rather than a reason to stay home. Pull the exhibitor list, pick ten names, and write the four sentences before you decide which badge to buy.

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Sources. The 2026 dates, venue, exhibitor list, badge tiers and prices (advance and onsite), the Constellation Stage access rule, the buyer accreditation deadline, the Pitch Conference dates and the Sessions schedule all come from the American Film Market's own site at americanfilmmarket.com. The 2025 figures (6,132 attendees from 83 countries, 285 exhibitors, 500 buying companies from 61 countries) are from AFM's post-market release and Screen Daily's report on it. The 2026 theme and speaker count come from VideoAge International and from AFM's own preview in Cinema & Video International, which is sponsored content. Market mechanics come from Mark Litwak's "Distribution and the Indie Filmmaker" at marklitwak.com (sales agent fees of 15 to 30 percent, roughly twelve-year license terms, the 60 to 90 day approach window) and a presales explainer at nicowan.substack.com (lender advances of 70 to 90 cents on the dollar, gap financing, double coverage). AFM's history and organizer are from the American Film Market entry on Wikipedia.