Screen Australia funded 112 development projects in 2025 and most will never be made

Screen Australia’s development fund supported 112 projects across the 2024-25 financial year. That includes feature films, television series, online projects, and a small number of interactive works. The total development spend was approximately $8.4 million, which works out to an average of $75,000 per project, though the range is wide: some projects received as little as $20,000 for early-stage script development, while others received upwards of $200,000 for advanced development including packaging and market attachment.

The number 112 sounds healthy. Whether it is healthy depends on what happens next.

The conversion rate

The historical conversion rate from Screen Australia development funding to production is between 15 and 20 per cent. That figure has been relatively stable for the past decade, varying year to year but rarely breaking above 25 per cent or falling below 12 per cent. Applied to the 2025 cohort, it means that somewhere between 17 and 22 of the 112 projects will eventually be produced. The other 90 will not.

This is not a failure of the fund. Development funding is designed to operate at this conversion rate. The purpose of a development fund is to finance the early work, the script drafts, the budgets, the market testing, the creative packaging, that determines whether a project is viable. Most projects are not viable. That is not because they are bad. It is because the gap between a good script and a financed production is wide, and the factors that determine whether a project crosses that gap are often unrelated to the quality of the work.

Market conditions, platform appetite, cast attachment, producer track record, genre trends, international sales estimates: these are the variables that move a project from development to production, and none of them are fully within the control of the people who made the work.

What gets developed versus what gets made

The 112 projects break down roughly as follows: 48 feature films, 39 television series, 18 online or short-form projects, and 7 interactive or cross-platform works. Feature films represent the largest share of development but historically have the lowest conversion rate, partly because feature film financing in Australia requires assembling multiple sources (Screen Australia production investment, state agency funding, distributor advances, international sales, tax offsets) and the failure of any one source can stall the entire package.

Television series have a higher conversion rate, around 22 to 28 per cent, because the financing structure is simpler: a platform commission from Stan, Binge, ABC, or SBS typically covers the majority of the budget, with Screen Australia and state agencies providing the balance. The decision point is clearer. Either a platform wants the show or it does not.

The projects most likely to convert are those that entered development with a platform already attached or interested. This creates a self-reinforcing dynamic: producers who have existing relationships with platform commissioners are more likely to develop projects that convert, and their conversion rate reinforces their access to future development funding. Emerging producers, who are often developing the most distinctive and formally adventurous work, face the lowest conversion rates because they lack the platform relationships that make conversion more likely.

The development gap

There is a structural gap between what the development fund supports and what the production pipeline requires. Screen Australia has been explicit about wanting to fund diverse voices, emerging talent, and projects that would not otherwise find support. That mandate is reflected in the 2025 cohort: a significant proportion of funded projects come from first- or second-time creators, from culturally and linguistically diverse filmmakers, and from regional producers outside the Sydney-Melbourne axis.

The production pipeline, however, is driven by platform commissioning, and platforms are risk-averse. They commission from producers they know, in genres they understand, with talent they can market. The result is that the development fund and the production pipeline are selecting for different qualities. The fund values novelty and diversity. The pipeline values reliability and marketability. The projects that satisfy both criteria are rare, and they are the ones that get made.

Is it a pipeline or a waiting room

The charitable reading of the development fund is that it builds a pipeline: projects enter at one end, are refined through the development process, and emerge at the other end ready for production. Some are produced. Most are not, but the process of development itself has value, building the skills of the writers and producers involved and generating material that may be revisited when market conditions change.

The less charitable reading is that the fund operates as a waiting room. Projects receive development money, complete a round of work, and then sit. They wait for a platform to express interest. They wait for a star to become available. They wait for the genre they belong to to come back into favour. Some wait indefinitely. The development money sustains the project’s existence without advancing it toward production, and the project occupies a space between alive and dead that is unique to the screen industry: too developed to abandon, too unfinanced to produce.

Both readings are true, and the proportion of projects in each category varies year to year. What does not vary is the fundamental maths. Of the 112 projects funded in 2025, roughly 90 will not be produced. The writers who wrote those scripts, the producers who assembled those packages, the directors who attached themselves to those projects, will move on, or they will not, and the work they did will exist as documents on hard drives, neither made nor forgotten, evidence of an industry that develops far more than it can produce.