Behind Neon’s Banner Year and Rivalry With A24
It is virtually unheard-of for top filmmakers and talent to get back to a journalist almost immediately without going through armies of publicists. Not so when it comes to talking about Neon founder and CEO Tom Quinn, the savvy and innovative indie executive whose company is enjoying its best year in history thanks to nurturing the under-35 cinephile crowd, as well as seeing yet another one of its films, Anora, win the prestigious 2024 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or for the fifth consecutive year, an unprecedented feat for a U.S. indie or studio distributor.
“Tom has something — a once highly valued human trait that, one might argue by looking around, apparently humans don’t need anymore — it’s called good taste, and Tom has it in surplus. I think he might put it in his laundry detergent, his toothpaste, his milkshakes,” Longlegs director Oz Perkins tells THR within several hours of receiving a request for comment.
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Perkins, and Neon, are still reeling from the record-breaking performance of Longlegs, the summer box office sensation that has surpassed Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite to become Neon’s top-grossing title of all time domestically with north of $74 million, making it the most successful indie horror pic in a decade and the top indie film of the year so far (currently, it’s No. 12 on the summer chart in a neck-and-neck battle with Alien: Romulus and ranking ahead of Mad Max: Furiosa). Sydney Sweeney, who starred in and produced Immaculate for Neon earlier this year, also dispatched her own take almost instantly: “One thing that I’ve admired about Tom is that he’s honestly for the art. Neon often takes risks with unconventional storytelling and marketing strategies. They support independent films and filmmakers, creating engaging ways to bring audiences into worlds that some companies may overlook.”
The film executive’s three-decade career included stints at indie stalwarts Samuel Goldwyn, Magnolia and then Radius-TWC, a label of The Weinstein Co., before he founded Neon (the official moniker is NEON Unrated LLC) in 2017 with backing from 30West. Neon has released 115 films, both narrative features and documentaries, and garnered 32 Oscar nominations and six wins, including best picture and best director for Bong’s groundbreaking Parasite, the first non-English film to take home the statuette. He’s got a staff of 52, including top lieutenants Elissa Federoff, who serves as chief distribution officer, president of acquisitions and production Jeff Deutchman, president of publicity Christina Zisa and chief financial officer Ryan Friscia. “What I do know for certain is that from the very beginning, Tom Quinn saw Parasite as a universal film and refused to put it in a box as a foreign-language or international film,” says Bong, who worked with Quinn on Snowpiercer, Mother, The Host and Barking Dogs Never Bite. “He saw the heart of the film and understood that it was about all of us living in our modern class-based society. I was always grateful for that.”
Neon, named THR’s Independent Distributor of the Year, has a major presence on the fall festival circuit, including at TIFF, where the slate features Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora, Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the world premiere of the Neon-produced documentary Men of War and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End, starring Tilda Swinton, which Neon also produced. (Several of Neon’s awards contenders made a major splash at the Telluride Film Festival.)
Quinn, who grew up overseas, where his dad coached basketball — helping to explain his worldly perspective — recently spoke with THR about the state of the business, Neon’s rivalry with A24 and why he doesn’t let dust-ups with talent get him down.
Take me back to the beginning. What year did you launch Neon?
We are 7 years old, so are in our eighth year of releasing movies. The first movie we launched, Colossal, was on April 7, 2017. Neon started off with 12 people. There were six of us in New York and another six in L.A. We were very much a startup, with everyone functioning as this sophisticated amoeba. We very quickly found ourselves that year in Toronto with a great slate. We worked with Errol Morris on The B-Side, and we launched Ingrid Goes West. That work enabled us to sit at the table in Toronto that year and buy I, Tonya. Before the ink was even dry on the deal, we were planning its Oscar campaign. It’s a testament to how quickly we can make decisions because we’re not this big studio. We’ve always used that to our advantage. As of today, we have 52 people. There are multiple reasons for why the company has more than doubled in size. One is success but also different functionalities, such as production and wide-release capacity. And we’ve added an international sales team.
Neon and A24 rank Nos. 10 and 9, respectively, in 2024 domestic box office share, with less than $15 million separating the two of you. Do you cringe when seeing all the glowing headlines about A24? How do you view your rivalry?
It’s a great question. We are both New York-centric companies. That’s where we started. Most of us, if not all of us, have worked in New York. I spent 20 years there but now live in L.A. We’ve exchanged a lot of directors. We pick up movies that they walked away from, and vice versa, but we’re not the same. Here’s a stark difference: In their first seven years, they released three foreign-language films and three documentaries. We’ve released 64 — 32 foreign-language films and 32 documentaries. We are very different, but are very much on the same trajectory. They won best picture, and we won best picture. But I don’t understand their business and their valuations. I’m sure most of the industry doesn’t either, but more power to them.
What’s the one that got away in terms of a bidding war?
I was all over [2022’s] Talk to Me. We were the first offer, the highest offer and the only wide-release offer before anybody else woke up. And we narrowly lost that to A24, so credit to them.
Any other big regrets?
We fell in love with Hit Man at Toronto last year. We absolutely thought Richard Linklater would be an Oscar contender for screenplay and director, and then you have Glen Powell — who is in an absolute vortex of hyper-celebrity — in a role I found very classic in nature. No one makes movies like this anymore. The film was made for, I believe, somewhere between $5 million and $7 million. We offered $10 million for U.S. rights only, which would’ve been a record sale. We believed the film would have grossed in excess of $25 million domestically, with a chance of doing maybe as much as $40 million. Considering what’s happened this summer with Longlegs, I think we would’ve been proved right. And no discredit to Netflix, but they paid in excess of $20 million for that film with a few other multiple territories. And to me, that’s a disappointment for exhibition and certainly a disappointment for us. The idea of something that can really build excitement around multiple kinds of audiences in both the flyover states and the coastal states sets up the chance for so many other successes.
And what’s the one where you did prevail or, shall we say, hit the jackpot?
Longlegs. It was very competitive. In the wake of releasing Longlegs and its incredible success, we also got Oz Perkins’ next two films, including The Monkey. Multiple studios were going after The Monkey, which is being produced by James Wan and is based on a Stephen King property.
Titane is among the five Neon films that were awarded the Palme d’Or, beginning with Parasite and also including Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall. How does the Palme d’Or help in the U.S. with the younger moviegoers, which is Neon’s sweet spot?
The award means a lot. To audiences here who are looking for the absolute most adventurous, forward-looking cinema available, that award represents it because these films have delivered, and they’ve been major Oscar contenders.
Are indie dramas in danger of being punted to streaming since genre films are working so well on the big screen for Neon and other top indie distributors?
I think dismissing genre films as its own category is a mistake, and it falls in line with our mantra to be agnostic. Great cinema is great cinema, regardless of whether it’s an action film or a documentary. Roughly 60 percent of the films that we have released today are equally split between foreign-language films and documentaries. So the idea that we’ve gotten to this place, having grossed over $300 million on what are traditionally viewed as films that don’t have a chance theatrically, there has to be a certain intention behind it. And we don’t shy away from nonfiction. We don’t shy away from drama. We simply are trying to find films that warrant your attention at a certain price point to leave the home and sit and be captive and be taken somewhere that, honestly, I don’t know that we could do as effectively if you were streaming at home and being able to walk away at any moment that you want.
As your team uses the fall festivals to ramp up for awards season, you also are looking for films to buy. How do you juggle these two very different demands?
We have a massive team. It’s funny watching Neon at a screening. There are like 12 people who show up. And I always joke, “Do you think anybody thinks we’re interested in this film?” You can just see us roll in like a mini platoon. But we have a lot of films across the festival circuit. We think it’s a hugely valuable tool to position and promote and launch our films. And so between Venice, Telluride, Toronto and the New York Film Festival, I think it sets the stage for the rest of the fall, and we try to be active and present. One of the things that I love, and I feel that is part of my job, a responsibility, is honestly to show up. Not simply to just show face, but it’s very important to see your movies play.
Longlegs wasn’t the only big success of the summer. Another big win was Andrew McCarthy’s doc Brats, which revisits The Breakfast Club and the other Brat Pack movies of the 1980s. Neon produced that film and sold it to ABC News. Why did you feel like that was best served by streaming and not theatrical?
Our goal was to move it very quickly. You saw right away that Brats was number one on streaming charts and all the other Brat Pack movies showed up in the top 15. We wanted to whet people’s appetite to go back and revisit those films.
In March, Ava DuVernay’s camp took aim at Neon on social media over her film Origin, complaining they weren’t invited to Neon’s Oscar nominee party after the film failed to get any major awards traction. Anatomy of a Fall was Neon’s big winner that night after picking up best original screenplay; it also was nominated for best picture, director, actress and editing. Why no invite for the Origin team?
I cannot comment on what [DuVernay’s] opinion is, but I can tell you that not only did we fulfill all of our contractual obligations, but we exceeded all of our contractual obligations. We were the only offer to distribute this incredible film. No one — not a studio, not an independent, not a streamer — was willing to step up and support this film. I absolutely adore and love that movie. It says more about the world that we live in than almost any film I’ve seen of recent memory. And in this particular year, this particular political climate, any time anybody asks, “How do we bring everybody into the same tent?” — I’d say watch Origin.
And why do you think there was buzz that Neon was in trouble financially in the wake of Michael Mann’s 2023 film Ferrari, which did modest business at the box office — it topped out at $18.6 million domestically — and struggled during the awards race?
I’m always disappointed by the Monday quarterbacking that surrounds our industry without delving into the actual numbers of what’s happening. A lot of the sandbagging around Ferrari was disappointing and inaccurate. It doesn’t mean that everything that we do works, but we’re not in the perception business. We are absolutely, 100 percent in the sustainability business. Everything that we do is calculated at a pretty conservative level. I picked up U.S. rights for $15 million and targeted a release of $17.5 million. We were banking on winding up exactly where we wound up theatrically. But the model that we built would’ve been successful as a pure business venture at that box office gross after you take into account home entertainment, the pay-one window and subsequent TV value. We committed to spend a minimum of $15 million on P&A, which we did because that’s what Michael asked for, and we thought that was right. We wound up spending over $17 million. So I viewed it as an on-target release. It is his highest-grossing film in 15 years [domestically]. But, yes, we all hoped that this was going to deliver an Oscar nomination for Penélope Cruz, but it didn’t. She came very close and was a SAG nominee. She did not get an Oscar nomination. I would’ve liked to have at least gotten into the 20s. But this is the model we built and I would do it again.
And for Michael as a master director in his 80s to pull off a lifelong dream of financing it on his own and doing for himself what the studios couldn’t do or chose not to do is admirable. No one else stepped up for Ferrari. I want to make that really clear. We were the only company that stepped up to make sense of an awkward situation that stopped this movie from going straight to Paramount+ and Showtime. And to me, I don’t care what anybody says, that’s the success for me.
You wanted to be an actor as a teenager once you realized your first dream — to play basketball — wasn’t going to work out because of your height. What happened?
I spent my college years producing theater. I sold my car to produce a production of Orphans. I mean, it was my entire life. Then it came time to move to L.A. I got a house manager job at The Matrix on Melrose, a 99-seat theater. There was this whole set of younger actors putting on every kind of play. Then they’d go on auditions. There was a predisposition that they were going to make it and I found it really uncomfortable. I used to joke, “Do I want to spend my whole life waiting to get some guest-starring role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?” I knew very quickly that I was not going to be fulfilled artistically without having some real control over my career.
Longlegs’ Creepy Campaign Killed at the Box Office
Instead of TV ads, the company’s marketing team came up with a series of cryptic billboards that teased Nicolas Cage’s deeply unsettling character. Fans went wild.
Let’s say you have one of the most recognizable stars on Earth in one of your movies and you decide not to show him in key marketing materials. Absurd, right? Or maybe not.
Neon chief marketing officer Christian Parkes wasn’t sure how Nicolas Cage would react when he approached the actor with their unorthodox plan for selling Longlegs, director Oz Perkins’ beyond-creepy story of an FBI agent (Maika Monroe) who has more in common than she realizes with a serial killer (Cage) who has been on the loose for decades. Parkes and his team wanted to keep Cage in the shadows, much as his character is.
“[Cage] was really happy with where the campaign was heading,” says Parkes. “He asked me, ‘So am I to believe that you’re going to hold back my magnificent grotesqueness until much deeper in the campaign, in which you’ll reveal me in all of my glory?’” I took pause because I was like, this is the moment in which this campaign kind of lives or dies. And I said, ‘Well, actually, Nick, I don’t want to show you at all.’ And he rocked back in his chair, and he put his finger up to his mouth and started thinking, and I said to him, ‘You’re the boogeyman and you live in the shadows.’ He took a beat and he nodded his head and said, ‘Yeah, I like that.’”
Parkes and Neon were off to the races. A month or so before Longlegs opened in theaters on July 12, Neon put up four billboards throughout Los Angeles, although none were on Sunset Boulevard, the most expensive real estate for Hollywood studios. Three of the billboards had cipher codes that were clues to pieces of information that the audience could unlock elsewhere in the campaign, and each one had a different glimpse of Cage’s character — a cropped eye, part of a mouth. But there was no movie title to piece the different images together to figure out that it was Longlegs, even though a few super fans knew something was up. The fourth billboard, positioned on the nondescript corner of La Brea Avenue and Olympic Boulevard, also featured a phone number. On the other end of the line was a recorded message of Cage speaking as if it were in real time.
“Obviously, we posted it on our social and it exploded,” says Parkes, whose team helped it go viral. “We got over 1.4 million calls from 68 countries and six continents from that one billboard, which only cost $8,000 or $9,000. People wanted to know what it was they heard.”
Nor did Neon take out a TV ad for Longlegs, which is unprecedented for a wide release. The guerrilla campaign paid off between the billboards and digital materials: The film opened to $22.4 million — well ahead of an expected $7 million to $9 million — to score the biggest opening of 2024 for an original horror film and a record launch for Neon.
This story first appeared in the Sept. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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