The Indie Thing
There have been very good – and very repetitive – pieces on The Indie Meltdown of 2008.
I am not of the belief that we are at the end of indies, but that we are at the end of a certain kind of cycle, particularly regarding theatrical distribution.
I am not of the belief that this is a “sky is falling” moment in which people are panicking for no reason, but that there is a real paradigm shift going on and that indie distributors are as slow in adjusting mindset at the major studios.
I am not of the belief that the shutdown of studio Dependents is deadly to the indie world, but that it is simply a natural coming to sanity that “indie” movies are not mainstream movies and cannot carry the budgets of mainstream movies.
Every door that closes opens another door. That is the nature of the world, not a showbiz issue. Nature abhors a vacuum. But what the next door is going to be, no one knows. Let me restate that… NO ONE knows.
In the last five years, we went from a Dependent standard of $12 million per film, set by Searchlight, growing into the 20s by way of Focus, and then into the 30s and beyond via Vantage in the last two years. Higher budgets mean more risk, which to the people who oversee these companies means more ad dollars are needed to insure the risk.
The three rock solid Dependents as of this writing are Fox Searchlight, Miramax, and Sony Pictures Classics. But neither company followed the Dependent trends of the last few years. Searchlight started to head down that road – it was their success that created the opening for bigger budgets and higher profile – and then backed off… they could feel it was wrong as they were doing it. Meanwhile, the studio has become as sure an annual Oscar bet as any, ever… and cracked the $100 million ceiling last year for the first time with Juno. Still, we are in one of the company’s down years, with just 4 releases due this year, none of which seem likely to be terribly significant in any way.
Disney’s Miramax has been very cautious in its approach under Daniel Battsek. He will spend money, but he won’t through a lot of cash at the wall and see what sticks. He’s gone acquisition and production funding pretty evenly. He’s taken his hits, but he’s never risked so much that a failure threatened the division’s profitability for the year. And with No Country for Old Men, The Queen, The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, and Gone Baby Gone (plus foreign on There Will Be Blood), no one has had a better high-profile run in recent years (though Searchlight has had bigger hits).
Sony Pictures Classics has never much played that game, though they stepped towards a bigger production slate – that seems to be over – and they do act as a domestic distribution and marketing arm for some of Sony’s international efforts, like the Stephen Chow films.
Clearly, there is an opening for popular movies that have a likely audience of a size that suggests that grosses between $5 million and $15 million are reasonable… and only more than that when magic strikes. But at that price point, how do businesses proceed and succeed?
“Too full a marketplace” is, to my ear, a gross simplification. It’s not how much competition there is, but how the product competes.
Unfocused competition is an issue. Last year, there were 156 releases onto 1000 screens or more. There were 123 such releases a decade ago (1998) and 127 five years ago (2003). So we’re looking at an increase in wide releases of roughly one extra release every other week. This is clearly not what is clogging the system’s arteries.
Most of that 20% increase is in the range of 1000 screens to 2000 screens… which is where The Weinsteins and the Dependents often live and majors dump their junk. Just seven of the thirty-eight films released in 2007, on between 1000 and 2000 screens, grossed more than $30m domestic, the biggest being Sweeney Todd, which hit $53.9 million. In distribution, anything can happen, but “anything” doesn’t often happen.
There were only another 81 titles last year that opened on between 100 and 1000 screens.
We’re looking at 156 wide releases over 2000 screens and 125 releases between 100 screens and 2000 screens. Yet only 147 total films last year did as much as $10 million. 33 films opened on more than 1000 screens and didn’t hit this modest goal.
Just 280 titles – or 5.5 a week – that get significant releases… it’s a lot, but it isn’t the cause of drowning.
There is a fascinating grouping of films right around the 300 screen release level from last year; Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Lars & The Real Girl, The Assassination Of Jesse James, and Away From Her. All four films had much higher ambitions. The highest domestic gross in the group is $7.1 million.
You can’t blame the failure of these films – released with stars, recent Oscar-nominees, an avalanche of press, and lots of acclaim – on marketplace overcrowding.
When people write about “no one wants to go to the movies,” they should be writing, “I no longer care about going to a theater, paying a lot, being bothered by kids and ads and popcorn prices… all-in-all, I prefer my living room.” Nothing wrong with that. But, it is time for us all to acknowledge is that the audience for indies is EXACTLY the audience that is actually abandoning the theaters. Teens aren’t. Lower income people aren’t. It is people over 30 with busy lives who can afford bigger TVs, a wide array of pay cable channels, and DVD rental and purchase.
Ironically, it is their disinterest and the success of DVD that has caused the sense of a theatrical glut.
Have you noticed that few of the “too many film”ers talk about the number of films in release seem to acknowledge that at least a third of the titles are released theatrically by contract, going through the steps to a better life in ancillary markets, which is where they were intended to earn their keep in the first place? This is a phenomenon of the last five years in particular.
258 films were released in 2007 that didn’t gross $100,000. A tiny number of these films were expecting to find a stronger theatrical life after dipping their toes in the water. Many “opened” only in New York City… which is what drives the New York Times a little nuts. But the vast majority was just putting a floater out there on the way to DVD.
It is these films that roughly doubled the overall number of annual theatrical releases from a decade ago to today, not serious players in the distribution business.
The biggest change in indie theatrical is the size of the releases competing in that realm. Between Lionsgate, MGM releases – which were all independently made in the last couple of years – and the studio Dependents (not the genre arms, like Screen Gems or Rogue), there were 48 releases of over 1000 screens last year.
But that only taps the most overt part of the problem. When you have a major “indie” at every studio, how does anyone who isn’t a major going to get space at the top art houses, with less marketing power?
What’s playing on the five screens at Landmark’s Magnolia Theater in Dallas? A split between The Fall and The Promotion, Lelouch’s Roman de Gare (Sam Goldwyn), The Weinstein Co’s release of Argento’s Mother of Tears, Sony Classics’ When Did You Last See Your Father, and, uh, Get Smart.
Lamdmark in West LA? De Gare, Father and Fall (split with daytime shows at LAFF) again, Overture’s The Visitor, Picturehouse’s Mongol, IFC’s Savage Grace, and… The Love Guru on 2 screens.
Get the picture?
There are some great and ambitious exhibitors in NY, LA, and even in some smaller towns. But the bigger the nut the theater is carrying, the more tempting to just roll forward in the most obvious way… bet on the movies that have the most marketing might behind them.
So where does it all go from here?
We already discussed the “answer.” No one knows.
But like any situation in which change is afoot, there are, in the broadest sense, two paths to travel. The internet, for instance, can empower… or it can be a way to avoid life and to isolate oneself in a very destructive way. A nuclear weapon can force peace by being a deterrent… it can kill millions when used to the end for which it was created. And the void that is about to hit the indie-minded exhibitors can make room for more films from a wider array of distributors or it can just mean more playdates for the ongoing Dependents and Lionsgate.
The thing is, much as I love seeing movies on screens, it’s probably time to reconsider what success looks like for these movies that have a smart but narrow market. Some companies, like IFC, have mostly abandoned theatrical, but the signal that that isn’t a step down hasn’t really be accepted by the intelligentsia. Cinetic is reaching for the future with its digital delivery program, meant to take hold of the long tail and shake it up, but that nagging wish for a theatrical life is still writ large on the soul of most young filmmakers.
But it seems more likely that some large amount of money will come flying in from whatever new sucker there is out there and will continue to feed the lust to do things as they have always been done. And I can just recycle this column again in five years.
Another reason for theatrical exhibition: There remains, as Mark Gill noted in his weekend LAFF address, the question of “how do you get noticed in a world of endless possibilities?” Right now, the best way — the only way — to ensure that your non-blockbuster, little-hyped indie film will get reviewed in mainstream venues — i.e., newspapers, magazines, TV and radio — and the website versions of same is to open in at least a handful of theaters. Yes, yes, I know: There are on-line critics who will review films that never see the inside of a theater (at least, never beyond a sprint through the film festival circuit). But, like it or not, a three-paragraph notice in The New York Times, or a 200-word mini-review in Entertainment Weekly still will carry a lot more weight, and reach a lot more people, than any website rave. Will that change? Possibly. No, make that probably. But right now, in 2008, you rely on what I call The Happenstance Factor: You need people casually paging through a newspaper or magazine (or watching TV or listening to the radio) to stumble across a review of a movie they knew nothing about, and to decide: “Hey, that sounds interesting. Maybe I’ll go see it. Or, down the road, rent it.”