Speak of the demise of the Sundance Movie Pageant as an incubator for audience-friendly impartial movies seems to have been tremendously exaggerated.
When titles from this 12 months’s fortieth anniversary pageant weren’t flying off the cabinets by the third day of screenings, some observers noticed it as yet one more signal that Hollywood was in dire straits. The pageant was not that includes impartial movies that might go on to be commercially viable, the considering went.
But when the pageant concluded over the weekend, it appeared that studios discovered quite a lot of movies that they had been prepared to wager would join with moviegoers.
As has been the case lately, streaming companies made the flashiest offers. Netflix paid a reported $17 million for the horror movie “It’s What’s Inside” and Amazon/MGM purchased “My Outdated Ass,” starring Aubrey Plaza, for $15 million. “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” a documentary a couple of Russian couple who save their marriage by scaling skyscrapers, was acquired by Netflix, whereas Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns the Max streaming service, is negotiating a $15 million sale for “Tremendous/Man: The Christopher Reeve story,” a documentary in regards to the “fall and rise” of the actor finest identified for his big-screen portrayal of Superman.
The normal studios acquired in on the act, too. Harking back to the headiest days of Sundance, an all-night bidding warfare ended with Searchlight Photos’ buying Jesse Eisenberg’s movie “A Actual Ache,” through which he stars reverse Kieran Culkin, for $10 million. The impartial distributor Neon purchased Steven Soderbergh’s ghost story “Presence” for $5 million.
Deborah McIntosh, co-head of WME’s impartial movie financing and gross sales group, mentioned this 12 months’s market was prone to find yourself on par with 2023 by way of gross sales quantity.
“I believe that there’s actually loads of issues popping out now that the pageant mud is settling, the place patrons really feel actually excited in regards to the movies they’ll earn money on,” she mentioned in an interview. “Finally, the crop of films could be very robust, and I believe the shopping for market has elevated 12 months on 12 months and hopefully is settling again in a great spot.”
The Sundance Movie Pageant has lengthy been seen as a barometer for the well being of the movie trade. Previously 12 months, after two strikes that shut down the enterprise for shut to 6 months, movie insiders hoped {that a} strong market would emerge through which an in depth variety of films could be snapped up and finally made accessible to the general public.
“My hope is that the one optimistic factor in regards to the strike is that a number of films which may have struggled shouldn’t, as a result of there are such a lot of holes within the launch schedule,” the producer Jason Blum mentioned throughout a information convention at first of the pageant. “I hope a bunch of Sundance films wind up in theaters rapidly within the subsequent six months.”
Nonetheless, all will not be idyllic within the impartial movie market. Final week, Sundance convened a three-hour summit the place 60 trade leaders from throughout the spectrum of indie movie — distributors, producers and gross sales brokers — gathered to brainstorm on the problems dealing with the enterprise. Based on one attendee, who spoke on situation of anonymity as a result of the occasion was off limits to the media, one focus was on how finest to assist up-and-coming impartial filmmakers, who usually go on to land on the helm of a few of Hollywood’s greatest films. The first concern was that whereas movies at Sundance had been nonetheless being purchased for bigger sums, the smaller million-dollar purchases that used to symbolize nearly all of gross sales are not as plentiful.
“We’re nicely past the post-studio period and because it seems, we’re nicely past the post-streaming period,” mentioned Tom Quinn, chief govt of Neon, referencing the go-go days when first studios after which streaming companies usually overpaid for expertise and set excessively massive budgets for movies.
But, he added, regardless of the contraction out there, Sundance has remained regular.
“It’s actually fascinating to see the consistency of Sundance,” he mentioned, including that sure movies from this 12 months’s pageant “could possibly be put into Sundance 20 years in the past and they’d be as related then as they’re immediately, a sure timeless notion of what impartial filmmaking is, and that’s actually thrilling.”
