Sundance Preview: LA Fires Cast Shadow Over Park City as Market Seeks New Balance
As Los Angeles grapples with the widespread devastation of its ongoing wildfires, indie movie leaders are looking to the Sundance Film Festival with a mix of renewed purpose and cautious optimism about the independent film market.
The annual gathering in Park City, which kicks off Thursday, arrives when both the physical and financial landscapes have dramatically shifted, with some filmmakers, actors and executives literally displaced from their homes while the broader market continues its drift away from the streaming-fueled bidding wars of recent years.
Adding to the challenges, the impact of the Los Angeles wildfires is palpable among industry figures headed to the festival. “I think going into Sundance, that provides people there with a bit of perspective,” Julien Levesque, an agent in Gersh’s film finance group, told TheWrap. “People are going to be at Sundance with a little bit of a renewed sense of purpose, and just that community feeling that we’ve been feeling in Los Angeles I think definitely will continue.”
Picturestart’s Erik Feig, who has been displaced from his Palisades home due to the fires, sees the festival as an opportunity for renewal. “What’s so great about Sundance, what I always love about it, is it’s the community of creativity,” Feig said. “It’s by far my favorite festival, because it’s such a festival of discoveries, more than Venice or Toronto. There are so many movies that you don’t really know anything about, and so many filmmakers who are brand new.”
The market dynamics at this year’s festival reflect an industry in transition. Every industry insider who spoke to TheWrap agreed that the days of all-night bidding wars are pretty much over, making way for a more measured sale process that can extend beyond the festival’s end date. Those seeking distribution are cautiously optimistic that buyers will be spreading around the love — and their bets — instead of plopping down big money for one or two films and leaving.
“I think that we’re in a positive direction in terms of the market,” Levesque said. “For several years we had these big booms in acquisitions, which was obviously very nice, but we’re returning, and we’re evolving as an industry, towards a more strategic and thoughtful acquisition market, and I’m positive Sundance will be a great place to have a lot of these great films that we can showcase and to get picked up.”
Topic Studios’ EVP of Film and Documentary Ryan Heller, who had great success last year with “A Real Pain,” the Kieran Culkin-starring drama that was snatched up by Searchlight for $10 million and is now considered a contender in awards season, echoed Levesque’s sentiment that the sales process is now more diversified.
“There are more buyers playing more distinct games from one another,” he said, noting that there are pure streaming buyers, pure theatrical buyers and some who are a hybrid of both, each with their own windowing strategy. “What that means for us as sellers is that you can have the same movie and five buyers with varied ideas about release timing, how to reach an audience [and] who the audience is.”
Heller, who has two documentaries in the festival this year in “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” and “FOLKTALES,” described the relatively new experience as both exciting and more complicated, since it depends on what the sellers feel is the best path for the movie.
The biggest sales at last year’s festival were largely marked by either big stars or genre fare, but none of them made a huge splash at the box office: There was “A Real Pain” ($12 million gross), Magnolia snatched the June Squibb actioner “Thelma” for an undisclosed sum ($12.6 million gross) and Amazon MGM Studios picked up the Aubrey Plaza-starring coming-of-age film “My Old Ass” for $15 million ($5.7 million gross before streaming on Prime Video). Netflix also plopped down $17 million for the body-swap horror movie “It’s What’s Inside” and an undisclosed amount for the Will Ferrell documentary “Will & Harper.”
This year’s lineup is more muted, with fewer films featuring big stars and only a couple from established filmmakers. That said, two of the buzziest acquisition titles are the Jennifer Lopez-fronted “Kiss of the Spider Woman” from director Bill Condon and the Benedict Cumberbatch grief drama “The Thing With Feathers.”
What impact that dynamic will have on the market is unclear, but Republic Pictures president and chief content licensing officer Dan Cohen, who is bringing the Dylan O’Brien film “Twinless” to the festival, acknowledged this year’s lineup feels “pretty indie.”
Levesque added: “I feel that there’s not going to be huge bidding wars, but I do feel that there will be deals made and there will be opportunities for these films to be seen.” That of course includes streamers — Apple picked up “CODA” for $25 million in 2021 and won the Oscar for Best Picture, Hulu and Neon paid $17.5 million for the Andy Samberg comedy “Palm Springs” in 2020 and Netflix has been a constant presence at the festival over the last several years.
“Streamers are very well educated. They know their market, they know their audience, they know the consumer,” Feig said. “They know what works on their platform. They know what doesn’t.”
But the overall state of independent film remains complex. “I think why buyers go to Sundance is to be surprised,” Heller said, tempering expectations about big sales. “It’s less about the tempo of the market or how quickly things sell, and it’s really about the long game on every title.”
As Feig puts it, “In independent film, as in so many other areas about media and the economy at large, it’s feast or famine. You either really work or you really don’t work.”
That extends to the documentary community, which has been struggling in recent years. Amplify Pictures co-founder Joe Lewis and head of documentary Lauren Haber have “Pamela, A Love Story” director Ryan White’s new film “Come See Me in the Good Light,” about poet and LGBTQ activist Andrea Gibson, at this year’s festival. But as veterans of the documentary space, they acknowledged a changed environment, one in which they strive to combine passion with commercial prospects.
“We’re honest about the state of the industry,” Lewis said, noting that the current documentary market favors films about sports, music, true crime or celebrity. “How do we make something that’s elevated and smart and has great filmmaking but is also commercial?” The “Fleabag” and “Transparent” producer said they focus on serious subjects “but done in a fun way,” while noting they don’t run after every trend. “If we wanted to chase what was commercial, we’d do a lot more true crime.”
Haber, who worked on the acclaimed documentary “Sugarcane” that premiered at Sundance last year and is firmly in the Oscar race, pointed out that many documentaries shortlisted for this year’s Oscars struggled to find U.S. distribution. “I do feel like there’s a disconnect there that I hope is so obvious right now, that it’s being recognized, and that it will start to move in a different direction,” she said of critically acclaimed docs failing to find a distributor.
Of course, coming out of the dual strikes and overall contraction in Hollywood, narrative indie film is not immune to constraints either.
“I think the industry as a whole is evolving, and indie film as a whole is evolving to exist in this new marketplace. So I feel good about the state of indie film,” Levesque said. “I think that there’s inherently going to be a latent period between what the market is selling and what the producers and financiers are making.”
He added: “And we’ve had this big slowdown in acquisition. We had a big slowdown in production. A lot of producers and financiers have had to kind of structure how they build their budget in a much more thoughtful way that allows for a film to be successful.”
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