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The Independent Film Market Gets A Slate Of New Distributors
Cinematic competition // Illustration by Kait Cunniff via DALL-E
Over the past year, several new movie distributors have emerged that could reinvigorate the strained independent film market.
The Big Picture: As Hollywood contracts, movie studios are taking safer bets on fewer films that have the potential for blockbuster upside. That’s leaving a lot of festival movies without distributors to release them. These new distributors hope to fill that gap.
Behind The Scenes: If a filmmaker has a hit movie at Sundance or SXSW, they might find a new list of companies involved in the bidding war.
Variety has a sampling:
Sumerian Pictures surprised Sundance by picking up the US Jury Prize winner, Josephine, which stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan.
Row K released Gus Van Sant’s latest movie, Dead Man’s Wire, and acquired the reboot of Cliffhanger with Lily James.
Black Bear, a longtime financier of movies, moved into distribution with the release of last year’s Christy, starring Sydney Sweeney.
Magenta Light Studios is building a slate that includes Renny Harlin’s Deep Water and James McAvoy’s directorial debut, California Schemin’.
Annapurna, the once Oscar darling studio of Megan Ellison (sister of Paramount’s David Ellison), is coming back after a few dormant years with new financing.
Final Deal: The key with all of these new studios is that there’s quite a bit of private financing behind them to keep the lights on — something necessary when marketing and releasing a film takes a minimum of five years… and then years more to fully recoup. Black Bear is run by Teddy Schwarzman, the son of billionaire Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman, and Row K is an arm of investment firm Media Capital Technologies.
Still, Hollywood is littered with once-promising startup distributors that bit the dust after a few years — Broad Green, Relativity Media, and STX Entertainment, to name a recent few. But Hollywood has always been a gamble… so hopefully the odds are more favorable this time around.
Coming Soon: By betting on fresh filmmakers and innovative marketing approaches, these distributors could make a name for themselves by servicing the smaller films that the studios are mostly ignoring.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.