What do you do when you’ve seemingly accomplished everything in the world of music — selling over five million albums, racking up nearly two billion views on YouTube, and selling out legendary venues like Madison Square Garden with ease? If you’re Logic, you finally start pursuing what you wanted to do in the first place: making movies.
The rap star, whose real name is Sir Robert Bryson Hall II (but he lets his friends call him Bobby), has been a cinephile for far longer than he’s been a musician. That shouldn’t be particularly surprising to anyone who has followed his music career, where he’s been referencing Quentin Tarantino and Old Hollywood for as long as he’s been dropping mixtapes. But hearing him speak about the movies he grew up watching, it’s immediately clear that his passion for the medium is far deeper than a passing interest.
“I love film and television more than anything in the world. It raised me. … My father was a crack addict. My mother was a prostitute. I was conceived in a crack house, brothers and sisters, gang members, shooting guns. This is all I grew up with,” Logic said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “I learned how to cook crack at 12 years old. It’s not really the most ideal situation, but that’s all I knew. And my escape was film. I knew how to court a partner from watching black and white flicks and learning about chivalry and respect… I just genuinely love movies.”
Writing and directing films was always the goal for Logic, who says he’s currently sitting on “eight or 10” scripts that he’d like to make, including a magnum opus called “Chocolate Swirl Sunset” that he describes as a cross between Charlie Kaufman and “a Black ‘Annie Hall.’” He began showing some of his scripts to Hollywood friends like Seth Macfarlane and J.J. Abrams in 2018 — but while his writing was met with lots of initial enthusiasm, he struggled to get a movie greenlit through the conventional Hollywood channels.
Enter Kevin Smith, who knows a thing or two about bypassing gatekeepers. Smith cast Logic in a small role in his 2024 film “The 4:30 Movie,” and encouraged his friend to make the leap into feature filmmaking. He advised the rapper to follow the plan that launched his own filmmaking career with “Clerks”: write a movie that’s confined to one location, finance it yourself, and shoot it with all of your friends.
Logic listened, and “Paradise Records” was born.
A raunchy hangout comedy that combines the slacker joy of vintage Smith and Richard Linklater movies with a tinge of the crime flicks its director loves to reference, the film stars Logic as a struggling Oregon record store owner trying to keep his eccentric staff employed as his world collapses around him. Much like “Clerks,” all the action takes place over the course of one day, where high-stakes encounters with seedy debt collectors fit in alongside musings about pop culture and weed-fueled adventures. It’s a film that knows exactly what it’s trying to be — Jay and Silent Bob even make a cameo, erasing all doubts about its DNA — and Logic proves himself to be a capable writer and director whose love of ’90s indie film shines through the entire project.
The film premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival and sold out every screening, an experience that Logic called “a dream come true” after being rejected from some other festivals. But not even a celebrity with a built-in fanbase ready to support his work is immune to the problems facing independent filmmakers everywhere.
The age-old value proposition of indie filmmaking — that landing acceptance to a prestigious festival begets a sale to a distributor that pays off your debts and puts your movie in front of a massive audience — is flimsier than ever. More and more filmmakers are turning to self-distribution rather than sign away the rights to their films without receiving much money up front or guarantees about the resources that will be committed to marketing their work.
Logic entered Tribeca expecting to shop his film around to the traditional buyers, but the offers he received were disappointing. It reminded him of the music industry, where artists famously struggle to hold onto the financial rewards that follow their work. He came to the conclusion that, much like in music, he might be better off handling things on his own. He recalled one offer that his agent presented him — which came from “a great company” and was described by his team as one of the best offers they had seen an independent film receive in years — that was a financial nonstarter.
“The deal was no money down, so they’re going to buy it for free. That doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said. “I have to pay for merchandise. They also get the merchandise. They would not relinquish what they were willing to spend in marketing on the film, and they would own it for 30 years. To me, that doesn’t sound like a partnership. That sounds like slavery. And coming from the world of music where I’ve made over a hundred million dollars and wish I saw that, there’s a lot of crazy ways money gets washed in that system. I saw a nice amount of it, though, don’t get me wrong, I just respectfully declined and thank this person so much from the bottom of my heart for their consideration.”
Like so many other filmmakers, Logic had to weigh the alleged legitimacy that comes with selling your film to a distributor with the reality that there was more money to be made, without relinquishing any control, by simply handling things himself.
“My biggest thing was, ‘Oh, if I sell it to a distributor, I made it. I did the thing and I proved myself in Hollywood and in this independent filmmaking community that I did it.’ And then I was like, ‘Who gives a shit about that?,’” he said. “In my mind, I was like, ‘Who gives a shit if I sell this for nothing and give it away after I spent millions of dollars on this thing? I just give it to somebody to do whatever they want and not include me and not tell me anything, and they own it until I’m 65 years old, are you joking? No.’ And I very terrified-ly, that’s not even a word, said, ‘No, I’m going to do it myself.’ And I’m still scared, but I’m having a fucking blast doing it.”
Logic and his team did just that, setting up the film’s VOD release and printing a run of Blu-rays without any outside help. The rapper-turned-filmmaker’s bet that his fanbase would follow him across mediums has turned out to be a wise one, as “Paradise Records” has already racked up over $1 million in Blu-ray pre-sales, with much more likely to come as the team rolls out more collectible variants. And that’s all before the film ever lands on VOD or streaming platforms.
Logic is well aware that his story isn’t easily replicable — not everyone can announce their Blu-ray drop at a sold out Red Rocks concert — but the success of “Paradise Records” is a reason to be optimistic about the future of independent film. It’s proof that even if old business models are crumbling, new ones are emerging. Logic is already close to recouping his budget on physical media sales alone, and the evidence of his ability to market his own films has caused his phone to start ringing with bigger and bigger offers. (He’s not sure he’s going to take any of them, though… he’s tempted to scale things down and self-finance an even smaller film instead.)
“I think the days of that sexy napkin deal in the hotel lobby after a premiere at a film festival, that shit is over, man,” he said. “Having climbed Mount Everest of music, I saw another mountain and I am climbing, and I’m just like, I’m not even at the first base camp, but there’s a house there, and this is the house of film and it was glowing. And I see this beautiful house, and I’m like, ‘I’m going to live there.’ And I walk in and I’m like, ‘Oh, holy shit. It’s glowing because this motherfucker is burning down.’ This industry is on fire. Everything is insane.”
He added, “So it isn’t what I thought it would be, but it’s still such a beautiful space because of those who occupy it. And respectfully, I don’t mean the studios and the executives. I think there’s a lot of really great ones out there without question. But the people I’ve met along my way have been the filmmakers, the cinematographers, the writers, the people hanging lights, man, and holding cameras, and PAs on sets. Those are the people that make this so beautiful and unique. I know I’m very lucky to have entered it, even though it’s a scary space.”
Plenty of celebrities from other mediums have tried their hand at directing movies, often with mixed results. But spend even a few minutes talking to Logic, and it becomes clear that he’s the kind of person the indie film world should be supporting. His sincere obsession with movies is instantly apparent — I’ve never met him when he wasn’t wearing multiple pieces of vintage film memorabilia, and he eagerly showed me his collection of baseball caps labeled “WRITER,” “DIRECTOR,” and “ACTOR” that he switches between based on whatever task he’s performing that day — and he seems genuinely giddy to be doing the job he’s wanted since he was a kid.
There are a lot of writing and directing credits in his immediate future, but Logic has his sights set on playing an even bigger role in the indie film ecosystem. The next step might be an independent studio, with “Paradise Records” serving as the cornerstone of a company that ensures the next wave of directors have an easier time getting their film off the ground than he did.
“As a businessman, without question, I’m trying to sell my film and make my own money back so I can continue to make films and pay for other people’s films starting my own studio, Bobby Boy Films,” he said. “I want to build something and say ‘Yes’ to the people who have just heard ‘No’ over and over. I want to build something really dope where I can give people money and just say, ‘Go cook, go do it.’ Because I believe in it that much.”
“Paradise Records” is now available to pre-order on Blu-ray.