Sundance 2023: filmmakers must adjust to reality of the market, say indie distributors

You’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t excited to be returning to Sundance for the festival’s first in-person edition since 2020. Yet the industry’s giddy anticipation cannot hide pressing concerns over the fate of theatrical distribution for independent cinema, particularly adult-skewing dramas.

Aided and abetted by the pandemic, streamers rose to the fore in the last two years when Sundance went virtual – including 2021’s unfortunate eleventh hour switch to an online event amid the Omicron surge – as Apple, Searchlight/Hulu and Prime Video stole the headlines with big buys on Cha Cha Real Smooth ($15m worldwide), Fresh (pre-festival) and Nanny ($7m worldwide), respectively.

Theatrical buyers scored points too, with a notable win for IFC Films with Watcher while Sony Pictures Classics’ Living starring heavyweight awards contender Bill Nighy is still in the relatively early stage of release. However a number of last year’s Sundance buys failed to take hold at the theatrical box office as older audiences remained reluctant to return to cinemas or theatrical played a relatively small role in a digital-led release pattern. 

Many in the industry are emotionally wedded to theatrical, although given the recent box office stumbles in North America led by a couple of starry, studio-backed Oscar frontrunners – Tár and The Fabelmans – the industry is cautious and a number of people who spoke to Screen believe it’s time for filmmakers to better align their expectations with the reality of the market.

This comes at a time when streaming platforms are watching their own production costs and continue to buy content. However they’ve become far stricter about what they snap up and it’s not necessarily going to be independent films with small cast. Their subscribers want to be entertained, just as theatrical audiences do.

“If the movies screening at Sundance are dark dramas with zero cost that are made to be discoveries, that’s not what the market wants,” observes one source. “We’re still in the tail end of what was allowed to get made during Covid. Small, personal films that cost a lot to get made…they’re not viable.”

“I’m opened-minded,” says Tommy Oliver of Confluential Films, which has four films in this year’s selection. “People need to understand where the audience is and how they want to engage with content. While I love theatrical, it’s not right for every film when you have movies like Tár and The Fablemans both bombing theatrically. You need to pay attention.”

Confluential is executive producer on Qasim Basir’s NEXT drama To Live And Die And Live, and the company co-financed another film in the discovery section, Thembi Banks’s romance Young. Wild. Free., with Macro. Oliver’s company put in most of the equity on US Documentary Competition entry Going To Mars, a profile of the poet and activist Nikki Giovanni by Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson, and Erica Tremblay’s Indigenous drama Fancy Dance in US Dramatic Competition.

He continues: “Most of the movies that are sales titles at Sundance are unlikely to be theatrical. If you think about the movies that have done well coming out of festivals like Coda, Nomadland, Cha Cha Real Smooth and Nanny, most of these movies don’t do big numbers at the box office, so maybe [the Sundance 2023 acquisitions] will be a hybrid release or a qualifying release [for an awards run].

“The idea most movies will do tens of millions of dollars at the box office isn’t where the marketplace is right now. That’s a reality check. Viewing habits have changed and most people have shown they don’t want to go to the theatre to see a drama; they want to see a spectacle. There will be exceptions but those exceptions need to be planned for.”

IFC Films pioneered the day-and-date model yet it remains flexible about how it releases each film and will often craft an exclusive theatrical run. President Arianna Bocco scheduled Watcher to open in June last year to get ahead of other genre films and take advantage of the film’s commercial elements (it stars Maika Monroe from It Follows) and capitalise on the buzz out of Sundance. Watcher played for 18 days exclusively in around 700 cinemas, earning close to $2m, boosting awareness and the must-see buzz prior to its arrival on ancillary platforms.

Festival hits like Watcher and the accompanying campaigns that get people to come out at the end of a working week don’t come along that often. IFC Films isn’t looking for programmers for the sake of it; the company wants films that can make an impact with their audience in whatever manner they are released.

“I’m not entirely sure the creative community has caught up, on the indie side, of what’s working in the market and what people want to see,” says Bocco. “I’m interested to see what’s at Sundance and how they could resonate in the marketplace.

“We don’t release [everything] in the same way and we do what’s right for our films. It’s not just day-and-date,” continues Bocco. “We’ve been doing theatrical windows and we’ve been doing a lot more strategic windowing to showcase theatrical. A lot of my [peers] are thinking in the same way. We don’t need to fill a pipeline filled with streamer titles.”

Bocco says the name of the game is to adopt a disciplined approach to what can work theatrically while focusing on how to reach the widest audience on more digitally-focused campaigns.

Kino Lorber is another veteran distributor that has handled lots of prestige and independent festival releases. It acquired five films at last year’s Sundance including Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s acclaimed Bolivian eco drama and World Cinema Grand Jury Prize winner Utama, Chase Joynt’s trans documentary and NEXT audience award winner Framing Agnes, and Francisca Alegría’s Chilean magical realist film The Cow Who Sang A Song Into The Future, which will open theatrically in spring.

The company adopts a flexible approach to distribution and tends to fashion theatrical releases for almost every film it buys. “Our standard policy has evolved,” says Wendy Lidell, SVP theatrical and non-theatrical distribution and acquisitions, a job title that reflects changing times. “It was a moving target. We started out with 90 days and during the pandemic we reduced it to as short as 30 and 45 days following AMC’s lead.”

In the end, the company settled on a 60-day window to allow their releases time to breathe. Lidell notes that regional cinemas will play films even once they’ve gone to digital platforms.

“With something like Utama the cinematography needs to be seen in a theatre,” she says. Kino Lorber planned an early November release for Utama hoping it would become the Bolivian Oscar submission. It did, although Utama did not make the international feature film Oscar shortlist. Kino Lorber proceeded regardless and the theatrical platform release grossed less than $50,000 theatrically before migrating to digital platforms, where the company has been prospering for some time.

Older audiences

Coaxing the older audiences into cinemas has proved to be difficult. “It’s harder than it was,” says Lidell. However Kino Lorber, which operates premium VoD platform Kino Now, has diversified its business and built a thriving library of classics, which according to Lidell may account for around 40% of the company’s revenues.

“I don’t know that the people who are not coming back are going to come back,” she says. “We’ll try to draw people out and [give releases] a long tail and we’re acclimating to the new environment. We’re on some level agnostic to platform; the idea is to bring the best possible films to the greatest number of people.

“A hit is a hit is a hit and quality will succeed, so that’s why building a strong library will get us over; if the percentage of our revenue stream is less from theatrical and more from another platform, that’s OK. If you’d asked me [about the prospects of the independent theatrical business] question 10 years ago, I would have said you have to do theatrical because that’s the only way to release the film. That’s no longer the case. We’re endeavouring to future-proof our company and migrating to the digital sphere.”

Producer and Picturestart founder Erik Feig got Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth and Am I OK? into the festival last year (both starred Dakota Johnson) and provoked a strong reaction from buyers, with Apple and Warner Bros/HBO Max pouncing on the titles, respectively.

This year Feig has US Dramatic Competition entry Theater Camp, a comedy starring Amy Sedaris and Jimmy Tatro about a desperate attempt to save an upstate New York theatre group from financial ruin before opening night. 

“Theater Camp is made to be enjoyed by an audience. I’m thrilled to be seeing it with a big audience at Sundance and we’ll be asking what’s the best way to get it out there,” says Feig. “We’ll be looking at theatrical, streaming, and streaming with a theatrical option.”

Feig says that streamers seemed like the most reasonable way of reaching audiences with last year’s Sundance selections, given how the festival pivoted to virtual and there were still big questions markets in audiences’ minds about returning to cinemas.

A year on and the industry has learned how to be opportunistic about the right films for theatrical. “There is a theatrical market out there, 100%,” he says. “This past year we’ve seen a lot of things work, and a lot not work and it’s not like consumers have forgotten how to go to a movie theatre. Theatrical distributors have got savvier and learned to play around with windows and engage with their markets in different pockets of opportunity. The streamers’ business have evolved as they’ve got a lot more focused about their subscribers and know what they like.”

So as high inflation and lingering Covid protocols push up costs, and the prospect of a summer writers strike looms over Hollywood and threatens the supply line, will theatrical buyers scramble to stock up? Not necessarily.

“A lot of times the urgency is for buyers who desperately need product,” notes Feig. “A lot of buyers have become more educated about what works for them. You will have a lot of buyers who may want things but there aren’t as many buyers who need things.”

Oliver Wheeler of Range Select, which represents worldwide sales on Sebastian Silva’s Premieres entry Rotting In The Sun and Laura Gabbert’s food industry documentary Food And Country in Premieres, is upbeat. “While we did ultimately become very successful in creating a robust and competitive marketplace when we were virtual,” he says, ”you can never fully recreate having buyers in the same room with an audience. That will have a very positive impact at the market.”

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