But the most interesting question raised in Venice was what happens when the creator is not positioned downstream from the movie at all.

Rome-based Slim Dogs is an obvious test case. Founded in the online-video world, the company has expanded across branded content, documentaries and conventional audiovisual production. Co-founder Marco Cioni described that evolution less as abandoning digital media for traditional production than as the disappearance of the boundary between the two.

“For us, television is not a destination,” he said. “It is a parallel track that we can activate and that, actually, we want to contaminate with what we do elsewhere.”

That is a materially different model from the familiar story of the YouTuber attempting to “graduate” into television.

Slim Dogs director and co-founder Matteo Bruno described the audience instinct inherited from digital production as something closer to a creative principle.

“We have to reach people,” he said. “And if we don’t reach them, then we are getting something wrong.”

That remained true even while producing a documentary around a specialized subject such as Formula 1 history. “If I’m telling my personal story, or the story of a Formula 1 team that revolutionized that world in the 1980s and 1990s, I have to find a way to make it reach a 20-year-old and a 40-year-old,” Bruno said. “How do you do that? By telling a story that works and can reach people.”

The implication is significant for conventional producers. Digital-native companies have spent years operating in an environment in which audience response is immediate, measurable and unforgiving. Accessibility is not something handed to a marketing department when production is finished; it can be embedded into the storytelling itself.

Anna Manzo, head of The Jackal Management at CiaoPeople, was explicit about the danger of treating the people who developed those skills merely as promotional inventory.

“A creator is not just their follower count,” she said.

“Creators are already inside cinema,” Manzo continued. The more useful question, in her view, is “how we can enhance and recognize the skills that are behind them.”

The industry still frequently encounters creators through promotional campaigns attached to finished movies. “It is certainly a system that can work to bring people into theaters,” she said, but “it is not the only way.”

Manzo urged producers, platforms and institutions to look behind the visible personality and recognize “the competence behind that face and behind that content,” including production ability and expertise in developing formats and languages specific to particular platforms.

Her broader argument was that cinema should stop constructing creators as a separate category that occasionally enters its territory.“Every year there are these big articles about influencers arriving in Venice,” she said. “No. That’s not it.”

Instead, she argued, creators and established audiovisual companies should increasingly be understood as operating inside “a single ecosystem, without creating another territory.”

That philosophy was also visible in Good Morning Venezia, an initiative discussed during the panel in which creators covered the festival and particularly its Orizzonti section through digital formats.

“This isn’t about bringing creators into Venice,” Manzo said. “Creators are already here.”

The point, she continued, was to officially provide space within the festival where creators could use “their language, their positioning and their voice” alongside producers and publishers to “open new doors of access to cinema,” including films audiences might otherwise never encounter.

Antonio James Mascoli, whose work combines social content with direct access to professional film sets, offered perhaps the clearest description of what those doors could look like.

A creator’s role, he argued, does not have to stop at recommending the finished product. Creators can explain the machinery behind filmmaking and introduce audiences to crafts, workers and processes that conventional film marketing rarely foregrounds.

“We try not only to follow trends or understand what could potentially work,” Mascoli said. “We also try to create interests, to make people discover new things.”

That relationship depends heavily on trust. “I want to tell you a story,” he said. “If you follow me and you trust me, then let’s try to tell you something you might not expect, something you may never even have thought about approaching.”

For Mascoli, cooperation with the industry could ultimately allow creators to promote something broader than individual releases.

“We as creators could try to pursue that objective better — promoting not only films, but cinema as a whole, cinema as a machine — if we work together,” he said.

“We aren’t just people making videos in a little bedroom,” he added. “We are people who want to come here, go onto sets and work with all of you.”

Yet two less comfortable questions were largely absent from the Venice discussion.

The first concerns access. The growing embrace of creators has coincided with an increasingly tense relationship between studios, film journalists and professional critics, particularly when limited interview slots, junkets and early screenings are involved. Creators can produce sophisticated work that goes well beyond straightforward promotion and may occasionally overlap with criticism or journalistic practices, but they can also occupy a fundamentally different position in the publicity ecosystem: one in which access is granted specifically because their coverage can help sell a title to an audience.

That distinction can become problematic when promotional reach begins competing directly with independent editorial work for the same finite access.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” provided a revealing recent example. Universal unusually opted against organizing the kind of separate early influencer screenings that have become commonplace around major studio titles, meaning professional film press largely drove the first wave of reactions. Creators were hardly excluded from the wider campaign, but the decision stood out precisely because critics and journalists have increasingly found themselves competing for access with personalities whose value to a campaign may lie primarily in promotional reach rather than independent evaluation.

This is not an argument for rebuilding an artificial wall between the two groups. A handful of creators produce truly compelling work, while a growing number of journalists increasingly operate across social platforms; neither category guarantees quality. But pretending there is no structural distinction between editorial independence and promotional partnership risks making the conversation about “one audiovisual ecosystem” rather too convenient for the companies controlling access.

The second unresolved issue is abundance. If practically anybody can become a creator, how does the industry distinguish genuinely distinctive talent from the enormous volume of accounts producing increasingly interchangeable material? Followers and views are the obvious shorthand, but neither necessarily measures audience trust, originality, storytelling ability or the capacity to sustain a project beyond short-form content. Even engagement figures provide only part of the answer.

There are now enormous numbers of creators covering the same trailers, festivals, releases and entertainment news through strikingly similar formats, editing rhythms, visual grammar and, at times, even delivery and tone of voice. The low barrier to entry that made the creator economy so powerful also produces tremendous amounts of duplication.

That creates a difficult selection problem for an industry increasingly eager to work with it. If cinema is serious about treating creators as writers, directors and producers, rather than simply marketing channels, it will eventually need more sophisticated criteria for identifying creative value than the size of an account.

Professionalization therefore requires more than providing creators with greater access. It also means determining what skills, standards and responsibilities should accompany that access — and being willing to distinguish between someone who has developed a genuine creative practice and someone who has simply learned to reproduce a successful content template.

None of that invalidates the argument made in Venice. It makes the next stage more difficult, and probably more interesting.

The creator economy’s contribution may ultimately have less to do with importing internet celebrities into an established film system than with importing a different relationship with audiences. But if that relationship is to become part of cinema’s infrastructure rather than merely another branch of its marketing apparatus, questions of access, editorial independence, quality and selection will have to be confronted alongside reach.

Creators tend to build the community before they build the project. Cinema has traditionally done the opposite. The opportunity is real, but so are the trade-offs.

The post Cinema’s Creator Problem Is No Longer Just About Marketing appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

For Wendt, one sign that international marketing has worked is surprisingly practical: whether local distributors actually use the materials. “The proof is if most of the distributors worldwide will use the campaign,” she said, rather than deciding to create their own artwork, trailers and social assets.

The experience also changed how TrustNordisk thinks about publicity. Wendt said the company had wanted to bring a publicist onto “The Last Viking” earlier, before its festival destination was known, but did not manage to do so. On subsequent titles, that role has moved further upstream, allowing teams to discuss sensitivities and positioning earlier.

That need for alignment was even more visible on Roubin’s “Le Faux Soir,” Michaël R. Roskam’s Belgian-French wartime drama produced by Frakas. Roubin divided its potential audience into Belgium, France and the rest of the world. Each required a different approach, yet distributors and sales agents were often focused on completed films while his team was trying to make decisions months earlier.

“The main problem actually that we faced is the time,” Roubin said.

Frakas eventually organized a dedicated marketing shoot with the cast and a professional team after principal photography. It was a workaround for something Roubin would rather have embedded into production itself: a marketing unit present during the shoot, when stills, interviews and promotional assets can be created without recreating the opportunity later.

Early, But Not Too Early
The paradox running through the panel was that everybody agreed marketing should begin earlier, yet “earlier” does not mean publishing everything sooner. At the time of Trevisan’s project, costs tied to the Eurimages support had to be reported within a relatively tight window, encouraging activity around the festival premiere even when theatrical releases remained months away.

Cadoux distilled the problem neatly: the work has to happen “early, but not too early.”

There is also the harder question of measurement. For a sales company, distributor uptake offers one indicator. For a public cultural fund, Cadoux cautioned, admissions and sales cannot be the only measures of success. The first projects entered the program in 2024, and meaningful circulation data can take years to emerge.

That makes the scheme less a quick experiment in boosting ticket sales than an attempt to change working habits. The practical recommendations from Venice were strikingly low-tech: bring sales agents and distributors in sooner, reserve development money for audience work even without a grant, and keep producers at the center of the discussion.

Roubin said the application process itself had changed his thinking. Even without winning support, forcing a producer to build a marketing plan early can be useful. “I will start on every project, even small projects, to think about marketing and audience at an early stage,” he said.

Trevisan pushed the idea further, arguing that “the conversation should begin with the director too.” Ask where a filmmaker imagines the premiere, she suggested, and “the answer can reveal whether the creative and industrial expectations are remotely aligned.”

Cadoux closed with an old marketing truth that sounded newly relevant after 45 minutes of talking about targeting, territories and timing: “It’s like people saying it’s a film for everyone. So it’s for no one.”

All in all, Eurimages’ experiment suggests that audience development can no longer be treated as the final stage of a film’s life. But starting early only works if the rest of the chain is willing to start early with you.

The post Film Marketing Needs to Start Earlier. Eurimages Is Learning How Hard That Can Be appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

The independent film sector is never short on conversations about audience development. What it lacks, judging by a closed working session at the 2026 Venice Production Bridge, is a reliable way to make those conversations happen early enough to change a film’s fate.

That tension ran through “New Paths to Audiences: Strengthening Collaboration Between Independent Film Distributors and Producers,” the fourth edition of Europa Distribution’s producers and distributors working session, held 6 September at the Hotel Excelsior’s Spazio Incontri. Organized in collaboration with ACE Producers, EAVE and the European Producers Club, the event brought together 30 distributors and 30 producers for three hours of small-group discussion followed by a plenary wrap-up.

Pascal Diot, head of the Venice Production Bridge, opened the session, while Europa Distribution project coordinator Valentina Serra introduced the association and its partner organizations. Before the room split into groups, Eurimages program manager and financial controller Thierry Hugot and project manager Iris Cadoux updated attendees on the Council of Europe fund’s Film Marketing & Audience Development Support Programme, which, crucially, is now rewarding marketing work that begins before principal photography. This set up the question that would dominate the afternoon: how much earlier can marketing, distribution and audience work realistically begin?

Ahead of the curve
The Eurimages figures suggest there is institutional appetite for trying. Across 2024 and 2025, the scheme received 72 applications and supported 30 films, a 45% selection rate, awarding EUR €1.47 million (USD $1.71 million) to projects led by producers from 23 countries. Seven supported titles were animations and four documentaries. Among the lessons Eurimages says it has drawn so far: early research pays off, digital can outperform traditional marketing, taste-based targeting can beat demographic targeting, centralized assets save money and the physical presence of talent matters.

For 2026, the program offers non-refundable grants of up to EUR €50,000 (USD $58,193) per film for activities ranging from audience research and digital campaigns to media assets, PR and outreach. Eligible projects must already have Eurimages co-production support, have a sales agent attached and not yet have reached their first market presentation or festival screening. The next deadline is 5 October. The 2026/27 assessment grid also explicitly rewards marketing work begun before principal photography, with five equally weighted criteria replacing the previous six-part system. The five 2026/27 criteria, each scored from 0–20, are: Strategy, Audience Targeting & Unique Selling Points; Transnational Dimension & Associated Promotional Material; Collaboration & Professional Capacity of the Parties Involved; Budget Coherence & Feasibility; and Timeliness & Implementation Readiness.

That notion of “early,” however, became considerably less straightforward once practitioners compared how films are actually financed, acquired and released.

Larry Bass of Ireland’s ShinAwil said one of the clearest missing links was not between producers and distributors but the absent third party. “Sales agents are missing in action everywhere,” he said. His group found that transparency between producers and distributors was often less of a problem than actual communication, particularly on international titles where a distributor may never meet the producer and instead deal exclusively with the sales company.

A second group, led by Jan Macola of the Czech Republic’s Pilot Film, exposed how different national systems can make any universal model difficult. Participants compared larger territories such as France, where pre-sales are common, with smaller markets where they are not. More importantly, Macola’s group returned to the same structural issue that Bass had laid out: “It’s very important to have dialogue from the early stage of development of the project,” while arguing that exhibitors, sales agents and funding bodies should also become part of that conversation.

Bass also identified practical areas where earlier collaboration could reduce duplicated costs. Posters and trailers were obvious examples. While participants disagreed on who should ultimately cut a trailer, Bass argued that trailer-making is “a specific skill base” and that sharing or coordinating such expenditure could improve recoupment for both sides.

He also stressed something increasingly decisive: cast access. “Cast is getting even more important for all parts of filmmaking,” he said, from financing through to getting a movie noticed. Therefore, availability needs to be built into the process rather than negotiated later.

Macola’s group also called for more money at the development stage, rather than concentrating resources on production and release. Better-funded development, they suggested, can allow producers to stop projects that are clearly going nowhere instead of being pushed to finish them “at any cost,” feeding an oversupply of films competing for already fragmented audience attention.

Cull my agent?
Igor Stankovic of Serbia’s Megacom Film offered the most combative take on sales agents. For domestic films, he said, early marketing collaboration is already possible: distributors can involve talent, visit locations and start digital communication during production. International acquisitions operate on another clock entirely. Some movies are pre-bought on the strength of a director or cast; others are only discovered once they emerge as festival titles.

“It is impossible to talk at that level [about] the early stage of the marketing strategy and campaigns,” Stankovic said of the latter category.

He argued that distributors need more direct access to talent and clearer information about release timing, particularly when a film’s international rollout may stretch across an 18-month window. Then came the session’s sharpest jab. On getting filmmakers and actors to support local releases and festivals, Stankovic suggested distributors might sometimes be better off approaching producers directly, quipping that sales agents “care just about the commission — and flying business class.”

Beneath the joke was a genuine frustration: local distributors can be expected to build campaigns around filmmakers and actors whom they may have little ability to access.

His group also questioned whether minimum guarantees are always the smartest place to concentrate distributor risk. Stankovic floated a model in which MGs could come down while contractual prints and advertising commitments become more explicit, giving producers reassurance that money will actually be spent on launching the film. “Maybe MG could be structured differently,” he said, with P&A becoming “an obligatory part of the contract.”

Simon Wullens of Lumière Benelux brought the discussion back to audiences. His group compared the film business with theater companies that employ dedicated audience developers whose job is to identify organizations and communities likely to connect with a work. “That might also be a good strategy for film distributors,” Wullens said.

His larger point was that distributors cannot solve audience problems at the end of the chain if the project never had a plausible audience to begin with. “Producers and distributors are actually forming a very good marriage,” he said. “Things go up, things go down, as long as we stay together.”

But that marriage requires early candor, including telling producers when a project appears destined to “fall between two chairs.” It also requires usable materials on time. Good stills, positioning materials and trailers are not decorative extras added once a movie is completed; they are the means through which distributors begin finding audiences.

Next, Stefan Bradea of Romania’s Bad Unicorn described a paradox that perhaps best summarized the afternoon, building on Stankovic’s comments. Distributors say they want to be involved early, and on national productions they often are, partly because local financing structures reward having a domestic distributor attached. Yet with international films, the same distributors want to minimize risk and may only commit once a project is substantially further along.

Finding the sweet spot
What they do want early, Bradea said, is influence over the marketing toolkit. Distributors “would like very much to be as soon as possible in the mix” when materials and strategy are being developed. He singled out set photography and trailers, arguing that having a trailer two or three months before the first international release would already represent an improvement.

Sales agents, in this formulation, are less villains than gatekeepers: the parties frequently controlling materials and marketing strategy, with local distributors sometimes brought in only after the campaign’s “sweet spot” has passed.

Bradea’s group also revisited financing. MGs remain critical to producers’ financing plans, so simply eliminating them is unrealistic. But rights structures, P&A guarantees and other deal terms could potentially reduce upfront MG exposure. He also raised contractual “callbacks” that can hold up releases until a film’s commercial potential has diminished, arguing for fewer such mechanisms and greater flexibility around secondary rights.

Later, Jakub Duszynski of Poland’s Gutek Film closed with the most philosophical report. His table began by imagining a “utopia” in which distributors could engage very early, discuss a project’s merits and perhaps invest. That vision immediately ran into resistance from producers worried about “too many cooks” and about protecting the filmmaker’s creative vision.

Duszynski’s group therefore reframed the proposition: if producers want distributors to share financial risk earlier, what exactly do distributors receive in return? Influence over development? Access and information? Or simply the expectation that they fall in love with the project as completely as the producer already has? This discussion was particularly important because it exposes the crucial tension of early distributor involvement: producers may want distributors to take financial risk earlier without necessarily wanting them to have greater influence over development. That’s a major contradiction that, as yet, is still in search of a meaningful resolution.

One idea floated was a database of first-time, lower-budget projects open to “courageous distributors” willing to read treatments and identify promising films before the normal acquisition stage. But the more telling complaint came from producers themselves. They do not simply want distributors to send back box-office figures and demographic metrics after release.

“They are very much disappointed with just getting numbers, statistics, metrics,” Duszynski said. “They would like to understand from distributors who are the audiences for their films.”

That may be the workshop’s clearest takeaway. The problem is not a shortage of data, schemes or marketing terminology. Every part of the chain still tends to make its biggest decisions at a different moment. Producers need financing before distributors feel safe. Distributors need materials before producers have finished making them. Sales agents sit between the two. Exhibitors enter later still. Meanwhile, the audience — the stake holder everyone claims to be working toward — is too often treated as something to locate once the film is already complete.

Eurimages is now explicitly putting money behind an attempt to reverse that sequence. The Venice discussion showed why doing so is difficult, but also why the status quo is increasingly untenable. Or, as Stankovic put it with considerably less diplomacy: without films, cinemas would be “just huge popcorn stores.”

The post Everyone Wants to Market Independent Films Earlier. So Why Doesn’t It Happen? appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

At festivals, Nordic films travel extraordinarily well. They win prizes, attract sales agents, generate press and enter foreign markets carrying exactly the kind of cultural prestige independent distributors are supposed to monetize. The harder step comes afterward: converting that prestige into a reason for somebody to leave home and buy a cinema ticket.

That distinction matters because the European theatrical market has become increasingly unforgiving. More than 3,400 European films received commercial releases worldwide in 2024, yet only 47 passed one million admissions, 35% fewer than during the pre-pandemic period. In 2025, European cinema attendance then fell another 5.5%, from 843 million to 796 million admissions. More European films are circulating, but relatively few are achieving scale.

A Europa Distribution session at New Nordic Films during the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund on 27 August offered a close-up of that conversion problem through Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” and Hlynur Pálmason’s “The Love That Remains.” The wider question was how visibility turns into positioning, urgency and admissions.

Prestige Is Raw Material, Not a Business Model
For “Sentimental Value,” the advantages were considerable: Trier’s profile after “The Worst Person in the World,” a Cannes Grand Prix, awards momentum and a cast including Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård.

Yet even those assets did not make success automatic.

Bianca Maria Roiu of Bucharest-based arthouse distributor Bad Unicorn called the Romanian release “the perfect storm.” It drew more than 29,000 admissions over 16 weeks. Yet Bad Unicorn’s “Armand,” also starring Reinsve, had struggled, while Golden Bear winner “Dreams” still did not approach Trier’s numbers. Prestige and familiarity created favorable conditions; they did not produce a repeatable formula.

Taiwan offered the same warning from another angle. “For us, I would position Nordic films alongside other European films,” said Swallow Wings’ Albert Yao. In a market where arthouse competes with Hollywood, Japanese animation, Korean cinema and local releases, “Nordic” can signal quality without becoming a mass-market proposition.

That is the weakness in treating Nordic cinema as a bankable category. Quality recognition and consumer demand are not the same thing.

The Most Useful Festival May Not Be the Biggest
The international festival hierarchy can obscure another part of the equation.

Cannes, Berlin and Venice remain unmatched for global visibility, but for a Nordic debut or less immediately commercial auteur film, a festival outside the Big Three can sometimes provide a clearer market signal precisely because the film has more room to dominate the conversation.

Lilja Ingolfsdottir’s Norwegian debut “Loveable” is almost a textbook example. It world-premiered in Karlovy Vary’s main competition in 2024 and left with five awards, including the Special Jury Prize, Best Actress for Helga Guren and the Europa Cinemas Label. The latter matters particularly from an exhibition perspective: the film did not merely leave with critical validation, but with a recognizable theatrical selling point.

Karlovy Vary produced another striking Nordic example this year. Danish filmmaker Mads Mengel’s debut “The Guest,” sold internationally by LevelK, world-premiered in the Crystal Globe Competition and emerged with both the Special Jury Prize and Best Director. For first features such as “Loveable” and “The Guest,” becoming one of the discoveries of Karlovy Vary may therefore be more useful than simply possessing a laurel from a more crowded program elsewhere. Prizes, concentrated press attention and industry exposure give distributors and exhibitors a narrative they can actually sell.

Locarno has long performed a similar auteur-building function. Pálmason’s “Winter Brothers” world-premiered there in 2017, beginning the accumulation of recognition that would eventually make “a Hlynur Pálmason film” a meaningful proposition in itself.

More recently, Janicke Askevold’s Norwegian “Solomamma” entered Locarno’s 2025 competition with international sales already underway. The point is not that Locarno generated every deal, but that selection itself forms part of a film’s international positioning, giving buyers, distributors and press a platform around which momentum can accumulate.

Maria Bäck’s Danish-Swedish-Greek “Brave New Love” offered a fresh example this August. Sold by Reinvent Yellow and selected for Locarno’s International Competition, the film arrived with Anders Danielsen Lie, Kathrine Thorborg Johansen and an unruly story about marriage, motherhood, infidelity and desire. Its immediate Locarno value is easier to measure in attention than completed sales, but that distinction matters: festival impact begins with visibility and positioning, not when a box-office result appears.

Rotterdam makes the exhibition connection more explicit. Swedish-Finnish drama “Raptures” won IFFR’s 2025 Big Screen Award, which provides EUR €15,000 (USD $17,473) to the filmmaker and another EUR €15,000 to the Dutch distributor acquiring the film. Here the festival does not merely confer prestige; it directly incentivizes theatrical circulation.

The lesson is not that one festival tier has replaced another. It is that for independent cinema, fit can matter more than rank.

There is another striking pattern across these examples. “Loveable,” “The Guest,” “Brave New Love,” “Sentimental Value” and “The Love That Remains” all revolve, in different ways, around families under pressure. For all the talk of Nordic cinema as an exportable aesthetic, one of its most internationally legible recent strands may be remarkably domestic: universal emotional material filtered through a distinctive mixture of candor, discomfort and dry humor.

Distributors Are Increasingly Selling an Occasion
The Haugesund campaigns were most revealing when distributors described everything they had constructed around the films. Independent distributors are increasingly being asked not simply to advertise a movie, but to manufacture an occasion around it.

Swallow Wings turned “Sentimental Value” into a series of limited theatrical collectibles in Taiwan. In Romania, Bad Unicorn asked more than 200 guests at a press screening to bring objects carrying sentimental value. Roiu said the resulting images helped communicate that “this is a very intimate film and you can participate in this.”

Aerofilms pursued the same logic through Scandinavian food, design and a relationship-focused conversation game. For “The Love That Remains,” it went further with dog-friendly screenings, a therapist Q&A and Icelandic-themed collaborations, while Mozinet built its Hungarian campaign around slow living, nature and craftsmanship.

The common logic matters more than the individual stunts. These campaigns try to rebuild something streaming has weakened: urgency. A film that audiences assume they can watch later needs a reason to be experienced now. A collectible, a filmmaker visit, a themed event or an audience ritual can turn a screening into a time-specific proposition rather than another item waiting in a digital queue.

And Sometimes Even That Isn’t Enough
That is why “The Love That Remains” may ultimately be more revealing than “Sentimental Value.”

Jour2Fête invested around EUR €150,000 (USD $174,725) in P&A and released Pálmason’s film on roughly 50 prints in France. Admissions nevertheless remained below 20,000. In Czechia, Aerofilms mounted an unusually hands-on campaign but remained under 7,000 admissions. Anna Rampa summarized the contradiction plainly: “We tried really hard to approach broader audiences, but it didn’t really happen.”

Yet both distributors intend to keep following the filmmaker.

For Jour2Fête’s Johanna Mayer, that continuity is part of the economics of independent distribution. European support, she argued, is vital because commercial resonance can rise and fall across an auteur’s career. “It’s super important for us to grow with our [filmmakers],” she said, adding that without such support, sometimes it simply would not be possible.

This is where auteur distribution stops resembling a sequence of isolated bets and starts looking like portfolio economics. A breakout proves that breakout is possible; a difficult release exposes the machinery required to keep arthouse distribution functioning. The value of the relationship can only be understood across several films, not from a single opening weekend.

European backing therefore becomes structural rather than decorative. Without risk-sharing mechanisms, distributors would face ever stronger incentives to buy only films with stars, immediately communicable concepts or already overwhelming festival momentum.

The European Audiovisual Observatory’s figures reinforce the problem. Domestic markets typically generated between 62% and 66% of admissions to European films in 2024, while 63% of export admissions were still generated elsewhere in Europe. European cinema crosses borders, but its ability to achieve scale far beyond those borders remains limited.

The wrong conclusion is that the Nordic label needs to be marketed harder. The evidence suggests the opposite.

A film from Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki may travel as romance and deadpan comedy. A Trier title can move through stars, awards and emotional accessibility. Pálmason can be sold through landscape, artistic authorship and the accumulated value of a career built across festivals such as Locarno. A Norwegian or Danish debut can arrive at Karlovy Vary relatively unknown and leave carrying a ready-made theatrical narrative.

The Nordic label may open a door. A festival may help prop it open, but the distributor still has to persuade somebody to walk through it.

The post Nordic Cinema Doesn’t Have an Export Problem. It Has a Conversion Problem appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

The film is now being positioned primarily at nine-to-12-year-olds rather than younger children. But reaching that audience presents another problem: Norwegian-language titles are competing for attention with entertainment backed by vastly larger global marketing budgets.

“It usually takes multiple touchpoints before something really registers,” Barholt said. The campaign uses TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, but also football tournaments, sporting events and local festivals. “You need to create a sense that the film is present around them, which is harder when you don’t have the machinery of a major international campaign behind you.”

There is an intriguing contradiction here. The channels used to reach younger viewers are overwhelmingly digital, yet Barholt sees growing interest among the same audience in analogue photography, journaling, crafts and other tactile experiences. “Back to Tottori” itself barely features phones and includes an actual camera as part of its visual world.

That tension between digital discovery and the experience surrounding a film was echoed by Danish Associate Professor Helle Kannik Haastrup, from the University of Copenhagen, whose Haugesund presentation examined Reddit, Letterboxd and internet-native phenomena including “Backrooms.” Haastrup argues that online engagement should not simply be understood as an extension of promotion. Different platforms allow films and series to become cultural forums in which viewers demonstrate taste, explore identity and discuss experiences that can be difficult to articulate elsewhere.

On Reddit, she has observed users drawing on stories such as “Stranger Things” and “Heated Rivalry” to discuss bullying, mental health, sexuality and coming out, aided by the relative safety of anonymity. Letterboxd works differently, turning taste itself into a form of identity. Selecting four favourite films, she noted, has become “a kind of gamified cinephilia,” connecting ordinary users to a ritual increasingly replicated by filmmakers and actors in interviews, press junkets and on red carpets.

“Backrooms” illustrates how the exchange can also move in the opposite direction, with an internet-native aesthetic migrating into mainstream cinema. Haastrup pointed to the project’s recognisable yellow visual signature and its roots in memetic imagery, ASMR-inflected videos and a viral web series, arguing that the film enters the market with both an established visual language and a pre-existing community.

For Haastrup, however, the social layer has not replaced the film itself. “The viewing experience seems to be central,” she said, pointing to the care online communities take around spoilers. What has changed is what can happen around that viewing experience. Younger audiences are highly selective about where they invest attention, and films can resonate because of their storytelling, their memetic potential or their capacity to create spaces in which personal experiences can be shared.

Research High and Low
All of this creates an obvious temptation for an industry hungry for younger audiences: study the data, identify the behaviours and reverse-engineer films around them. Salomonsen, who co-directed “Back to Tottori” and whose daughters play its central sisters, offered a useful corrective.

“The way young people consume stories has changed. But I don’t think we should change the way we make films because of that,” she said. “Every film should come from a particular place – from a person, an urge, or a longing to tell this exact story.”

She was even more forceful about building films around target-group research. “If we try to make films based on target groups, numbers, or previous blockbusters, I think we’re doomed to fail,” Salomonsen said. “Popcorn movies are fine too. Pure entertainment has its place. But I also think we have a responsibility to encourage children to think more deeply about storytelling, to look at images, and to understand art.”

That position is less opposed to the audience research than it might initially sound. The strongest lesson from Haugesund was not that filmmakers should follow younger audiences wherever an algorithm points. It was that the industry needs to distinguish more carefully between making a film and creating the conditions in which that film can be discovered, understood and acted upon.

Younger viewers do not appear to need convincing that cinema can be valuable. The harder task is making an individual film relevant enough to overcome inertia, price, infinite choice and competing forms of attention – while still trusting its audience enough not to reduce relevance to a formula.

The post Young Audiences Already Like Cinema. The Hard Part Is Giving Them a Reason to Go appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

Locarno Pro (August 5-11) – the Swiss film festival’s industry platform – closed its biggest edition yet this August with 2,140 industry accreditations (up 10% year-on-year), nearly 100 countries represented and 1,463 pre-scheduled meetings. Among the 76 films shown across its industry programs was one whose journey encapsulated a less obvious question facing the sector: once a film has been rescued and restored, what happens next?

“Letter from My Village,” Safi Faye’s 1975 debut feature, won the third Locarno Heritage Restoration Contest in 2025 after being selected from more than 30 submissions. Cinegrell subsequently undertook the digital restoration, which was presented at Locarno in 2026. Arsenal Filminstitut, which has represented Faye’s oeuvre since 2015, sees the restoration as the first step in a broader effort to return her work to circulation, including a retrospective planned for late 2026 followed by screenings and events internationally.

The Senegalese filmmaker’s work was not tackled directly during Locarno Pro’s Heritage Monday roundtable, “How Classic Cinema Finds New Audiences.” But its return to the screen offered a timely case study for many of the questions raised there: what comes after restoration, who is responsible for rebuilding an audience around a catalog title, and how can repertory cinema compete for attention?

For Leslie Vuchot, founder and CEO of Timeless Cinema, the problem often begins with access.

Her company grew partly out of requests from cinemas seeking festival and classic titles during the pandemic. Rights could be difficult to clear, while locating prints, DCPs, subtitles and information about territorial availability could become a project in itself.

Timeless Cinema, launched this summer, aims to simplify that process for programmers. But Vuchot stressed that making a film available does not automatically make it attractive to an audience.

“Every venue needs curation and editorialization and eventization,” she said. The challenge is to extend the circulation of classic films in a theatrical environment already crowded with new releases.

Exhibition Can Fund Preservation
For Film Noir Foundation founder Eddie Muller, exhibition itself became the engine of preservation.

Muller began organizing festivals after publishing his book “Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir,” only to discover that some of the films he wanted to screen were effectively unavailable. That led him to establish the nonprofit foundation to locate and restore orphaned or neglected films.

Today, revenue generated by its festivals feeds back into restoration work, creating what Muller described as a closed loop beginning with exhibition.

The foundation now operates ten festivals in the United States. Muller deliberately works with venues that can offer something of a classic moviegoing experience, with double bills, ushers and programming designed to make the screening feel like a night out rather than simply access to an old movie.

“My actual job was maintaining the audience to watch these movies,” he said.

That can mean keeping audiences coming through the doors during 10-day festivals even on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, when repertory cinemas might otherwise struggle to fill seats.

The cultural argument, however, has limits when dealing with commercial rights holders.

Recalling his efforts to convince US studios to make seemingly dormant titles available, Muller boiled the pitch down to one sentence: “I’m going to make you money.”

“That is the only viable answer that you can give in the United States of America,” he added.

As an example, he cited “The Crimson Canary,” a 1945 B movie that had barely been requested for decades but nevertheless found an audience through the foundation’s festivals. Another supposedly “lost” film, “Laughter in Hell,” produced an even simpler explanation from a Universal archivist: “It wasn’t lost. It was just nobody was asking for it.”

Give Audiences More Than a Screening
At the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, the same principle operates at a different scale. Its two theaters screen around 600 repertory titles each year, according to the museum’s director and president Amy Homma, but programming increasingly expands beyond the film itself.

A screening of Disney’s “101 Dalmatians,” for example, featured a real Dalmatian in attendance, and also ran alongside a live drawing class exploring hand-drawn animation. When Guillermo del Toro participated in a Hitchcock program, he was encouraged to work with archival papers and production materials rather than simply introduce the screening.

The aim, Homma explained, was to create “forever memories.”

“We have to be thinking of audience engagement as creatively as we possibly can,” she added.

Not every repertory venue can produce that level of event regularly, but Homma argued that consistency matters almost as much as scale. A dependable monthly screening can gradually create word of mouth, membership and a recognizable community around a venue.

Heritage Is Not Just Nostalgia
Perhaps the strongest evidence that this is not simply a nostalgia market came from Arsenal artistic director Stefanie Schulte Strathaus — whose institution, separately from the panel discussion, is also behind the renewed circulation of “Letter from My Village.”

“We make more income now with heritage film than with new films,” she told the audience.

The unexpected successes include restored shorts by India’s feminist Yugantar collective and the Sudanese Film Group. These are not necessarily canonical titles with pre-existing mass recognition, yet they have been circulating internationally.

Schulte Strathaus linked that interest to a younger audience searching the past for alternatives to dominant historical narratives.

“Film heritage offers so many potential futures,” she said.

Interest also extends to analog processes themselves. Arsenal’s workshops on Bolex cameras, film development, digitization, cataloging and projection can book out within days. The institution sometimes screens material before restoration, allowing audiences to understand the condition of the work and follow the process of bringing it back.

“Being transparent, being open, letting people in and not keeping them outside is the key,” she said.

That approach gives additional context to Arsenal’s plans for Faye. The restoration of “Letter from My Village” is not being positioned as an isolated technical achievement: the institution says it is intended to initiate renewed visibility for her wider filmography.

Build the Relationship Earlier
A second Locarno Pro session suggested that this audience-first thinking begins long before a film reaches the archive..

During Open Doors’ “It Takes a Village: Investing in Film Beyond Cinema,” Darcy Heusel, founder of audience-development and US distribution company Outside, described audience as something more fundamental.

“Audience really is the infrastructure,” she said.

Heusel argued that a small but committed group can be more useful than hundreds of thousands of passive social media followers, and that the relationship should begin during development rather than shortly before a festival premiere or theatrical release. Ugandan producer Samuel Tebandeke echoed that point. “I need to build that community from the moment I get a green light and say, ‘We’re shooting this film,’” he said.

For a newly financed feature and a 50-year-old restoration, the mechanics are obviously different. The underlying challenge is not. Films do not automatically find audiences because they have been funded, selected, digitized or restored. Someone still has to provide context, create an experience and establish a relationship between the work and people who might never have known to ask for it.

For “Letter from My Village,” Locarno’s restoration therefore marks less an endpoint than the beginning of another cycle: from preservation to circulation, and from circulation to rediscovery. Restoration can save a film; rediscovery, however, requires an audience.

The post At Locarno, Restored Films Face Their Next Challenge: Finding an Audience appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

At Karlovy Vary’s Industry program (July 5-9), a sharp conversation held on July 6 on audience strategy argued that independent films can no longer afford to treat marketing as something that begins after distribution. Moderated by Deadline’s Zac Ntim, the panel, titled “Audience First: Rethinking Film Marketing Before Distribution,” brought together producer Mollye Asher, whose credits include Chloé Zhao’s “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” “The Rider” and Oscar-winner “Nomadland,” and Mathias Noschis, founder and head of strategy at European film marketing agency Alphapanda.

Asher said her approach to picking projects has changed over time, with the marketability an increasingly important factor. Earlier in her career, the key questions were whether she liked the filmmaker and the script. Now, she also considers whether there is an audience for a project, and whether the market wants it. “I do not necessarily always follow that,” she said, noting that instinct still matters, “but it is something I take into account, because it will also affect the financing of a project.”

Noschis argued that the best time to begin serious marketing work is not after a film is finished, but just before shooting. While producers can start thinking about audiences at the financing stage, too much can still change. Three or four months before production, once the script is close to final, is the ideal moment, he said, because teams can plan stills, interviews, social formats and festival positioning before everyone is consumed by the shoot.

The recommendation, however, also points to a growing pressure on independent producers: marketing is being pushed earlier into the production cycle, even as many teams are still struggling to close financing, secure cast and manage basic production logistics.

Creating Buzz, Prompting Debate
For Noschis, buzz is not something that can simply be manufactured after the fact. At festivals, it already exists in conversations between people asking what they have seen and what is worth catching. Alphapanda’s job, he said, is often to bring those conversations online, so that people beyond the festival can feel part of the momentum.

He cited Golden Bear winner “Yellow Letters” as a case where the campaign anticipated a wider discussion around politics and freedom of speech. By inviting people already active in that debate to engage with the film, the campaign was able to enter a conversation that was already happening. “Online you can never control everything,” Noschis said, “but up to a certain point, we were able to guide the conversation.”

Asher pointed to “Swallow,” which opened just as the pandemic hit, as an example of audience pockets becoming unexpectedly powerful. The film’s themes of female agency and confinement helped it travel online, while partnerships with Planned Parenthood and coverage in Architectural Digest gave it additional routes to visibility. With “Nomadland,” she said, she saw even more clearly how small audience clusters can help build wider awareness.

Partnerships, Timing and Visual Assets
The panel also tackled brand partnerships, still more common in the US than in Europe. Asher said she is currently exploring brands that are already organic to a project, partly for financing reasons but also for broader collaboration. Noschis warned, however, that any partnership must fit the film’s identity. “There is nothing worse, in terms of image, than a misfit,” he said.

That identity work, he suggested, starts with a simple exercise: imagine the film as a person. Is it a 15-year-old skater, or a 70-year-old woman who drinks coffee? From there, producers can ask which brands, influencers or communities genuinely match the film’s personality.

Timing was another major concern. Noschis warned that filmmakers can damage a project by going online too early and revealing too much about its progress. If a film has spent months or even years chasing a festival slot, the industry may start to perceive it as old. “This industry likes fresh meat every month,” he said. Materials should be created early, but not necessarily published early.

Asher agreed, adding that a press announcement only helps if there is a clear call to action, such as a market or financing push. Holding back images can also allow a team to choose the right trade publication for a first look and shape the public perception of the film.

Noschis was blunt about one practical requirement: hire a still photographer. “Get a still photographer to take proper stills, not screenshots,” he said. He added that poster designers need character portraits and images that actually communicate the tone of the film. Too often, he said, comedies arrive with no images that look funny.

In that sense, the discussion made clear that “audience first” is not just a strategic mindset, but a cost line. For smaller productions, the challenge is not only knowing what materials should be created, but finding the resources to create them properly before a distributor or sales agent is fully on board.

Old Gatekeepers Still Matter
The discussion also returned repeatedly to the enduring power of trade reviews. Noschis said buyers still rely heavily on a handful of major trades – Screen International, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline – even as the media landscape has fragmented. “Reviews are still extremely important,” he said, but relying only on them is dangerous. He cited Irish coming-of-age drama “The Quiet Girl,” which initially struggled to secure reviews out of Berlin’s Generation section, but built visibility through social media, later growing into an Oscar-nominated success.

That tension was one of the panel’s most revealing points: while marketing channels are fragmenting across social media, influencers and niche communities, the industry’s core validation mechanisms remain strikingly concentrated around a small number of festivals and trade publications.

For  “The Quiet Girl,” Alphapanda initially leaned into the film’s Irish-language identity as its unique selling point. Later, for the United Kingdom, United States and Oscar campaigns, that element was downplayed in favor of reviews and festival selections, showing how positioning can change throughout a film’s life.

Asked whether festivals still matter, both speakers were clear. Asher said most of her films have depended on festivals to attract distributors, audiences and reviews. Noschis described festivals as essential labels of reputation. For an acquisitions executive with limited time, a festival selection signals that a film is worth watching.

His broader message to producers was direct: thinking about marketing does not mean surrendering the film to commerce. It means being able to speak to sales agents and distributors at eye level. “Trust the people you work with and be ready to lose,” he said, “but have ideas yourself, because that is what starts the conversation.”

The post Indie Film Marketing Can’t Wait Until the Film Is Finished appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

For six years, Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome has sat dark on Sunset Boulevard, its familiar red-and-blue marquee offering moviegoers a daily reminder of what Los Angeles lost when Pacific Theatres and ArcLight Cinemas shut down during the COVID pandemic.

Now, the landmark finally has something it has lacked since March 2020: a credible path toward reopening.

Sony Pictures Entertainment and its wholly owned cinema chain, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, announced Wednesday that they will restore the Cinerama Dome and reopen it in early 2028. Renovation work is scheduled to begin next month, with Alamo operating both the Dome and the adjoining 14-screen complex formerly known as ArcLight Hollywood.

Cinema United President and CEO Michael O’Leary welcomed the announcement on behalf of the exhibition industry, describing Sony Pictures and Alamo Drafthouse as “two of exhibition’s strongest champions.” He added that “the timing could not be better, with moviegoers making clear this year that they love the unique experience of seeing a movie on the big screen.”

The announcement is also good news for anyone who feared that one of the world’s most recognizable cinemas might remain permanently stranded between Hollywood history and Los Angeles real estate economics. It is also about considerably more than rescuing a beloved building.

The Cinerama Dome gives Sony something more valuable than another cinema location. It gives the studio a globally recognizable centerpiece for an exhibition and experiential-entertainment strategy that has begun taking shape remarkably quickly.

Sony acquired Alamo Drafthouse in 2024, placing the circuit inside a newly established Sony Pictures Experiences division. In June, the company made a USD $100 million strategic investment in Cosm, the immersive entertainment company whose Shared Reality venues combine large-scale visual technology with live sports, entertainment and social hospitality. The Dome deal now adds one of cinema’s most famous physical venues to that portfolio.

The deal therefore provides the clearest answer yet to a question that followed Sony’s acquisition of Alamo: What does a major studio actually intend to do with a cinema circuit?

Apparently, restoring the Cinerama Dome is part of the answer.

Preserving the Dome, Reimagining the ArcLight
Sony says the approximately 86-foot-wide, deeply curved screen inside the Dome will remain central to its large-format presentation, while the Cinerama name and exterior branding will be preserved. The auditorium will not be converted into an Alamo-style dine-in cinema. Instead, it will maintain a traditional concession operation while adding Alamo’s repertory programming, filmmaker series, premieres and special events.

That is probably the right decision. Moviegoers have waited long enough to return to the Dome without also wondering whether a server will cross in front of them during the chariot race in “Ben-Hur.”

The adjoining 14-screen multiplex will operate very differently. It will become a full Alamo Drafthouse with dine-in service and curated programming. Sony says the complex will retain 35mm capabilities for archival prints and include premium auditoriums with immersive audio, 4K laser projection and 70mm presentation.

That split creates a potentially powerful hybrid.

The Dome can remain the architectural landmark and prestige event venue, while the former ArcLight becomes the larger commercial engine: a modern Alamo capable of playing mainstream releases, independent films, repertory titles and premium-format engagements across multiple auditoriums.

The famous white geodesic roof will inevitably attract most of the attention, but the adjoining multiplex may be just as important to the long-term viability of the project. Without it, Sony and Alamo would be restoring a historic single-screen venue. With it, they are creating a fully functioning Hollywood cinema complex.

Michael Kustermann, CEO of Alamo Drafthouse and head of Sony Pictures Experiences, called the location the circuit’s “new West Coast flagship.” That description is not marketing hyperbole. Alamo currently operates only one other Los Angeles venue, a 10-screen cinema in Downtown Los Angeles.

Variety reports that Decurion’s Robertson Property Group will retain ownership of the Hollywood real estate, with Sony operating the cinemas under a lease agreement.

For Alamo, the location solves a particularly Los Angeles problem.

Its Downtown cinema has built a devoted following, but Downtown is not equally convenient for moviegoers scattered across a city where a short distance on a map can turn into a considerable block of one’s afternoon. Los Angeles cinephiles will cross town for the right film, of course. That does not mean they enjoy doing it.

A Hollywood location gives Alamo a more central and visible presence near a large concentration of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, studios and entertainment-industry professionals. For a circuit built around distinctive programming, presentation standards and treating movies as events, there may be no more appropriate address.

The city’s cinephile population is likely to greet the arrival of Alamo in Hollywood with something close to jubilation; assuming everyone can remain patient until 2028.

More Than a Multiplex
What disappeared in 2020 was not simply a 15-screen cinema complex.

ArcLight Hollywood functioned as one of Los Angeles’ principal moviegoing town squares. It hosted premieres, press screenings, filmmaker appearances, festivals, industry events and awards-season gatherings. Its enormous lobby and adjoining café gave people somewhere to meet before a film, continue arguing about it afterward or discover that the person standing beside them in the concession line had directed it.

When Celluloid Junkie selected ArcLight Hollywood as its Cinema of the Month in 2017, we noted that the complex was important not because its amenities still seemed revolutionary, but because so many of them had become commonplace precisely because ArcLight helped popularize them.

When the multiplex opened in 2002, reserved seating was not yet standard across North America. Neither were spacious lobby bars, full-service cafés, cinema retail areas or the idea that audiences might arrive early and remain after the credits. ArcLight also became known for refusing late seating, eliminating most preshow advertising and having staff members personally introduce each feature before it began.

These details helped create a cinema designed less around processing customers and more around people who cared deeply about what was being shown and how it was presented.

“For many Angelenos,” we wrote at the time, “if they couldn’t see a new release at the ArcLight, then it wasn’t worth seeing.”

That may have been an exaggeration, but only slightly.

The loss was particularly acute for the local film community. ArcLight Hollywood was close enough to the studios to be useful, large enough to accommodate major events and prestigious enough that audiences actually wanted to attend them. Festivals could take over multiple auditoriums while using the lobby, bars and surrounding spaces for receptions and filmmaker gatherings.

The Dome gave the complex its iconography, but ArcLight gave it daily relevance.

That distinction is important as Alamo prepares to take over the site. The question is not simply whether Alamo can reopen the auditoriums. It is whether the circuit can restore the complex’s role as a gathering place while introducing its own programming culture and operating model.

Alamo is one of the few exhibitors whose brand is strong enough to make that transition plausible. Its identity has always extended beyond dine-in food service. The circuit grew out of repertory programming in Austin, operates Fantastic Fest and the American Genre Film Archive, and has spent nearly three decades cultivating audiences around themed screenings, filmmaker events and a deliberately theatrical approach to moviegoing.

Still, ArcLight Hollywood was not simply an empty multiplex waiting for a new sign. It had its own culture, rituals and loyal audience. The strongest version of the new complex will combine Alamo’s programming instincts with the presentation discipline and social character that made ArcLight influential in the first place.

Sony’s Experiences Strategy Becomes Visible
Sony’s acquisition of Alamo was initially notable because it placed a major Hollywood studio back in direct ownership of a significant cinema circuit.

Sony was not new to exhibition. It previously owned Loews Theatres and later held a substantial stake in Loews Cineplex. But the Alamo deal marked its return to the sector after more than two decades.

At the time, Sony said Alamo would remain open to films from every studio and distributor while becoming the foundation of Sony Pictures Experiences, a division focused on engaging entertainment fans outside the home.

That mandate was broad enough to mean almost anything.

The company’s Cosm investment made the direction clearer. Sony described Cosm as sitting at the intersection of technology, fandom and physical entertainment, with potential to extend film, television, music and gaming properties into immersive shared experiences. Cosm primarily presents live sports and other events inside large domed environments rather than operating conventional cinemas.

The Cinerama Dome occupies a different end of the experiential spectrum. It does not require inventing a new entertainment format because the experience already exists. Its value comes from being singular, historic and impossible to duplicate through an app or home-entertainment system.

Together, Alamo, Cosm and the Dome suggest Sony is assembling a portfolio rather than following a single model. Alamo provides a national cinema circuit and dedicated audience community. Cosm provides immersive technology and large-scale live experiences. The Cinerama Dome supplies history, prestige and a physical connection to Hollywood itself. The Los Angeles Times also placed the Dome deal within that sequence of Sony’s Alamo acquisition and USD $100 million Cosm investment.

For Sony, the value lies in having a permanent Hollywood venue through which its theatrical, television, anime, gaming and other entertainment businesses can connect directly with audiences. The complex can host studio premieres and fan events without becoming a Sony-only showcase, while its everyday operation remains grounded in Alamo’s broader programming identity.

That distinction matters.

The circuit’s credibility depends on programming films from throughout cinema history and supporting releases from every distributor, not merely filling screens with Columbia Pictures catalog titles. Turning the complex into a permanent Sony promotional pavilion would undermine much of what made Alamo attractive in the first place.

Sony now possesses a highly visible platform through which it can demonstrate what it means by “experiences” without abandoning the core theatrical business.

Six Years Is a Long Time for a Cinema to Sit Dark
For all the understandable celebration surrounding the announcement, early 2028 remains some distance away.

The extended renovation schedule suggests the project involves considerably more than replacing carpets and testing the popcorn machines. Cinemas do not generally improve while sitting unused, and the Dome and ArcLight complex have been dormant since March 2020.

Sony has not disclosed the renovation budget, the current condition of the auditoriums or which projection and sound systems remain onsite. It has also not said whether the Dome’s deeply curved screen can be restored or must be replaced, nor whether the venue will retain its ability to present three-strip Cinerama.

Those questions matter because the Dome was once equipped to handle an unusually wide range of formats.

During CJ’s 2017 visit, the auditorium had Christie Mirage 4K digital projection, Dolby Atmos, Kinoton film projectors capable of screening 35mm and 70mm, and a restored three-projector Cinerama installation with seven-channel stereophonic sound. What remains of that equipment nearly a decade later, and after six years without regular operation, is unknown.

The building’s designation as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument adds another layer of complexity. The landmark status protects the exterior rather than every interior element, but any substantial restoration of a venue this distinctive will still require balancing preservation, modern building standards and contemporary audience expectations.

Sony has promised to preserve the Dome’s aesthetic character, curved-screen presentation and traditional concession experience. That is encouraging. The real test will be whether the company can retain the qualities that make the auditorium unique while delivering the comfort, accessibility, projection brightness, sound quality and operational reliability expected of a modern marquee venue.

There will be ample opportunity to examine those decisions as the restoration moves forward. For now, the length of the schedule may be the clearest indication that Sony and Alamo recognize the scale of what they have taken on.

Los Angeles Reinvests in Its Historic Cinemas
The Cinerama Dome is also part of a broader wave of investment in Los Angeles’ historic movie palaces and landmark cinemas.

In Westwood, the Village Theatre is preparing to close for a year-long restoration under the ownership of the Village Directors Circle, a filmmaker group that includes Jason Reitman, Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas and Steven Spielberg. The American Cinematheque is expected to operate the venue, with plans for new releases, retrospectives, filmmaker conversations, awards events and festival programming when it reopens.

The cinema recently received a 70mm send-off with Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” before beginning the renovation

In Hollywood, Netflix completed a reported USD $70 million restoration of the Egyptian Theatre before reopening it with the American Cinematheque in 2023. The venue temporarily closed again this summer for further technical upgrades and is expected to return in the fall.

The ownership and operating models differ, but all three projects rest on the same premise: historic cinemas are not merely sentimental artifacts.

Properly operated, they can be strategic cultural assets; venues for premium presentation, premieres, repertory programming, festivals, fan engagement and events that ordinary multiplexes cannot easily reproduce.

That distinction may be increasingly important as exhibitors search for experiences capable of competing not only with home entertainment, but with every other use of an audience’s time and money.

The Village does not need to compete with a suburban multiplex on convenience. The Egyptian does not need 14 screens. The Cinerama Dome does not need recliners, mobile ordering or an endless menu.

Each needs to offer something audiences cannot get anywhere else.

In Sony and Alamo’s case, the adjoining multiplex may provide the commercial foundation that allows the Dome to remain singular.

Tom Rothman, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group,thankfully  summarized the enthusiasm less formally than most corporate announcements tend to allow: “Hot damn! We’re bringing the Dome back, baby.”

For once, the exuberance seems justified.

Sony is not simply adding another Alamo Drafthouse to its circuit. It is reviving a missing piece of Los Angeles movie culture, creating a showcase for its expanding experiences strategy and returning an important gathering place to one of the world’s most cinema-obsessed cities.

For a city built on movies, Hollywood has spent six years without one of its most important places to see them.

The wait is not over, but at least there is finally a date on the marquee.

The post Cinerama Dome Revival Gives Sony a Hollywood Flagship for Its Exhibition Ambitions appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

One year ago, the international theatrical recovery still looked fragile, uneven and heavily dependent on a limited supply of major releases. By the midpoint of 2026, the picture across many of the markets reporting first-half results had changed considerably.

Box office revenue or attendance increased in France, the UK and Ireland, Portugal, Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea and India during the first six months of the year. Several territories posted double-digit gains, while Australia recorded its first run of three consecutive months above AUD $100 million (USD $69.5 million) at the box office.

China stood conspicuously apart, suffering a 40.6% decline and recording its weakest non-pandemic first half in more than a decade.

The available results do not constitute a comprehensive worldwide survey. They cover selected markets in Europe, Asia and Australia, but do not yet include Latin America or Africa. The United States and Canada, meanwhile, are generally classified by the film industry as the domestic market rather than international territories.

Even with those limitations, the numbers point toward a much broader recovery than was visible only 12 months ago. More importantly, they suggest that two related but distinct recoveries are taking place.

Cinemas are recovering because audiences have been given a more consistent supply of appealing films. Hollywood is benefiting from that improvement, but not always leading it. In several territories, local-language productions are generating the biggest breakthroughs and taking a larger portion of the audience with them.

For exhibitors, a ticket sold is a ticket sold. For Hollywood studios, the distinction becomes rather more interesting once the rental statements arrive.

Europe Finds Its Footing
France delivered one of the strongest first-half performances among the markets reporting results. Admissions increased 19.7% year over year to approximately 90.1 million, generating an estimated €666 million in box office revenue. June alone drew around 13 million admissions, a 14.6% increase from the same month in 2025.

More encouraging than the headline increase was the breadth of the market. Around 20 films crossed one million admissions, including eight French productions. Local films accounted for an estimated 42.5% of admissions, compared with 47.5% for U.S. titles.

Pathé’s family adventure “Marsupilami” led the market with more than 6.1 million admissions. French releases including “Guru,” “Children of the Resistance,” “Just an Illusion” and “De Gaulle: Resistance” also finished among the year’s strongest performers, alongside Hollywood titles such as “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” “Michael,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “Toy Story 5” and “Hoppers.”

That balance is arguably more significant than any individual hit. France did not recover because one blockbuster arrived, consumed the market and left everyone waiting for the next one. It recovered because enough different films worked for enough different audiences.

The result supports the exhibition industry’s longstanding argument that moviegoing demand has not disappeared. It has simply become less forgiving of thin calendars. The old rule remains undefeated: no slate, no audience.

The UK and Ireland reported a similarly strong start to the year. Box office revenue reached GBP £604.9 million (USD $810.7 million) through the end of June, up 14% from GBP £532.2 million (USD $713.2 million) during the same period in 2025 and 34% ahead of the first half of 2024. Takings increased during five of the first six months, while June revenue rose 29% to GBP £99.4 million (USD $133.2 million).

Unlike France, however, the UK-Ireland market was overwhelmingly powered by American films. Universal’s “Michael” led the year with £52.9 million, followed by “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” “Project Hail Mary,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and “Toy Story 5.” Nine of the year-to-date top 10 were wholly or partly U.S.-originated productions.

That makes the territory a useful counterpoint. International recovery does not automatically mean Hollywood is losing ground. Where the U.S. slate is sufficiently broad and commercially appealing, American films can still dominate. The larger issue is that Hollywood can no longer assume that a recovering cinema market will necessarily translate into the same degree of market share it once enjoyed.

Portugal produced a more modest but still positive result. Gross box office revenue increased 5.8% to EUR €37.2 million (USD $42.5 million), even as admissions declined 2% to 5.4 million. The revenue growth came despite a contraction in the country’s exhibition infrastructure, with the number of active screens falling by 42 year over year to 498.

That is not the kind of recovery that produces celebratory champagne towers, but it is recovery nonetheless. In a market operating with fewer screens and slightly fewer admissions, revenue still moved in the right direction.

“The Housemaid” led the Portuguese market with 549,525 admissions and approximately EUR €3.6 million (USD $4.1 million), while Portuguese productions accounted for only 1.5% of attendance.

Portugal therefore presents almost the inverse of France: a market where revenue improved without a major local-film surge. Both are positive outcomes for exhibitors, though they arrived by very different routes.

Australia Strings Together a Historic Run
Australia’s recovery gathered momentum during the second quarter, with cinema admissions increasing 16% year over year during the first half of 2026.

April, May and June each generated more than AUD 100 million at the box office, marking the first time the market had recorded three consecutive months above that threshold. Cinema advertising expenditure also rose 22.6% in May, giving exhibitors another indication that agencies and advertisers are responding to improved audience traffic.

The Australian result was driven primarily by a broad Hollywood and international slate. “Wuthering Heights,” “Project Hail Mary,” “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” and “The Devil Wears Prada 2” all contributed, while “Michael” became the territory’s highest-grossing film of the year at the halfway point. “Toy Story 5” and “Minions & Monsters” extended the momentum heading into the winter school holidays.

Australia is particularly helpful in separating two ideas that can otherwise become tangled. The international exhibition business is recovering, and local films are gaining ground in several markets—but those are not universally the same story.

In Australia, Hollywood remained the principal engine. The market also shows how exhibitors are using stronger content supply to support investments in IMAX, ScreenX and other premium concepts, including HOYTS’ APEX auditoriums.

The films brought audiences back. The upgraded auditoriums gave some of them a reason to pay more once they arrived.

Local Films Power Several Asian Markets
Across Asia, the first-half picture was more polarized. Hong Kong, South Korea and India reported significant improvement, while China moved sharply in the opposite direction.

Hong Kong box office revenue increased nearly 25% to HKD 664 million (USD $84.6 million), reversing a downward trend that had persisted for several years. The total came from 142 first-run releases, including 17 local productions.

The recovery was led by local films. Jack Ng’s Chinese New Year comedy “Night King” earned HKD 118.1 million (USD $15.1 million), becoming only the fourth Hong Kong production to cross HKD 100 million (USD $12.8 million) and the territory’s third-highest-grossing local film of all time. Longman Leung’s “Cold War 1994,” also produced and distributed by Edko Films, ranked second among local titles with HKD 38.08 million (USD $4.9 million).

International releases still generated meaningful business, led by “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” “Toy Story 5,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and “Hoppers.” But the market’s defining success was unmistakably homegrown.

That matters because Hong Kong was not merely experiencing ordinary year-over-year growth. It was reversing a multi-year decline. Local cinema did not simply participate in the rebound; it gave the rebound its identity.

South Korea displayed an even more dramatic domestic-film recovery. Attendance for Korean productions increased 74.9% to 37.4 million, while revenue rose 81.7%. The increase came even though the number of Korean films released declined from 240 to 217.

The result was heavily influenced by a small number of major successes. Historical drama “The King’s Warden” drew 16.9 million admissions, becoming the second-most-attended Korean film in the country’s history. Zombie thriller “Colony” reached 5.86 million admissions, while supernatural horror release “Salmokji: Whispering Water” surpassed 3.2 million.

Those figures come with an important qualification. The number of films exceeding three million admissions actually declined slightly from the first half of 2025. Korea’s recovery was therefore broad in its overall impact but relatively concentrated in its sources.

A handful of films did a great deal of heavy lifting—something the theatrical business has never exactly regarded as an unfamiliar job description.

Still, the return of a Korean film to the closely watched 10-million-admission club represented a substantial change from 2025, when no Korean release reached that threshold for the first time since 2012, excluding the pandemic period.

The Korean results should therefore be read as both recovery and warning. Audiences are demonstrably willing to return in very large numbers, but the production and financing ecosystem still needs enough successful films beneath the outliers to turn a hot streak into a durable market.

India also reported double-digit improvement, although the available estimates use different measurements and time periods. Industry participants generally placed first-half box office growth between roughly 10% and 17%, with admissions and collections benefiting from a wider range of successful films than during the same period in 2025.

What appears more consistent than any single revenue total is the composition of that growth. Hindi, regional-language and Hollywood films all contributed, reducing the market’s reliance on a handful of giant releases.

“Dhurandhar: The Revenge,” “Border 2” and “Bhooth Bangla” were among the leading Hindi-language performers, while films from the Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam industries also generated substantial business. Hollywood releases including “Project Hail Mary” and “Obsession” added to the mix.

That broader range may be the healthiest sign in India’s numbers. A market powered by several languages, genres and audience segments is less vulnerable than one waiting for the next mega-budget Hindi film to perform emergency resuscitation.

Indian exhibitors are also expanding alternative programming, including concerts, sports broadcasts, fan events and re-releases. Those programs remain small relative to conventional film releases, but operators view them as a way to improve occupancy between tentpoles and make cinemas less dependent on the vagaries of the weekly release calendar.

China Becomes the Outlier
China remains the most significant exception to the improving international picture.

The market generated CNY ¥17.35 billion (USD $2.56 billion) during the first half of 2026, down 40.6% year over year. It was the country’s weakest non-pandemic first-half result since 2014 and only marginally above the lockdown-affected first six months of 2022.

The decline came despite several successful Chinese films and does not indicate a complete absence of audience demand. Rather, the market lacked the volume of large-scale releases needed to match the unusually strong first half of 2025. Only five films crossed CNY ¥1 billion (USD $147.6 million) during the period.

China did not disprove the broader content-supply argument. In some ways, it reinforced it.

The same dynamic that helped France, Hong Kong, South Korea and India recover worked against China when its domestic slate failed to produce enough major successes. Audiences did not necessarily abandon cinemas; they simply were not given enough reasons to visit them.

Hollywood’s position in China remains a separate concern. Even when the market rebounds, imported films can no longer assume they will recover alongside it. The question is no longer simply whether China’s box office will grow again, but who will benefit when it does.

A Better Recovery for Cinemas Than for Hollywood
Taken together, the results offer exhibitors a far more encouraging outlook than the one they faced a year ago.

The improvement spans mature European markets, Australia and several major Asian territories. It includes revenue growth, higher attendance, stronger cinema advertising and renewed demand for premium formats. Even Portugal increased box office revenue despite fewer admissions and a shrinking screen base.

This does not amount to a return to the old normal. Nor does it demonstrate that every structural problem facing exhibition has been solved. Release calendars can still thin out quickly, financing for local productions remains difficult in several territories and some gains are concentrated around a small number of unusually successful films.

But the first-half numbers do represent a meaningful shift. A year ago, the industry was still asking whether audiences would reliably return. In many markets, the more relevant question now is what they will return to see.

For Hollywood studios, the answer is less comforting than it once was.

American films drove much of the growth in the UK, Ireland and Australia and remained essential to France’s balanced recovery. In Hong Kong and South Korea, however, local films produced the biggest breakthroughs. India’s improvement was spread across several domestic-language industries as well as Hollywood.

The international theatrical recovery is therefore not distributing its rewards evenly. Cinemas may be getting healthier while Hollywood’s share of overseas admissions becomes more contested.

That is good news for exhibition, local producers and audiences seeking a more varied slate. It is more complicated news for studios accustomed to treating international recovery and Hollywood recovery as interchangeable concepts.

The second half of 2026 will test whether the momentum can hold. A substantial Hollywood slate—including “Moana,” “The Odyssey,” “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three”—will arrive alongside major local releases in territories around the world.

For cinemas, the first-half lesson is familiar but increasingly difficult to dismiss: give audiences a consistent range of films they want to see and they will continue to show up.

The more consequential question for Hollywood is whose films they are showing up for.

The post International Box Office Recovery Accelerates as Local Films Gain Ground appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

The news that Christopher Nolan’s upcoming epic “The Odyssey” would not hold “word of mouth” screenings for influencers was further fuel for the fire of a discussion that has raged in recent years. Is this marketing tactic – where commonly these more favourable, less critical reactions from influencers break on social media before the formal review embargo lifts – actually increasing awareness of these films, or is it devaluing the work of critics, whose more considered takes only get airtime after the breathless first wave of reactions.

The first reactions to “The Odyssey” flooded online after the global premiere took place in London on Monday, July 6. While there were some influencers and content creators in the mix – those who’d been invited to the premiere and/or seen advance screenings ahead of junket interviews – there were notably more mainstream critics and writers sharing first-look reactions, including Variety’s Jazz Tangcay, who called the film “a triumphant, spectacular epic” and the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (“a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion”). When the film hits cinemas next week, the discourse around the necessity of influencer screenings will surely continue.

It’s a subject that was a central talking point at the 2026 European Film Market (EFM, 12-18 February), which took place earlier this year. Across various panels, conversations about social media marketing were notably less about “going viral” as a goal in itself, and more about whether online attention can be translated into something the industry can bank on, such as ticket sales, streaming subscriptions and durable audience habits. Across panels that ranged from TikTok’s #FilmTok showcase to a broader marketing strategy session on attention scarcity, one tension kept resurfacing: platforms can generate extraordinary cultural heat, but the path from community to cash remains uneven, difficult to measure and – too often – oversold.

That split was clearest on 13 February, when the EFM hosted “From Community to Box Office: How Fandom on TikTok Drives Impact,” an afternoon event framed around the platform’s growing role in shaping film discovery and consumption. TikTok’s Stephen Naughton positioned the platform as an entertainment destination rather than a traditional social network — “You don’t check TikTok; you watch TikTok,” he said — arguing that this mindset matters because users arrive primed to be entertained, not merely updated. He added that the company’s research suggests three-quarters of TikTok’s audience come to the app specifically to find new entertainment, and described the platform as a “24-7 virtual stage” where studios, creators and fans can meet on equal footing.

Naughton’s pitch leaned heavily on the idea that fandom on TikTok is participatory by nature: users do not just watch trailers but remix, analyse and reframe content, helping titles travel across borders in ways that can’t be replicated through classic top-down advertising. He sought to reinforce that narrative with headline figures: in 2025, an average of 6.5 million posts per day related to film and TV appeared on the platform; and, crucially, TikTok has been working with market-research company Media Control to track correlations between virality and theatrical performance. The topline result, according to Naughton: “15 of the 20 most successful theatrical releases in 2025 across Europe were TikTok viral hits,” defined as titles generating over one million related posts.

From Content to Connection
It was a confident argument — but it also underscored the central problem with social media “impact” claims: correlation and causation are easy to blur, especially when the biggest releases are already structurally advantaged through awareness, spend and broad availability. If a title is already set up to dominate the theatrical conversation, it will almost inevitably dominate the TikTok conversation too. The more interesting question is what happens beneath the top tier: can fandom meaningfully lift mid-budget and independent films into wider visibility, and can that lift be reliably engineered rather than hoped for?

TikTok’s preferred answer is “yes — if you treat creators as partners rather than megaphones.” Naughton argued that creator-led content can achieve up to 91% more engagement than traditional advertising assets, and pointed to the company’s work with Constantin Film, where collaborations across more than 15 releases generated over one billion video views. He also highlighted TikTok Spotlight, an aggregation tool that collects official and user-generated content into a central hub, suggesting that structuring fan activity — rather than merely observing it — can help campaigns sustain momentum.

Still, even within TikTok’s own framing, the emphasis was less on replacing conventional marketing than on rethinking what marketing is: less campaign-as-broadcast, more campaign-as-community management. Search behavior became part of that story. Naughton noted that one in five users searches for content within 30 seconds of opening the app, with film-related queries growing by more than 100% year-over-year — an indicator, he suggested, that audiences increasingly treat TikTok as a discovery engine for both theatrical and streaming titles, with real implications for how release campaigns are timed and structured.

Community Spirit
The panel discussion that followed broadened the conversation beyond theatricals into streamer-first dynamics, using Prime Video’s “Maxton Hall” as a case study of a #BookTok phenomenon turned screen hit. Moderated by journalist and presenter Aylin Kazi, the panel brought together Prime Video EU Head of Social Jacky Meire, TikTok creator Melo Nsuka and actress Runa Greiner. If Naughton’s presentation was an attempt to “prove” impact with numbers, the discussion that followed focused on what impact looks like in practice: community engagement as an “extra layer” of storytelling, where fans dissect scenes, debate character arcs and generate an ongoing sense of participation.

The subtext here matters for anyone marketing both theatrical and streaming titles: viewing is no longer a closed experience. Audiences often move straight from watching to TikTok, effectively recreating a shared, communal space around content — sometimes approximating the social energy of theatrical attendance, but with platform-native behaviors, such as commenting, streaming and (doom)scrolling. The talk also returned repeatedly to the idea of creators as trust brokers: recommendations from familiar voices often carry more weight than classic advertising, while behind-the-scenes access and transparency are presented as essential tools for maintaining momentum.

Yet the Maxton Hall example also highlighted a structural asymmetry: streamer launches are already “built” for rapid online conversation, with audiences able to watch immediately once curiosity is triggered. Theatrical releases, by contrast, require friction-heavy conversion: checking listings, choosing a showtime, travelling, paying. Social media can generate intent; cinemas still require action.

That friction came roaring back into focus on 19 February, at another EFM panel titled “Marketing That Works: Turning Change Into a New Advantage,” which approached the same broad subject from a more skeptical, conversion-first angle. Moderated by AC Coppens, the session featured Marina Kosten, USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future; Adriana Trautman, marketing strategist with experience at Paramount and Prime Video; and Oliver Fegan, co-founder and CEO of usheru, a marketing technology company supporting distributors across 30 countries. Where the TikTok session argued that fandom can drive measurable impact, this panel repeatedly asked: measurable how, and at what rate?

Under the Influence
Kosten framed the current environment as a brutal attention economy — “Content is everywhere, and attention is increasingly a zero-sum game,” she said — arguing that marketers often have mere seconds to communicate not just what a film is, but where and when to see it. “If people remember the where and the when, they are much more likely to convert,” she added, stressing that basic clarity is frequently overlooked even as campaigns chase novelty.

Trautman offered a blunt corrective to influencer-era wishful thinking: “Just because you cast an influencer, it does not mean their audience will convert,” she said — and rightly so. In other words, social reach is not the same as audience action — especially when the “influencer” relationship to the title is thin, transactional or obviously paid. In a market that sometimes treats social as a magic shortcut, her point landed as a necessary deflation.

Fegan then provided the kind of statistic that complicates almost any platform-led narrative of conversion: TikTok-driven traffic, he said, converted at just 0.1% when moving from platform to ticket purchase. That figure doesn’t mean TikTok is “ineffective” — it may still be powerful at awareness, discovery and cultural signaling — but it does force a tougher reading of what social media is doing at each stage of the funnel. If the jump from scroll to sale is that small, then campaigns live or die on what happens next: retargeting, repetition, and a cross-platform system that keeps nudging the interested-but-not-yet-committed audience until the friction is overcome.

In that sense, the most actionable ideas in the “Marketing That Works” session were not about chasing virality, but about engineering follow-through. Fegan stressed retargeting as essential — those who show interest but don’t purchase must be approached multiple times, often via automated but personalized messaging. The panel also turned to first-party data, arguing that direct relationships with audiences — through tools like usheru, cinema websites, email lists and smaller communities (including Discord) — are increasingly valuable in a landscape where platform metrics can be opaque and platform algorithms can shift overnight.

The panel’s European-vs-US contrast also sharpened the conversation. In the US, mass marketing remains dominant, supported by budgets that are simply out of reach for most European distributors. Fegan noted, “In Europe, distributors might spend EUR €3,000 (USD $3,425 to market a film in France,” and argued that such constraints force European campaigns to be smarter: niche targeting, community-building and direct audience relationships rather than scale-led saturation.

There was also a recurring emphasis on habit-building. Trautman and Kosten both argued that younger audiences will still go to cinemas, but often for events that feel communal — fandom experiences that resemble concerts or social gatherings. Trautman put it plainly: “They aren’t going for cinema itself; they’re going for connection with peers and shared fandoms.” In that framing, the real competition is not other films but other forms of connection — and the strategic goal becomes making theatrical attendance feel like participation rather than consumption.

Under the Influence
So what were the key takeaways from EFM 2026 overall, on social media marketing for films? Conversations and analysis were more measured than the usual hype cycles, but some contradictions persist.

On one side, TikTok’s case is persuasive in cultural terms: it is undeniably a major arena where audiences discover, discuss and reshape film and TV narratives, and where communities can form quickly around titles, talent and moments. Naughton’s insistence that fandom is “participatory, personal and perpetual” captures something real about contemporary audience behavior, especially when conversation can outlive opening weekend.

This is a point that was emphasised by more recent FilmTok research, released in April 2026. It bears noting that the research was conducted by TikTok and Cinema United, with support from Comscore. The findings proudly claim that TikTok conversation can lead to box office staying power, beyond the opening weekend buzz. Looking at four varied (albeit high-profile) examples — “The Housemaid”, “Sinners”, “Wicked: For Good”, and “Zootopia 2” — the report studies the correlation between increased TikTok activity tied a title, and strong box office holds. Of course, correlation isn’t causation, and buzzy box office hits could be seen to be driving the conversation on social media, rather than interpreting the relationship to be working in the opposite direction, but there were also positive findings relating to increases in #FilmTok and #MovieTok posts (up 55% year on year), and TikTok surveys indicating that 47% of users polled said they’d discovered new films via the platform, and 36% said they’d purchased a ticket as a result. Is short-form social media video the new watercooler?

“This report reinforces what we know to be true: that moviegoing is a cultural experience that resonates deeply with audiences,” said Michael O’Leary, President and CEO of Cinema United. “The data shows that when films connect with communities on TikTok, people come to theatres. That is good for our members, good for Main Streets around the world, and good for the movie industry.” It’s also worth noting that — even if it can’t be said for certain that TikTok is driving users to theaters — TikTok data could be another valuable tool for exhibitors making programming decisions, by indicating which film are still dominating cultural conversations.

On the other side, the more sobering data points from the “Marketing That Works” panel underline that conversion remains the industry’s weak link — and that social media is not a substitute for fundamentals. Availability, clear messaging (“where and when”), repeat exposure, and infrastructure for retargeting and direct audience contact still do much of the heavy lifting.

That’s why some of the most interesting EFM conversations were the ones that implicitly challenged the idea of social media as a silo. Even panels not explicitly “about” social platforms — such as Europa Distribution’s session on co-operation across the film value chain — kept circling back to a marketing reality: audience work cannot be detached from production, sales, exhibition and long-term release planning. The strongest campaigns increasingly start early, build shared objectives across partners and keep communication tight — because, as Spanish distributor Eduardo Escudero put it, “In our market, we only get one shot.” In a world of compressed windows and overstretched attention, that single shot at getting audiences in seats early on in the theatrical run has to be aligned across every link in the chain.

The biggest question, then, is not whether fandom can move audiences — clearly, sometimes it can — but whether the industry is building repeatable systems around that ability. The “Minecraft initiative” type of thinking — meeting audiences inside the spaces where they already play, create and socialise — can sound visionary, and it may well work for certain IP-driven titles and youth-skewing brands. But EFM’s more grounded voices would likely insist on two tests before celebrating any such initiative: show the conversion path, and show the cost per conversion compared to alternatives. Without that, innovation risks becoming experimentation.

Finally, there is the issue of credibility. Social marketing thrives on authenticity; film marketing often defaults to polish. The gap between those two aesthetics is where a lot of campaigns fail. The EFM panels repeatedly hinted at the same underlying principle: the most effective social strategies treat audiences as collaborators rather than targets — and treat creators not as add-ons, but as culturally fluent partners who can translate a film into platform-native language. A film like “The Odyssey,” with the built in appeal of Christopher Nolan – a rare crossover filmmaker as beloved by critics and cinephiles as mainstream audiences – might be big enough to be able to skip influencer screenings. But like many Nolan success stories, it could yet prove to be an exception rather than a rule.

The post Social Media, Fandom and the Hard Question of Conversion appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.