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The AFM delivery checklist: what a sales agent needs ready per territory before the market, and what can wait

By the Fonti Studio post-production team · 14 August 2026

The American Film Market runs 10 to 15 November 2026 at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles, and the pattern around it is the same every year and at every market: the materials conversation happens twice. Once before, when a buyer wants to see the film, and once after, when a buyer wants to receive it. Agents who separate those two conversations cleanly walk out with cleaner deals; agents who conflate them either spend money on deliverables nobody asked for yet, or promise a delivery schedule that turns out to cost more than the advance.

This is the working split. What genuinely has to exist before the market, what belongs in the contract's delivery schedule, and what can wait, with the localization line items priced honestly.

Before the market: what a buyer needs to evaluate the film

The pre-market list is short, and it is not the delivery package. A buyer at this stage is deciding whether they want the title, not ingesting it.

A screener that plays. Secure link, watermarked, with burnt-in timecode if you are also using it for technical work. This is the one item that is genuinely non-negotiable.

English subtitles, if the film is not in English. No exceptions, and this is where agents most often under-invest. A buyer who cannot follow the film cannot buy it, and a rough auto-generated track actively hurts: it reads as a title nobody has bothered with. Pound for pound it is the most useful money in the whole cycle.

A trailer, subtitled in the languages of the buyers you are actively courting. The trailer is what circulates internally at the buyer's company after your meeting, in front of people who were not in the room. A trailer track is a small, fixed cost (ours is €50 per language, any runtime), and it is the single most visible piece of localization you own. It is also, from experience, where clients notice unnatural phrasing first, so it deserves the same editorial care as the feature.

A dialogue list or CCSL, if you have it. Not for the buyer's benefit, for yours: it is what makes every downstream localization quote firm rather than estimated, and it is the document a vendor asks for first.

A demonstrable answer on AI disclosure, if any part of the package used AI. European buyers now ask, and since 2 August 2026 Article 50 of the EU AI Act has made the disclosure obligation concrete for AI-generated audio. Have the answer ready rather than improvised.

What is not on this list: full localized masters in every territory language, dubs made on spec, or format conversions for platforms nobody has committed to. Those are post-deal costs, and pre-paying them is how a slate's localization budget disappears into titles that never sold.

After a deal: the delivery schedule, decoded

Once a territory closes, the buyer's delivery schedule arrives and it is long. Most of it is picture and audio deliverables your post house handles. The localization and text section is where the surprises live, so read it for these five items specifically.

1. Subtitle formats, and the frame rate. The schedule will name formats: SRT for reference, and usually IMSC 1.1, EBU-TT-D, SCC or a house format like PAC depending on the buyer. Frame-based formats must be generated at the master's measured frame rate. Get this wrong and the file drifts progressively out of sync, which is the most common way a professionally made subtitle package fails QC.

2. SDH or closed captions. Increasingly mandatory rather than optional: US captioning rules cover broadcast and much online distribution, and the European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025. Check whether the schedule wants SDH as a subtitle file or captions as a stream, because they are different deliverables.

3. Forced narratives. If the film has on-screen text or foreign-language dialogue, the buyer expects a standalone FN track per language alongside the dialogue track, with the FN events also present inside the full subtitle files. This is a frequent rejection cause precisely because it is small enough to forget.

4. The locale, exactly as written. es-419 is not es-ES, pt-BR is not pt-PT, fr-CA is not fr-FR. Each pair is two deliverables, and a schedule that lists both is asking for both.

5. Dub specifications, if the deal includes one. Loudness target (the number differs between European broadcast, US broadcast and streaming), stem requirements, and any consent documentation the buyer wants for AI-assisted work. The three loudness numbers are where dub masters bounce.

The budget line, honestly

The reason this split matters is arithmetic. Reporting out of recent markets has been consistent that indie deals now close in fewer territories at lower values than a decade ago, which means every pre-deal cost has to justify itself against a smaller and less certain return.

A defensible pre-market spend on a feature looks like: English subtitles if needed, plus trailer subtitles in your top three to five buyer languages. At our flat rates that is €400 for the feature track and €50 per trailer language, so a realistic pre-market localization budget for one title runs a few hundred euros, not thousands.

Post-deal, per closed territory, the subtitle deliverable is €400 per language flat for a feature, €100 to €200 per episode for series, with SDH and the bilingual stack included where relevant, and a dub, when the deal actually needs one, at €3,500 per language. The full reasoning on why flat pricing fits this market better than per-minute rate cards is in the cost breakdown.

The discipline that saves money is simply not paying for a territory's masters until that territory exists.

A market-week practical note

One small thing that pays for itself: know your turnaround before you are asked. Buyers at markets negotiate against calendars, and "how fast can you deliver the Dutch and French?" is a question that comes up in the room. An answer of "48 hours from approval for subtitles" changes the shape of a conversation compared with "I will have to check with the vendor." If your localization partner cannot give you a firm number in advance, that is worth knowing before November rather than during it.

Common questions

What materials do I need before a film market?

A watermarked screener, English subtitles if the film is not in English, a subtitled trailer in the languages of the buyers you are targeting, and your dialogue list or CCSL. Full localized masters for territories that have not sold yet are a post-deal cost, not a pre-market one.

What are film delivery requirements?

The contractual list of materials a buyer requires after a deal closes: picture and audio masters, textless elements, artwork, legal documents, and the text deliverables (subtitle files in named formats, SDH or captions, forced narrative tracks, per locale). The localization section is where most avoidable rejections originate.

When should I commission subtitles for a territory?

After the territory sells, with one exception: the English track and the trailer, which are sales materials rather than delivery materials and should exist before the market. Post-deal you have the buyer's actual schedule, which tells you the formats, locales and accessibility tracks they need, so you buy once instead of guessing.

How fast can localization realistically be delivered during a market?

For subtitles, a properly set up vendor delivers a feature in 48 hours from approval, which is fast enough to answer a buyer inside market week. Dubs are deeper work and run to weeks, not days, so a dub commitment made in the room should be scoped before it is promised.

Take this into November

Keep the pre-market list short and finished, keep the post-deal list read carefully and priced per territory, and keep the two from blurring into each other. The agents who do this walk into delivery with no surprises, which is the only version of a delivery schedule anyone enjoys.

Fonti Studio works to that rhythm: trailer subtitles at €50 per language for the market, feature subtitles at €400 per language flat when a territory closes, delivered in 48 hours from approval in the formats the buyer's schedule actually names. If you are packaging a slate for November and want the localization line item priced before you quote a buyer, email us the titles and territories.

Fonti Studio is a subtitle and dubbing studio run by post-production engineers, for film distributors and sales agents. Trailer subtitles €50 per language, feature subtitles €400 per language, dubs €3,500 per language. Flat. EUR. Free preview before you pay.