Publish. Compete. Win the audience.

You raised the capital. You made the film. This is the stage where every movie on bMovies is competing for the same thing — ticket sales and follow-on capital. The leaderboard is public, the royalties are on-chain, and the audience is waiting.

Publish is your starting gun. Four simultaneous moves: list shares on the exchange, push the film to /watch, spend your cap-table budget on marketing, and defend your position as other commissioners publish against you.

The workbench is where every film starts

When a commission finishes producing, the film lands in your workbench on the account dashboard. Private to you, minted on-chain already (so the royalty token exists from the moment you commissioned it), but not yet on the public exchange and not yet in the catalog. You can revise scenes, regenerate artifacts, or ship as-is — nothing is visible to anyone else until you hit Publish.

Four buckets on /account

There's also a fourth bucket — Archived — for offers the commissioner explicitly withdraws.

The Publish tool

The Publish tab in the account dashboard is the single surface for going public. It has two actions, both gated on verified identity (bct_user_kyc.status = 'verified'):

1. List shares on exchange. Opens a production-budget slot on the bonding curve. Defaults are user-discretionary across the four tiers. A row lands in bct_share_listings with status='open'; /exchange (FPO-restricted, KYC-gated) picks it up within seconds.
2. Publish to /watch. Flips bct_offers.status from draft to published, stamps published_at, and disables further presale. The film becomes ticketable — every watch is a $2.99 purchase that fans 99% of the ticket revenue on-chain to token holders in a single transaction with N+1 outputs.

Auto-publish (a cron worker) covers the feature revision-deadline path so you don't lose visibility if you stop checking the dashboard; manual publish covers everything else. Want to pull a listing back? One button. Cancel, shares return to Held.

KYC — only where it's legally required

KYC is not required to commission a film. Paying for content creation is a service purchase, not a securities issuance. Sign-in alone (email magic link or compatible wallet-connect) is enough to own a draft offer.

Where KYC is enforced is at the two moments the royalty token would become public — listing shares on the exchange, and publishing the film to /watch. Those are primary securities issuance events; we can't open one without a verified identity on file.

Spend the capital you raised — this is how you win

Raising capital isn't the prize. Converting that capital into audience is. The moment you publish, your cap-table balance unlocks as a marketing budget you control — and every competitor on the platform is doing the same thing. Publish early, spend smart, retain attention.

Where the capital goes

• Trailer boosts. Vertical-cut distribution on TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts, paid directly from the account dashboard in stablecoin, with spend attributed to the film's on-chain cap table. Every boost produces a measurable lift in ticket sales; the lift flows pro-rata back to holders.
• Audience reward inscriptions. Early viewers who share the film before release get on-chain attribution via a small on-chain mint — a discoverer badge, redeemable for a watch credit or a discount on the next film from the same studio. Builds the tribe before the trailer lands.
• Festival submissions. The cap table votes to allocate a slice of the raise to BFI Network, Raindance, Sundance Shorts, etc. Win a festival, mint a certificate on-chain, update the film's prospectus — and every holder's position revalues on the strength of the win.
• Agent-driven press. A Publicist agent (already in every studio roster — see agents) drafts press releases and press kits; token holders approve or reject before distribution. No agency retainer, no 20% markup.

It's a competition

Every film on bMovies competes for the same finite audience attention. The leaderboard ranks live films by ticket sales, royalties paid, and cap-table appreciation — public, on-chain, updated in real time. Your cap table is a coalition of people who want your film to beat the others. Marketing spend is how you make it happen, and the return is pro-rata.

Everything that makes a traditional theatrical release expensive — marketing budgets gated behind studio politics, distribution rails owned by intermediaries, festival entry fees that don't compound — is on-chain and permissionless here. The commissioner who spent $99 on a short can outperform a $999 feature purely by publishing at the right time into the right audience.

Why this belongs between Fund and the catalog

The lifecycle isn't just narrative ordering — it's the cash-flow sequence. Traditional film finance puts marketing in the distribution budget after release, which is why most indie films never get an audience. On bMovies, marketing spend is a cap-table decision made by the people who funded the film, before it's released. That makes the marketing budget an extension of the Fund stage, not a cost against post-release revenue.

After publish

The film sits in the public catalog, playing for $2.99 per watch. Every ticket is a real on-chain fan-out. Holders accumulate royalty revenue proportional to their stake. If someone builds on top of your film — a sequel, a remix, a short derived from your feature — the IP ladder cascades a slice of their royalties back to you, permissionlessly, forever.