The Wait For U.S. Distribution & The “Barren” UK Landscape: International Film Execs Debate The Current Market — San Sebastian
There was much enthusiasm but little optimism regarding the contemporary film market at San Sebastian’s third-annual Creative Investors’ Conference, which wrapped this afternoon.
Hosted at San Sebastian’s imposing, hipster-coded contemporary arts center Tabakalera, the conference runs for two days and features onstage Q&As with execs from the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Attendees include MUBI’s Bobby Allen, Axel Kuchevatzsky of Infinity Hill, LuckyChap’s Bronte Payne, and Netflix’s Teresa Moneo.
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The conference is hosted in collaboration with CAA Media Finance and the focus is broad, with a tangential connection to what most speakers in the room described as Spain’s bustling film sector. Here are some of the most prominent talking points from the sessions.
The “Unsustainable” U.S. Marketplace
“The name of this panel should be ‘taking the temperature of the U.S. market: Is it fucking sustainable?” veteran Killer Films producer Christine Vachon joked when she was called on during a panel about the state of the U.S. indie market.
Vachon spoke to the audience in the room about what she described as the “vicious” experience of attempting to bring Brady Corbet’s latest feature The Brutalist to the big screen.
“I’m one of about 25 executive producers on that film, so let’s be clear, that’s something that took Brady about 7 years,” she said.
Vachon said Killer Films were most involved in the project during the first three years of production and the film was only finally produced thanks to the amalgamation of “extraordinary subsidies” from multiple different countries, “a cast that believed in the movie and was okay to work for a price” and Corbet’s willingness to being “extraordinarily inventive” about how he “put across period in the film,” which is set in the post-war U.S.
“I saw what Brady went through to get the film made and it’s not sustainable,” Vachon said.
However, Corbet’s The Brutalist, which debuted at this year’s Venice Film Festival where it won Best Director, is the exact type of “highest quality product” that Scott Shooman, Head of AMC Film Group, said is currently working in the marketplace.
“Films that we’ve had success with are ones that are directly correlated to something like a high Rotten Tomatoes score or a Letterboxd score,” he said. “Anything with some energy or kineticism to it or feels like a communal experience. That’s what’s working right now in the United States.”
Films that are currently struggling in the marketplace, Shooman continued, are projects that skew older in age. The audiences for those films, he said, have yet to entirely return to cinemas following the pandemic. He emphasized the point when quizzed by an audience member on why what they described as the “broken” Kristin Scott Thomas-directed drama My Mother’s Wedding featuring Scarlett Johansson has been unable to find a distribution home following its debut at TIFF.
“Right now, the life of a broken film is not theatrical,” Shooman said. “The film that is not executed to perfection has a tougher time theatrically. And where we’re seeing that threshold of quality being most relevant is on old-skewing dramas. They really have to stick to the landing. Because that older audience has to be buying the film enough at 5pm on a Friday when it drops for it to top the charts and have a lifespan.”
Ultimately, he added: “The cheaper you make a movie the more buying opportunities you have in the marketplace. There will be more people who are able to afford that film.”
The “Barren” UK Film Landscape
The only territory that prompted a more pessimistic view in the room than the U.S. was the UK, which veteran producer Jeremy Thomas described as a “very barren landscape.”
Thomas was quizzed on his decades-long career, which includes credits like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, and he said his practice has only been sustainable because of his openness to working with international partners on films that he could never “put together in the UK.”
Pointing to the British Screen Forum’s recent report into the UK industry, Elysian Film Group’s Danny Perkins identified the UK’s reliance on inward investment as one of the biggest local challenges.
“Star Wars and all these big films are being made in the UK. And it’s a great production base but over the last year with the strike the production slowdown in the UK has been extraordinary,” Perkins said. “The budgets for locally funded films are becoming smaller and smaller while the big international films are getting bigger. Local productions are disappearing.”
However, Perkins noted that despite how “challenged” the UK is, the country remains a territory with a bustling film community with “lots of talent and IP and good material.”
“We have the Magic Faraway Tree, which is a big family film and we’re making it completely independently for 50 million dollars with stars like Andrew Garfield,” he said. “The UK is challenged but if you can see through the cracks there is an opportunity.”
Perkins added: “And we’ve had a change of government this year. The previous governments seemed determined to destroy BBC and Channel 4 who are the main financiers of indie films. So there are opportunities now but it is tough.”
Elysian’s Magic Faraway Tree is a modern adaptation of Enid Blyton’s popular novel. The book was adapted by BAFTA Award-winner Simon Farnaby (Wonka, Paddington 2) and will be directed by Ben Gregor (Britannia). Starring alongside Garfield are Claire Foy, Rebecca Ferguson, and Jennifer Saunders.
The Future
Titled Where Are We Going Next, the last session of the conference was the least existential with panelists Vincent Maraval and veteran exec and former Participant CEO David Linde urging calm among their colleagues.
The pair, with host Roeg Sutherland, were resolute in their conclusions that the film industry wasn’t dead. They instead preached that change is frequent in cinema and must be embraced.
“When I first started, the first tech boom was TV with HBO and Showtime. And that was a monumental change on how people were making money,” Linde said. “And then we had VHS, which changed how people approach the film business. And after that came DVD and BluRay and streaming.”
Linde said that change in the industry is “cyclical.” The only difference he said he has noticed with the shifts happening today is the “speed” at which they’re coming.
“Things are happening so quickly,” he said. “But the one optimistic thing I’ve witnessed is that people are coming together to try and figure out ways to try and crack the overall business.”
Maraval added: “We just need to adapt. We’re in a world where people consume more.”
The San Sebastian Film Festival runs until September 28.
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