“Everyone says that the pandemic changed everything, but it also opened my eyes to look for the audience in a different way,” said Spanish distributor Enrique Costa of Elastica Films who received the best international innovation distribution award at the second edition of the International Distribution Summit (IDS) in Cologne last week.
“As a distributor you need to build a brand which allows you to create an audience that knows about the company even before a particular film is released. We are not just distributing movies and selling tickets,” he suggested, pointing to the strategy of US distributor A24. The company generated 6.5m YouTube views of its trailer for The Zone Of Interest last week.
Indeed, Costa is even considering the idea of publishing a fanzine or newsletter in the future as another element of building up the company’s brand to connect with its potential audiences.
The importance of cinemagoers meeting filmmakers in Q&As and personal appearances during the promotion of a film’s release was also highlighted by keynote speakers at IDS.
Sara Frain, director of marketing and distribution at UK distributor Picturehouse Entertainment pointed to her experiences with the release of Charlotte Regan’s debut feature Scrapper this summer.
“The filmmakers were so invested in the film and wanted to connect with audiences,” Frain recalled. “We worked with them from the very beginning on creating the trailer and the poster right up to the release date. We then took them on an extensive Q&A tour, and local word of mouth really started to buzz on the film. I believe that working that closely with them produced the success that has now taken around £560,000 in the UK, which is a phenomenal result for a debut film.”
“Screenings with Q&As in the first two weeks of release in different cities are crucial in order to get the support of the cinemas and audiences,” Costa agreed
Torsten Frehse of Berlin-based Neue Visionen explained his promotional tours around Germany tend to target “lots of medium-sized towns to reach audiences because a premiere there with a star attending is more of an event than in a big city like Berlin, Cologne or Munich.”
The use of social media has become widespread as a key part of the arthouse distributors’ release strategies and it is notable that is younger audiences who have found their way back to global cinemas.
Statistics from the German Federal Film Board reported during the conference revealed the percentage of tickets sold to 10-19 year-olds in Germany in the first six months of 2023 had increased year-on-year from 19% to 23% and even above 2019’s 19% pre-pandemic figure.
In line with these changing audience demographics, Facebook is losing significance as a platform for promoting films and the focus is now more on TikTok and the role of influencers or creators to create a buzz about a film’s release.
“When you work with creators, give them absolute freedom, don’t restrict them,” says Mathieu Robinet of French distributor Tandem Films. He made the conscious decision to tap directly into the young generation’s world by recruiting a 17-year-old intern to the company to benefit from his inside knowledge about this target group and their viewing habits.
While influencers are usually being used by the distributors to promote the films in a positive way to their communities, Andrea Romero of Italy’s I Wonder Pictures adopted a quite different tack when promoting Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale for its release at the end of February this year.
“The challenge was to bring a younger audience into the cinemas, so we involved some creators who were against the film to do a special night for their audience and express their disappointment about the film,” Romero explains. “The idea was not to leave these people out of the campaign.”
Although the Italian press was lukewarm on the film and there was criticism of lead actor Brendan Fraser wearing a fat suit for his role, the hype around the “Brenaissance” phenomenon brought the younger filmgoers into the cinemas and resulted in the film grossing over €3m at the Italian box office for I Wonder.
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