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.

When Andrew Cripps, Head of Global Theatrical Distribution at The Walt Disney Company, arrived at the International Cinema Technology Association’s seminar in Barcelona on Sunday — one day before CineEurope officially opened — the audience was expecting clarity.

Two months after Disney unveiled Infinity Vision at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, exhibitors, technology partners and distributors were still trying to decipher exactly what the program was, who qualified and what it meant for their screens. Was it a new premium large format? A certification scheme? A Disney-owned quality mark? A marketing umbrella for exhibitor-branded PLF auditoriums?

Cripps is a well-liked executive, genuinely respected across the industry, and his willingness to engage on the topic was appreciated. But if the goal was to leave the room with a shared understanding of Infinity Vision, the session fell somewhat short — less because Cripps was evasive than because the program itself still appears to be evolving. What became clear is that Infinity Vision remains a work in progress, one with an obvious commercial rationale and a number of practical details yet to be fully defined.

What Infinity Vision Actually Is
Cripps framed the origins of Infinity Vision in straightforward commercial terms. The program emerged from a recognition that Disney’s marketing machine simply cannot effectively promote every premium large format screen in the world — of which, by his count, there are a staggering number.

“There are 75 exhibitor-owned PLF brands in North America, and there are over 320 exhibitor-owned PLF brands around the world,” Cripps said. “It’s very difficult — impossible — for us to effectively market all of those brands.”

The brands Disney can market globally are the ones with recognized consumer-facing names: IMAX, Dolby Cinema and ScreenX among them. Everything else — however technically impressive — lacks the shorthand that drives ticket buyers to seek out a specific auditorium.

Infinity Vision, in theory, is designed to solve that problem by creating a single umbrella brand Disney can actively promote: a signal to consumers that a screen meets a quality threshold worth paying for.

“What we want to make sure,” Cripps said, “is that customers understand — we want to set some standards, we want to make sure that we can try to drive customers to the best experience possible, with a shorthand marketing communication.”

That makes Infinity Vision less a new cinema technology than a studio-led attempt to identify, package and market high-quality non-IMAX premium auditoriums at scale.

The “Doomsday” Context Nobody Is Pretending Doesn’t Exist
Cripps also acknowledged the obvious subtext directly.

“We have a movie, it’s no secret, at the end of the year, ‘Avengers: Doomsday,’ that does not have IMAX,” he said.

With “Dune: Part Three” widely expected to command the IMAX footprint on the same 18 December 2026 release date, Disney needs an alternative premium tier to market for one of the biggest films on its upcoming slate. Infinity Vision is designed to be that alternative.

Cripps was candid that the timing provided a useful launch platform, while also pushing back against the idea that the program is purely reactive. “It felt like something — like I said, we talked about it for a while. How do we more effectively market the premium large formats that are out there? This feels like a really good launch pad for that.”

The rollout sequence confirms the stakes. A reissue of “Avengers: Endgame” in Infinity Vision will serve as a test run in September, followed by “Avengers: Doomsday” as the true commercial launch in December.

More Than a Badge, But Not Quite a Format
The most concrete element of Infinity Vision may be the one that distinguishes it most clearly from a simple logo program: Infinity Vision screens will receive a different DCP than standard auditoriums.

“The DCP will be a different DCP,” Cripps said. “We’re going to have different content for the Infinity Vision screens, whether it’s a button… a special piece of hopefully a filmmaker introduction at the beginning… different aspect ratio. There’s different things that we’re working on for Infinity Vision, and every movie I think will be different.”

That matters. If Infinity Vision were only a label applied to exhibitor-owned PLF auditoriums, exhibitors might reasonably ask what Disney is adding beyond a marketing badge. Cripps’ answer appears to be: global marketing support, potentially earlier ticketing and some form of differentiated theatrical content — with the specifics varying title by title.

What remains less clear is how meaningful those differences will be at the consumer level. Whether the alternate DCPs contain material unavailable in other theatrical versions, and whether any exclusive content is specific to Infinity Vision screens or simply part of a broader theatrical window, was not entirely resolved in the session. When an audience member asked Cripps to define what a “button” actually is, he explained it as an Easter egg or additional piece of content — “probably for another movie, or linking the movie to another movie coming.” He confirmed such material would be “exclusively to theaters,” though it remained unclear whether that exclusivity extends to Infinity Vision screens specifically or to theatrical exhibition generally.

Qualification vs. Certification
One of the more pointed audience questions cut to the heart of what has left exhibitors confused since CinemaCon: is Infinity Vision a qualification program — where an exhibitor ticks the boxes and is included — or a certification program, where Disney or an outside party verifies the quality of the auditorium?

Cripps’ answer was honest, and probably the most illuminating thing he said all session.

“It’s voluntary,” he said. “We don’t have a team of people that we can send out and check. We want to work collaboratively with exhibition. So, we said these are generally the standards we’re working to — work with us. Send us the screens that qualify, and then let’s talk about how we can more effectively market those screens.”

At least for now, Infinity Vision is closer to a voluntary, Disney-reviewed qualification process than a formal third-party certification scheme. Exhibitors submit screens. Disney evaluates them. There are no inspectors, no THX-style audit process, and no precise public technical checklist — only standards Disney describes as still being refined in collaboration with exhibitors.

Cripps indicated Disney would issue further details before its Wednesday presentation at CineEurope, including target screen counts. Until then, exhibitors are left with the broad contours of the program rather than firm specifications.

When Premium Does Not Fit One Global Standard
The limits of that flexibility came into focus when a questioner raised a very concrete version of the ambiguity. Some French exhibitors, he noted, have invested significantly in premium screens — in some cases with 4K laser projection — but those screens may be only 12 meters wide, potentially falling short of whatever screen-size threshold Infinity Vision requires.

Cripps’ response was notable for its pragmatism, and for the question it left hanging.

“I think if it’s the premium screen for that region, then I think we should be talking about trying to elevate that experience,” he said. “I think too often we come up with these standards that — one size doesn’t always fit all.”

That is a reasonable instinct. It recognizes the reality that a premium screen in a smaller regional market may not look like a flagship PLF auditorium in London, Paris or Shanghai. But if one size does not fit all, the obvious follow-up is: what exactly is the standard? At this stage, the answer appears to be that Disney is still working that out. Cripps said thousands of screens had already been submitted for evaluation, but the criteria remain opaque enough that some exhibitors left the room still unsure whether their auditoriums were in or out.

That uncertainty cuts both ways. Too rigid, and Infinity Vision risks excluding worthwhile premium screens in smaller markets. Too flexible, and it risks becoming a marketing term without enough technical meaning behind it.

Who Owns the Brand — and Who Else Might Use It?
Those standards questions connect directly to the ownership question, because a brand is only as meaningful as the consistency of what it represents. Disney has registered the Infinity Vision trademark in nearly every major market, with Cripps noting exceptions in India and Japan where prior registrations existed.

Cripps framed that as a starting point rather than a territorial claim. “The intention was not to create something that Disney were going to own and control,” he said. “The first two movies coming out will be Disney movies. We’ve actually presented to other studios and tried to encourage them to come along… but I think people are waiting to see how it rolls out.”

That is a familiar dynamic in this industry. Everyone likes the idea of a shared solution. Everyone also wants someone else to take the risk of going first. Disney is going first — and whether Infinity Vision ultimately becomes a broader industry standard or remains a Disney-branded marketing vehicle may depend as much on what “Avengers: Doomsday” does at the box office in December as it does on the elegance of the qualification framework.

What Can Play on an Infinity Vision Screen?
One source of confusion among attendees was whether a screen that qualifies for Infinity Vision would somehow be restricted in what it could play. The answer, based on Cripps’ remarks and the nature of the program, is no.

Infinity Vision is not a proprietary projection system. It does not prevent an auditorium from playing non-Disney titles. A screen that qualifies for “Avengers: Doomsday” could still play “Dune: Part Three,” or any other title, subject to normal booking decisions.

But unless another studio adopts the label, that film would not be playing “in Infinity Vision.” It would be playing in that exhibitor’s premium auditorium — whether branded as a circuit PLF, Dolby Cinema, ScreenX, 4DX or something else. That distinction may be obvious to studio distribution executives. It was not obvious to everyone in the room.

Pricing Is the Exhibitor’s Call
Cripps also clarified that Disney is not imposing a ticket surcharge on Infinity Vision presentations.

“Distributors don’t set ticket prices, you do,” he told exhibitors. “There’s no premium that Disney’s charging. Exhibitors are free to charge whatever they want.”

That does not mean exhibitors will not charge more. Premium branding exists in part because moviegoers have shown they will pay for better experiences — and Cripps made that case elsewhere in the conversation, arguing that when premium tickets go on sale, “the first tickets that sell out are the premium expensive tickets.” Infinity Vision is designed to help exhibitors sell those seats, not discount them.

What We Still Don’t Know
Cripps made a genuine and good-faith effort to explain Infinity Vision to an audience that wanted and needed an explanation. The program’s commercial logic is clear, and the core proposition — a Disney-led (for now) umbrella brand that helps consumers identify premium non-IMAX auditoriums — has real value for an exhibition sector whose PLF investments have long outpaced the industry’s ability to communicate them to ticket buyers.

What remains unclear are the practical mechanics: minimum screen specifications, the degree of territory-by-territory flexibility, what happens to strong regional premium screens that fall short of global thresholds, and whether a voluntary, exhibitor-submitted process can sustain enough consistency for the brand to mean something at scale.

Those answers may come from Disney’s Wednesday presentation at CineEurope, from the September “Avengers: Endgame” reissue, or from “Avengers: Doomsday” itself in December. For now, Infinity Vision is a program with a compelling premise and a strong commercial rationale — and a lot of fine print still being written.

Update — June 24, 2026: One day after this article was published, Disney provided additional public details about Infinity Vision during its CineEurope presentation in Barcelona, with Jeffrey Forman, Senior Vice President, International Film Distribution at The Walt Disney Studios, referring to Infinity Vision as a “certification program.”

According to Disney, auditoriums seeking Infinity Vision branding must meet several technical standards, including a screen at least 45 feet wide, immersive audio such as Dolby Atmos or 7.1, and brightness levels of either 14 footlamberts for 2D or 6 footlamberts for 3D presentations. Disney has also launched an Infinity Vision ticketing landing page at InfinityVisionTickets.com.

The additional details clarify some of the questions raised during Andrew Cripps’ ICTA appearance, particularly around minimum technical specifications. They also confirm that Disney is positioning Infinity Vision more formally as a certification program, even as its initial public explanation emphasized a voluntary, collaborative process with exhibitors. Disney reportedly received more than 7,500 applications from global exhibitor screens seeking certification and is now reviewing those auditoriums.

Editor’s note: This feature is part of Celluloid Junkie’s coverage of the 2026 ICTA Barcelona Cinema Technology Experience. See more reporting from the seminar below.

More from ICTA Barcelona

• Cinema Technology Is Advancing Faster Than the Business Model Supporting It
• The Best Cinemas Aren’t Competing With Netflix. They’re Competing With a Night Out
• Cinema Technology Has Never Been More Sophisticated, So Why Is It Still So Disconnected?

The post Disney’s Andrew Cripps Says Infinity Vision Is More Marketing Program Than Certification Scheme appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

After several years in which theatrical windows seemed to be shrinking by the quarter, the North American market may finally be settling into something that looks less like experimentation and more like strategy.

New research from Omdia suggests that studios are not returning wholesale to the old pre-pandemic windowing model. Instead, they are increasingly protecting theatrical exclusivity for the films most likely to benefit from it. In 2025, the average first transactional video-on-demand window rose slightly to a provisional 39 days, while the top 10 North American films averaged 51 days before reaching first transactional video-on-demand (TVOD), up from 45 days in 2024.

The message is not that the industry has solved the windows debate. It is that the debate has changed. Studios are still using flexible, title-by-title strategies, but the aggressive compression of theatrical exclusivity that followed the pandemic appears to be giving way to a more stable pattern — especially for the biggest releases.

Omdia’s findings were presented by Charlotte Jones, Senior Principal Analyst at Omdia, during the June 10 edition of the CJ Cinema Summit. The data came from the firm’s report, “US Movies: Theatrical, TVOD, SVOD, and Other Windowing Strategies 2025,” which tracks theatrical, transactional, subscription and other release windows across the North American market.

“What we found is that the average window did increase slightly,” Jones said during the Summit. “Generally, we are seeing a resurgence in some of the longer windows for some of those outlier titles.”

A Modest Shift, Concentrated at the Top
Omdia uses “first TVOD” to refer to the first transactional window, encompassing both premium rental and digital purchase availability. That measure has become one of the most closely watched indicators in the windows debate because it is often the first point at which a theatrically released film becomes available in the home.

In 2025, the average first TVOD window for wide releases tracked by Omdia rose to 39 days, up from 36 days in 2024. The average window to subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) release was a provisional 95 days, down slightly from 98 in 2024, based on known dates at the time the report was published in April.

Omdia noted that those figures could move as additional release dates become available, particularly on the SVOD side. Still, the provisional data points to a market in which studios are managing windows by platform and by title rather than reverting to one fixed model.

The shift was clearer among the highest-grossing films. Based on known dates at publication, seven of the top 10 North American titles in 2025 had more than 100 days between theatrical release and SVOD debut, up from six in 2024. All of the top 10 titles waited at least 30 days before first TVOD availability, a notable contrast with 2024, when Universal’s “Twisters” reached transactional platforms after 21 days.

Disney’s Benchmark, and the Outliers Pulling the Average Up
Disney stood out as the most consistent major studio in preserving a longer transactional window. Omdia found that Disney averaged 61.6 days from theatrical release to first TVOD in 2025, effectively matching its 61-day average in 2024. The studio also had the longest first TVOD window for a major studio title, with “Avatar: Fire and Ash” reaching transactional platforms after 102 days.

“Disney does have the longest in terms of that transactional window,” Jones said, pointing to the studio’s “consistency there over 60 days for many of those key titles.”

That consistency is significant because it places Disney’s approach closer to the kind of 60-day-plus model exhibitors have been advocating, even as the rest of the market continues to vary by studio and by title. Omdia’s data showed that 22 studio releases debuted on first TVOD after 45 days or more in 2025, up from 18 in 2024. But of the 17 studio titles that opened in 2025 to more than USD $50 million in North America, less than half had a 45-day window.

That finding may be one of the more revealing points in the study. Bigger opening weekends do not automatically guarantee longer theatrical exclusivity. Studio strategy still matters. So does the nature of the title, its performance trajectory, the distributor’s downstream priorities and the perceived value of keeping a film in cinemas longer.

“I would say that on average, when you have titles that perform at the higher end, in terms of the top three, top five, top 10, even top 20, they do tend to have on average longer windowing duration than the market average,” Jones said. “But you can see within that top 10 quite a lot of differences in studio approach and studio strategy.”

The Sentiment Shift, From the Top
The early 2026 data points toward further stabilization. According to Omdia, the top five films year-to-date for which data was available, all had theatrical-to-first TVOD windows of 45 days or more. Even traditionally shorter-window studios are tracking in that direction: Jones noted during the Summit that Amazon MGM’s “Project Hail Mary” ran roughly 53 days before TVOD, above that studio’s historical norm.

For exhibitors, that may be the most encouraging signal in the report. The industry is not necessarily returning to one fixed window for all films, but 45 days appears to be re-emerging as a meaningful floor for major releases, with stronger performers often allowed to run longer.

“It’s certainly very clear that the sentiment is now shifting towards backing longer windows,” Jones said.

That sentiment has been increasingly visible across the industry. Omdia’s presentation cited recent comments from Universal, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Steven Spielberg and Cinema United, all emphasizing the value of theatrical exclusivity. Paramount’s David Ellison has pledged a minimum 45-day theatrical window for releases, while Cinema United president and CEO Michael O’Leary has called for broad adoption of at least 45 days and, ideally, more.

Amazon MGM’s contribution to the same presentation struck a different note. Distribution chief Kevin Wilson framed the issue less in terms of a target number of days and more in terms of avoiding a scenario where a title is pulled from “a significant number of theaters after three weekends” and left to sit on a digital shelf for whatever is left of its window.

“I think there’s a middle ground that’s going to work for both studio and exhibitor,” Wilson said — a reminder that the consensus on longer windows is real, but the underlying math still varies by distributor.

The Cinema-Goer Premium
Still, the new windows landscape is not simply about holding films back from the home for a few extra weeks. Omdia’s consumer research suggests that cinema-goers are among the entertainment economy’s most valuable consumers precisely because they are active across so many other platforms.

In the U.S., Omdia found that cinema-goers over-index compared with non-cinema-goers across pay TV, SVOD, hybrid SVOD, FAST, social video, gaming and YouTube. Among surveyed U.S. cinema-goers, 95% used SVOD services, 95% used social video, 82% played video games and 91% used YouTube. They were also more than twice as likely as non-cinema-goers to subscribe to a traditional pay TV service.

“Cinema-goers are highly active across all of these windows,” Jones said. “Across all of these windows, we’re seeing the cinema-goer outperform the non-cinema-goer, which I think is a very interesting takeaway when we’re discussing the whole ecosystem.”

That complicates the familiar framing of theatrical and streaming as purely competing behaviors. Omdia’s data suggests that people who go to the cinema are not rejecting at-home entertainment. They are among its heaviest users. The issue for studios and exhibitors is therefore less about choosing between theatrical and downstream platforms, and more about sequencing those platforms in a way that preserves value.

“The cinema-goers are very valuable consumers across the value chain,” Jones said.

Windows as Value Preservation
That does not eliminate the tension around windows. A film can still be playing theatrically when it becomes available on TVOD, and exhibitors continue to argue that too-short windows train audiences to wait. But the Omdia study suggests the market has moved away from the most aggressive post-pandemic compression of theatrical exclusivity, particularly for bigger releases.

Jones noted that Omdia has not recently conducted a dedicated study on the impact of PVOD availability on individual box office runs, but said the subscription window likely carries the greater risk of cannibalization. In most cases, that window remains significantly longer than the transactional window, generally arriving closer to or beyond the three-month mark for major titles.

The current model is therefore neither a full restoration of the old windows system nor the free-for-all some feared during the pandemic. It is more flexible, more tactical and more dependent on performance. But it is also increasingly built around a recognition that theatrical exclusivity creates value that can carry into every later window.

For exhibitors, the significance of the Omdia data is not simply that windows are lengthening. It is that the strongest moviegoing audiences are also among the most active consumers across streaming, social video, gaming and other entertainment platforms. That makes theatrical exclusivity less of a defensive measure than a value-preservation strategy.

In other words, the window is no longer just about keeping a film off streaming for a few extra weeks. It is about giving theatrical enough room to create the awareness, word of mouth and cultural weight that every downstream window still depends on.

The post Theatrical Windows Are Stretching Again — and Hollywood’s C-Suite Wants Them Longer Still appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

That system is no longer the only path – as filmmakers, distributors, festivals, and technology companies increasingly embrace a direct-to-audience pipeline. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the panel “The Evolution of Distribution: How a Direct-To-Audience Pipeline Will Energize Independent Film” set out to explore this model, one that allows creators to build communities, market films, sell tickets, and distribute content directly to viewers long before a traditional distributor enters the picture.

Held on 16 May, at Village Innovation as part of the Marché du Film (Cannes Film Market), the panel was hosted by Iddo Patt, co-founder and CEO of Eventive, a company that provides ticketing, streaming, and audience management tools for festivals, cinemas, and filmmakers. Working with festivals for the past decade – 6,000 festival editions across 50 countries – Patt reported that over 16 million tickets have been issued through the Eventive platform. “So we’ve developed a lot of ideas, a lot of data, around how people are interacting with movies today,” he said.

Joining him on stage was a diverse slate of guests from different parts of the independent film spectrum: John Nein, senior programmer and director of strategy at the Sundance Film Festival; producer and sales agent Sarah Mosses, CEO and founder of the UK-based Together Films; Daniel Berger, president of Oscilloscope Laboratories, a US-based distribution and media company; and Sharon ‘Rocky’ Roggio, founder and creative director of 1946 Studios, and also the director of the documentary “1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted a Culture.”

The Tension Between Old and New Models
As Berger noted, there is still a great deal of “antiquated thinking” in the exhibition and distribution sector. Not least, who works in the exhibition realm. “A lot of theatre programmers… It’s the same old white men that have been programming those same theatres for decades,” he said. “You talk about reaching a younger audience… These are not the people to do that, they don’t understand it.”

Mosses added that defining success in terms of gaining traditional distribution was also an outdated way of thinking. “The second an audience member has watched it, you’re in a form of distribution,” she argued, “and your success should start from that metric, rather than ‘Did I get a formal offer from a traditional partner? Did I get the streaming deal? Did I get the broadcast offer?’ They’re all different forms of consumption.”

The rise of virtual communities as an in-built audience for a film is another exciting development, remarked Nein. Take those who have built a YouTube following, like Danny and Michael Philippou, whose feature debut “Talk To Me” was launched at Sundance in 2022 and went on to gross $92 million worldwide, or more recent hits like “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” made respectively by Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, who also started cultivating fans for their work online.

“There is something exciting about virtual communities,” continued Nein. “To me, it has to do with this idea of how do you expand the audience? How do you bring people who don’t normally go to a film festival or go to a theatre that’s playing an independent film? Are they coming to a new place for them? And we often talk about that in terms of young audiences. People who might become interested in independent feature work by virtue of some other means, right? And I think that that’s what I see being different today, as opposed to twenty years ago.”

“1946” as a Direct-to-Audience Case Study
As Patt noted, with traditional distribution channels now turning upside down, “It makes a lot of sense for filmmakers to build an audience in a community before a film even plays at a festival.” Roggio’s success is the perfect case study in exploring the direct-to-audience pipeline. Released in 2022, “1946…” explored how the word ‘homosexual’ first appeared in the Bible during the 1946 translation of the Revised Standard Version, arguing this was a mistranslation of Greek texts – a mistake that inadvertently fuelled decades of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

The controversial content immediately attracted viewers. “Before the movie even came out, we had hundreds of people telling us how much our movie was dumb, stupid, wrong,” Roggio recounted. With “pastors losing their minds” in Sunday morning sermons, on radio shows and podcasts, “1946…” was on everyone’s lips. “That was already a big win for us,” he said. An even bigger win came when an Australian TikTok user posted the film’s trailer, and it went viral – gaining 2 million views. When the film premiered at the 2022 Doc NYC festival, it won the Audience Award, the first of 25 awards.

The question remained: what next? “We wanted distribution,” said Roggio. “And if you sell too many tickets at a festival, are you going to get distribution? But I had an audience waiting to see this film, so I really wanted them to see the film. We ended up selling over 5,000 digital tickets at Doc NYC. We’re still the most viewed film in their festival history at the virtual end. They ended up opening an additional screening for us in person, which was huge, and we took a risk doing that, but it paid off.”

Despite employing publicists 42West, who helped ensure visibility, the reaction was disappointing from traditional distributors. “They said, ‘Love the film, can’t help you,’” said Roggio. As she previously explained at a Berlinale EFM talk, the film was considered risky – either “too gay or too Christian”. At this stage, Eventive stepped in. “Eventive contacted us,” said Roggio, “and said, ‘Listen, you obviously have an audience for this, so why don’t you do self-distribution?’”

Released in theatres in the US in December 2023 – to ensure qualifying for BAFTA and Oscars – Roggio also launched a virtual release, via Eventive, to help pay for the costs of entering the awards season. Turning the traditional distribution paradigm upside down was exactly the right strategy. In six months, “1946…” made $118,000 net profit from 500 watch parties – simultaneous virtual watch-along events – across 25 countries.

Crucially, Eventive also provided data: who watched the movie, how many times they watched the movie and for how long – and viewer’s email addresses. The production now has 15,000 subscribers on the film’s Mailchimp account. “I am excited, because we haven’t even hit our potential,” added Roggio. “I think maybe 100,000 people have seen the movie over watch parties, maybe 200,000. We need millions of people to see this movie, so we have a lot of work to do.”

The Three Rs: Reach, Revenue, and Reaction
During the panel, Sarah Mosses, founder and CEO of Together Films, suggested that filmmakers must begin every project by defining their primary intention. According to Mosses, most distribution goals fall into three categories:

• Reach
• Revenue
• Reaction

Some filmmakers prioritise prestige and awards recognition, which due to the expense of mounting an awards campaign will have an impact upon revenue. Others prioritize financial return. Others want to maximize social impact and audience engagement.

“Each film really is going to have a combination of all three, and you should have a combination,” said Mosses. “I advocate for everybody trying to make some form of money, that should be there. It should be the compounding of it, but you have to understand which of those things you’re aiming for to define your own success metrics within that process.”

A More Practical Way to Think About Audiences
Mosses also proposed a framework called CAST to help filmmakers think more strategically about audience segmentation.

• Commercial audiences
• Affected audiences
• Supportive audiences
• Tactical audiences

Commercial audiences are viewers most likely to buy tickets in traditional theatrical settings. Affected audiences are communities directly connected to the film’s subject matter or lived experience. Supportive audiences include advocacy groups, nonprofits, educational organizations, religious institutions, and community organizations that may organize screenings because they care about the issue. Tactical audiences are smaller groups — politicians, policymakers, corporate leaders, or influencers — whose engagement could create broader institutional change.

“We need to really think differently about how we categorize our audiences, so that we can plan distribution efforts that match who needs to see this,” Mosses added. “Because if we only solidly focus on a primary audience for theatrical, we might miss so many different windows that come around that.”

The Future
Mosses concluded by noting that further transparency is needed, including box office reports for each film playing at a festival. “That’s a level of success. How many people showed up to the festival? What was my total box office gross?” She also called for a more uniform way of looking at data in the industry.

Daniel Berger concurred: “You look at box office in Europe, and they tell you how many admissions there have been, how many people saw it. You look at box office in the US, they tell you how many dollars it made.” Given the vast array of ticket prices, it’s impossible to calculate admissions via the current US model. “I don’t know how many people see our films. I’ll never know, there’s no way to know.”

Overall, the panellists agreed that the direct-to-audience pipeline does not eliminate the need for festivals, distributors, or theatres. Festivals remain essential spaces for discovery, legitimacy, and communal viewing experiences, while distributors still provide expertise, relationships, marketing infrastructure, and access to broader markets.

Yet wider thinking is required. As Patt noted, “Ninety per cent of the films that are playing festivals overall are not getting formal or traditional distribution, even though they’ve been curated in a meaningful way. They’ve been selected for important reasons, they’re seen by a lot of people… and that’s part of what is driving this need for direct-to-audience opportunities that can then turn into theatrical.”

The post Can Direct-to-Audience Distribution Give Indie Films a New Path to Theatres? appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

Sony Pictures Classics has been doing it anyway for more than three decades.

The deal that best captured the early days of the 79th Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film wasn’t made by SPC. It was made across from them — in the abstract, at least — when A24 dropped a reported $17 million to acquire Jordan Firstman’s “Club Kid” after a bidding war that drew Netflix, Searchlight, Focus Features and Mubi before the price tag rocketed into eight figures.

The news broke just as Sony Pictures Classics co-founders and co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, along with Dylan Leiner, EVP of Acquisitions, Production and Business Affairs, took the stage at the Palais des Festivals for a Marché du Film panel titled “How Sony Pictures Classics Navigates the World of Indie and International Cinema,” moderated by Los Angeles Times editor Matt Brennan.

The timing was pointed. For exhibitors wondering which model of independent distribution is actually built to last — the headline-chasing eight-figure swing or the slow-burn, evergreen play — the SPC response was instructive.

“When we acquire a movie, whether anyone else has offers, we try to block it out,” said Barker. “We have trained ourselves to not let that noise bother us. What is it worth to us? What do we think it’s going to do?”

“You Never Lose Money on a Movie You Didn’t Buy”
The panel began, appropriately, with Cannes stories. Barker recalled 1984, when he and Bernard were at the festival with Orion Pictures and thought they were going to acquire Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas.” Then 20th Century Fox “swooped in for three times our offer,” Barker said, and the film was gone.

But over lunch with French producer Serge Silberman at the Carlton Hotel, they learned Silberman was preparing Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran.” “At that lunch we bought the film,” Barker said. “He literally wrote the deal on a napkin at the restaurant at the Carlton Hotel. So I think we turned out okay.”

Leiner’s own Cannes acquisition story was more physical. During a screening of “Son of Saul,” he stepped out, called Barker and Bernard, and told them this was the film they needed to pursue. The after-party was closed and the gatekeepers wouldn’t let him in, so Leiner found another route. “The only way I was going to be able to get in was through the beach,” he said. “I was in my tux, and I waded through the ocean.”

He met director László Nemes and the sales team. Later that night, SPC bought the movie. “Son of Saul” went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

These are not just good stories. They are the texture of an era in which Cannes was a smaller, stranger operation — and in which the deals that shaped international cinema were made by people who trusted their guts and worked the room. That instinct-first philosophy remains at the center of SPC’s methodology, now reinforced by Leiner’s financial modeling: scenario ranges on the low end and high end, followed by a disciplined decision about where SPC can make the numbers work.

Bernard put the guiding principle in terms Silberman himself might have appreciated: “He always said you never lose money on a movie you didn’t buy.”

That discipline may sound almost quaint in a marketplace where acquisitions increasingly double as brand announcements. But for exhibition, the SPC model carries a direct analog: programming discipline — knowing which films you can actually make work on your screens — is as valuable as chasing the next hot title. The specialty circuit’s healthiest operators have always known this.

The Festival as Intelligence Network
SPC acquired four films from this year’s Sundance and picked up South by Southwest premiere “Wishful Thinking” — five domestic festival acquisitions before Cannes opened. The trio’s account of how festivals actually drive those decisions is more pragmatic than romantic.

For Leiner, the value of in-person festivals crystallized at the first post-COVID Berlin International Film Festival. Several international distributors asked whether SPC had seen “The Teachers’ Lounge.” It wasn’t on their radar. They saw it quickly and acquired it; the film later earned an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film.

“Being at a festival and being in this fishbowl environment is really helpful,” Leiner said. “These films that we acquired at these domestic festivals recently — they were not planned. That’s what’s always amazing.”

The festival circuit, in other words, is not primarily a screening schedule. It is a distributed intelligence network — one that only functions when the right people are physically in the same room. For exhibitors making programming decisions months in advance, that same network helps determine which specialty titles arrive on their screens with genuine word-of-mouth velocity versus manufactured buzz. The difference often shows up in holdover performance.

Bernard described the festival ecosystem as one of fiercely guarded premiere politics and distinct personalities. Cannes carries the most weight, partly because of what Barker called the singular contribution of longtime selection chief Thierry Frémaux: “What he has done in the last 25 years has kept film relevant — for all of us and for the public.”

By the time the festival closed, Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord” had taken the Palme d’Or and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur” the Grand Prix — further confirmation, if any were needed, that the director-driven international cinema SPC has championed for decades remains Cannes’ defining currency. Neon extended its remarkable Cannes winning streak, reinforcing exactly the competitive dynamic the panel had been interrogating all morning: which acquisitions represent genuine long-term value, and which are brand positioning?

“Nuremberg,” Timing and the Evergreen Principle
No film in the session illustrated the SPC model more concretely than “Nuremberg,” the James Vanderbilt-directed courtroom drama starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, acquired at last year’s Cannes and released theatrically in November 2025. The film grossed more than $56 million globally — exceptional by contemporary specialty-market standards — and has continued to perform in ancillary markets, including airlines, where SPC deliberately holds rights.

“Nobody else was really interested in the movie,” Leiner said. The challenge was convincing the team behind a $40 million production to trust an independent distributor.

“We felt we were auditioning, like to get married to somebody,” said Bernard. “We said, sell it to us. We think it’s going to be a great success — and we’ll make your movie way more valuable over the test of time.”

Part of that value came from an unscripted source. At a Museum of Modern Art screening before release, Barker watched the audience react to Michael Shannon’s speech about the fragility of constitutional law by whispering “Trump.”

“That movie was timely for what Americans were going through,” Barker said. “Whatever side they were on at that moment — very timely. And that helped that film.” SPC bought advertising on both Fox News and MSNBC.

The lesson is the one SPC has been demonstrating for 30 years: a film with genuine evergreen potential — “Run Lola Run,” “Call Me by Your Name,” “Living” — can generate revenue long after its theatrical run closes. That long tail changes how even a modest opening looks on the full balance sheet.

Bernard was direct about pay-one windows: “We look at pay one as part of the theatrical release, in a sense. We continue to promote with all the different aspects of whoever our partner is… to get people to see it at home.” In the post-COVID marketplace, he argued, that window has become “a more valuable revenue stream than it ever was” — a point exhibitors negotiating window lengths with distributors should weigh carefully.

“Blue Moon” and the Art of the Planned Nomination
“Blue Moon,” Richard Linklater’s one-night biographical drama following lyricist Lorenz Hart on the opening night of “Oklahoma!,” earned Ethan Hawke his first Best Actor Oscar nomination at the 98th Academy Awards alongside a Best Original Screenplay nod for writer Robert Kaplow. For Barker, the nomination was not a surprise. It was a planned outcome.

“We sat down with Rick Linklater in 2024 and we said we’d like to make this movie,” Barker recalled. “Our confidence was that movie is going to be nominated for Best Actor and Best Screenplay. The screenplay was spectacular, and it was so obvious — we had to do that for Ethan. Twenty years earlier, we had ‘Capote’ with Philip Seymour Hoffman. This was a similar kind of spectacular performance.”

The airline strategy was deliberate. SPC placed “Blue Moon” on cross-country flights during the Oscar voting window.

Barker said, “I firmly believe the airline orchestrating it is what helped cause Ethan Hawke to get nominated — because we were all on all these planes and they were all watching ‘Blue Moon.'” Bernard called it “an old-school tactic” deployed with precision in the streaming age.

The implication for exhibitors is concrete: Oscar nominations remain one of the few mechanisms that can return a specialized title to screens multiple times — at announcement, through the ceremony, and after a win.

“That is more valuable than it’s ever been,” Bernard said, “because you can’t get onto that stage without being in that conversation with movies that the theater owners decide they should play.” At the end of the voting period, chains play all nominated films for a full week. That guaranteed screen time has to be earned upstream, through exactly the kind of long-range campaign architecture SPC described.

The Weekday Audience and the Repertory Rebound
The session’s most forward-looking thread concerned theatrical exhibition — and whether the signals Barker and Bernard are reading amount to a genuine structural shift or another false dawn.

At CinemaCon, SPC drew more exhibitor attendance at its specialized night presentation than perhaps ever before, a reflection of what Bernard described as a real change: commercial multiplexes beginning to program specialty content in earnest.

Barker flagged a metric with direct booking implications: “The Monday through Thursday gross on a specialized film could be as high as the weekend gross — never happened before.” Younger audiences, he argued, prefer to attend arthouse titles on weekdays. AMC has responded with senior Tuesday discounts. The weekday specialized audience is no longer a rounding error, and exhibitors who haven’t adjusted their midweek programming strategy accordingly may be leaving money on the table.

Then there is the repertory renaissance. “There’s a new generation that’s learning about cinema the way it happened back in the late ’60s and ’70s,” said Bernard. AMC has offered SPC 170 of its largest screens for a week-long “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” run. SPC is reissuing “Trainspotting” in June on 400 commercial screens and planning a similar outing for “The Piano.”

“It’s not just the older crowd,” Barker said. “It’s younger people that want to see this on a big screen with great sound.”

“Becoming Led Zeppelin” offered the proof of concept. When SPC acquired the documentary, some wondered what the company was doing taking on a rock legacy film. Bernard helped engineer an IMAX strategy that Barker said “blew people’s mind,” and the release became, in Barker’s words, “one of the most successful independent films of the last decade” — establishing a template that SPC then replicated for its Elvis Presley documentary.

“It has rejuvenated the documentary form,” Leiner said. “The key is to eventize these movies — the smallest one to the biggest one. Now is the time when distributors can be more creative than they’ve ever been.”

Bernard offered exhibitors a pointed challenge alongside the optimism: make moviegoing more fun, and find better ways to tell audiences what is playing before their friends have to tell them for you. The infrastructure for discovery still lags behind the appetite.

The Neon Question
An audience question — from Andrew Frank of Mongrel Media — cut directly to the competitive landscape: Is it sustainable for Neon to acquire every major Palme d’Or contender at Cannes year after year?

Bernard reached for history. “I’d say you should asked the people who used to be at Miramax — that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Barker passed entirely. “As long as we’ve been in the business, there’s always been someone saying they’re gonna buy everything on the Croisette. Good luck.”

Leiner offered the more analytically useful frame. A24’s ability to pay $17 million for “Club Kid” was underwritten, in part, by the fact that its international sales arm had already received territory offers before the final deal was closed.

“They’re basically plugging into an existing deal, which is hugely valuable to a US distributor,” Leiner said. “There’s already a sense of how much they can lay off.”

The headline number, in other words, may not tell the whole story — a reminder that acquisition economics in 2026 are increasingly opaque to outside observers.

SPC does not buy for headlines or to establish a floor. It buys films it thinks it can make work: on airlines, in repertory houses, across Oscar campaigns, in territories that open wide once domestic momentum builds — and on screens where the work of getting the audience there has already begun long before opening weekend.

Sony Pictures Classics is not pretending the business has not changed. Barker, Bernard and Leiner spoke like executives who understand that every revenue stream matters, every window must be managed, and every audience must be found. But they also made clear that survival in specialty distribution still begins with taste — not nostalgia, not romanticism, and not the fear of losing a bidding war.

The “Club Kid” deal will generate more column inches in the next month than “Nuremberg” did in six. The question for the film industry is which one is still in rotation in 2030.

That, more than any bidding-war headline, is the Sony Pictures Classics business model.

The post The Long Game: How Sony Pictures Classics Still Wins at Cannes appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

The last five years have indeed redrawn the theatrical map. Local content, once considered supplementary, has  become the stabilizing backbone of the Nigerian cinema business. In some quarters, it is more than  just a cinema business; it’s the differentiator, the engine, and arguably the only segment still showing structural resilience in a market battered by piracy, inflation, insecurity, and shifting consumer habits.  

In recent times, the rise of local cinema is no longer a hopeful narrative pushed by filmmakers; it is a  measurable phenomenon with direct impact on exhibitors’ balance sheets. And if recent box office data is any indication, Nigeria is in a new era where domestic titles are increasingly shaping  performance cycles, investor confidence, and long-term viability.  

A Decade of Change in the Numbers and Authenticity  
As of 2014, Nollywood films accounted for just under 10% of total annual domestic box office revenue  in Nigeria, according to industry tallies from the Cinema Exhibitors Association of Nigeria (CEAN). By 2019, that share rose to 28%, helped by breakout titles like “The Wedding Party” (2016), “Sugar Rush” (2019), and “King of Boys” (2018).  

Then came 2020, the pandemic year that ironically created the conditions for Nollywood’s accelerated rise. With global release schedules disrupted and Hollywood theatrical release slates shrinking by over 70%, local filmmakers were forced to step up. They did, and audiences responded. Since 2021, Nigerian titles have consistently represented 35-45% of annual box office revenues, depending on quarter and region. 

The most telling shifts would be between mid 2022 and late 2024, where, for the first time in recorded CEAN data, local films outperformed Hollywood releases across multiple high-traffic months, not due to a lack of foreign releases but because indigenous titles had become strong enough to take up release dates and hold attention on their own. Hollywood remains important, but the era when Nigeria cinemas relied entirely on U.S. blockbusters to survive is gone. Local titles now anchor annual performance. Yes, anchoring is the right word. Because in weeks where imported content underperforms, Nollywood now graciously fills the revenue gap almost predictably.

According to CEAN’s national chairman, Opeyemi Ajayi, NGN ₦11.5 billion was realised in the year 2024 from ticket sales across cinemas in Nigeria, as against NGN ₦7.2 billion made in 2023. In 2024, cinemas accommodated 2.66 million persons and 2.54 million persons in 2023.

“We have recorded 60% growth in revenue in 2024 and about 4.5% growth in admissions despite the harsh economic climate. This is a  remarkable achievement and it is a testament to the industry’s resilience, creativity and determination. It is also the first time we are seeing a growth in admissions since 2020, signaling a significant upturn  in the cinema subsector”, he said.

In an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in July 2024, Ajayi acknowledged with  excitement that revenue generated from Nollywood and Hollywood films in cinemas were beginning to be on a par, and he described the development as the way to go. According to him, Nollywood films  raked in NGN ₦2,325,930,952 while Hollywood films generated NGN ₦2,321,273,174 in revenue during the first half of 2024. “We also recorded 559,122 total admissions for Hollywood films and 640,539 for Nollywood  films”, he added.

By the end of August 2025, Nigeria’s box office had attained yet another milestone, generating more  than NGN ₦10 billion in ticket sales. This figure reflects a 58% increase from the NGN ₦6.4 billion recorded during the same period last year. Admissions also surged to 1.84 million, an almost 16% increase from 1.59 million in 2024. This revalidates the growing strength of Nollywood and cinema culture in Nigeria. Should this trend continue, total box office revenues would likely exceed NGN ₦16 billion by the end of  December. This would mark yet another historic milestone for the industry. 

What Changed?
Post-pandemic was a trying time for businesses across the globe. While some thrived, many  struggled and some failed to recover. Nollywood was indeed favoured. When exchange-rate volatility pushed imported film licensing fees upward, local titles became a safer, more predictable bet. By 2024, Nollywood films delivered higher net margins for exhibitors than Hollywood releases, even when overall attendance was similar. Exhibitors maximized every advantage and made the best out of them. From a programming flexibility perspective, Nigerian films often run longer than foreign releases  because they grow through word-of-mouth rather than opening-day hype. What this means is that  exhibitors nowadays tend to program for longevity, not volatility. They exploit social media, collaborating with local influencers to drive engagement that authentically connects with the audience. This engineers audience loyalty. Anecdotal audience response suggests local content is pulling in groups like families,  female-heavy audiences, and culturally specific demographics who otherwise might never prioritise cinema outings.  

A mid-2024 CEAN analytic summary noted that local content is now a key stabiliser for cinemas outside Lagos and the capital Abuja, where Hollywood attendance fluctuates more dramatically. This is crucial; Nollywood isn’t just rising in urban hubs, it’s anchoring performance in mid-tier cities too.  

Ken Okwuosa, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Filmhouse Group, revealed  that Nigeria has a powerful local market and the cinemagoers are spending heavily on watching local  content in cinemas while speaking with  the founder of the Nigerian International Film & TV Summit, Ijeoma Onah, in 2024. Speaking on the rise of the Nigerian film industry and content, Okwuosa said, “In 2024 H1, Nollywood took 48% of the total market share in cinemas while Hollywood claimed 52%.”

He also said that Filmhouse has an enviable 82% market share in film distribution and up to 35% market share in cinema screening.

The Creative Side: Story Trends Driving the Boom
Nollywood did not arrive by accident: structures and intentionality took effect. A pattern has  emerged among the biggest local hits that led to the current shift, creating a phenomenon. Stories rooted in authentic, everyday Nigerian realities – films about family conflict,, cultural  identity, traditional power dynamics, and Lagos hustle tropes – consistently outperform others.  Nollywood connected with their own people, their culture, their personalities, their realities and,  eventually, their pockets with ease. While comedy and dramedy remain dominant, humour translates more consistently across regions and drives repeat viewing. In exploring genre experiments, titles in action (“Brotherhood”), period epics (“Aníkúlápó”), social thrillers (“Orah,” “Breath of Life”), and crime dramas (Shanty Town universe) signal a growing versatility. 

There is a popular Nigerian slang saying, “No gree for anybody”, meaning: do not let anyone  intimidate you – hustle and never give up. Nigerian women in Nollywood seem to take that slang a little more seriously. Funke Akindele has redefined commercial viability. “A Tribe Called Judah” alone grossed over NGN ₦1.4 billion, becoming Nigeria’s first billion-naira film. 

Cultural relevance is clearly outperforming spectacle. Nigeria’s median age is 18. Entertainment spending among young audiences is increasingly tied to relatability, not scale. Hollywood can bring budget and spectacle, but Nollywood brings familiarity, with characters grounded in Nigerian authenticity: glam, humour, conflict, aspiration, and social dynamics. 

A data review from FilmOne’s box-office insight unit shows that repeat viewership for top Nollywood titles is 2.2x higher than for most mid-tier  Hollywood releases. That is not an accident. Films like  “A Tribe Called Judah,” “Battle on Buka Street,” “Brotherhood,” and “Aníkúlápó: Rise of the Spectre” blend heightened drama with cultural specificity, appealing to audiences who want to “see themselves”.  

Global studio outputs are reducing, and it’s widening the opportunity gap. The U.S. theatrical recovery is still sluggish. Production delays from both the pandemic and the 2023 strikes created a multi-year content shortage. In 2024, global studios released roughly 25% fewer films compared to 2018. Fewer titles mean fewer high-performing weekends for exhibitors globally, but Nigeria has bucked the trend  as cinemagoers favour “event” films. In the past, exhibitors filled weak U.S. months with Bollywood or  European titles. That strategy has become increasingly ineffective. Non-local, non-Hollywood titles contribute barely 3-5% of the annual Nigerian box office.  

Nigerian distributors now program strategically around Hollywood calendars, not behind them. This shift has birthed a competitive advantage that no other market on the continent enjoys at this scale. Local filmmakers are responding by boosting production value, and audience perceptions are changing. Budgets for top Nigerian theatrical titles used to be NGN ₦50 – ₦80 million in the early 2010s. Now, they  range from NGN ₦200 to NGN ₦500 million. Cinemas are adjusting to accommodate and optimize in line with the new reality. Nigerian films are no longer supporting acts, they are headline content. The transformation is not just cultural but phenomenal.  

The Challenges
Of course, the rise is not without headwinds. Nollywood’s theatrical growth may be promising, but the terrain remains uneven. Inflation is suppressing discretionary spending. Ticket prices have increased by 40 – 60%, which has contributed to the box office increase, but admissions continue to rise (4.5% in 2024). Distribution bottlenecks are still major challenging factors. While exhibition has arguably improved over time, capacity is still under 90 screens   nationwide. This is far too low for an emerging market with a population over 200 million. Marketing  budgets remain modest. The average Nollywood theatrical marketing budget is NGN ₦10 – ₦20 naira,  limiting the required nationwide hype to drive more awareness and revenue. Piracy, amongst others, is undercutting long-term revenue. For every successful cinema run, there is an illegal digital leak within weeks. However, despite these pressures, Nollywood holds a massive opportunity with indigenous stories waiting to be told, while local films continue to outperform expectations. 

Ladun Awobokun, the Chief Content Officer, FilmOne Group, stated in an interview with Pulse Nigeria that there are many existing untold stories yet to get to the screen. She affirmed that, “If you position any film as a film to watch that should be watched, the Nigerian audience will watch it. They’re coming out for different types of films. They are coming out to watch these films in their numbers. There are so many, folks are coming out for biopic, romance, and epic and they’re doing great numbers. If you do the work, people will come out to see it. People are now asking questions. Because of that, you have to pay more attention to what you’re doing. How is it shot, what does it look like, and how was it  produced.” 

Nollywood is a market maturing into its own identity. The story of Nigerian cinema is no longer about catching up to global industries. It’s about defining its own commercial logic, one where local content drives growth, audience loyalty, and creative innovation. One with revenue opportunities where exhibitors are realizing how much they need Nollywood, just as filmmakers need the box office. Audiences are continuing to show up for stories they recognise. And for the first time in a long while, the incentives are aligning. Local content is not just rising; it is becoming the spine of the industry. And if this trajectory continues, the Nigerian film market will stand as one of the few in the world where the local beats the global at the gate.

The post The Rise of Local Cinema: How Nigerian Cinemas are Rebuilt on Indigenous Films appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

Following the strong response to the ninth edition of our sister list, Top Women in Global Cinema, published earlier this year, we wanted to once again shine a light on the women shaping how films reach audiences worldwide. While film distribution remains a male-dominated sector, recognising and amplifying female leadership in this space continues to be both necessary and overdue.

As has become customary with our Top Women lists — whether focused on cinema exhibition or distribution — the volume and quality of nominations made narrowing the field especially challenging. We’re therefore particularly pleased that 16 of the women featured this year are new entrants, reflecting both emerging leadership and the continued evolution of distribution roles across markets, platforms and release strategies.

At the same time, we remain conscious that some territories are still underrepresented, or not represented at all. This is not due to a lack of intent on our part, but rather a reminder of how dependent these initiatives are on industry participation and nominations from across the global ecosystem.

For 2025, we also continued with clearly defined eligibility criteria for distribution nominees, introduced to ensure consistency and relevance across the list. As a result, some senior executives whose roles extend well beyond film distribution — however influential — are not included here.

Our sincere thanks once again to AMC Theatres, DCDC and Event Cinemas for supporting our ongoing editorial mission of spotlighting standout talent across the global film industry.

Elissa Federoff

Chief Distribution Officer, NEON

Elissa Federoff is Chief Distribution Officer at NEON, a role she was promoted into in 2024 after overseeing the company’s theatrical distribution strategy since its founding in January 2017. She guides NEON’s release approach across the slate, helping establish the company as a major theatrical player with both large exhibition circuits and the independent arthouse community. Under her leadership, NEON released “Anora,” which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2025, further cementing the company’s reputation for filmmaker-driven cinema with substantial commercial and awards impact. This year, NEON picked up Jafar Panahi’s  “It Was Just An Accident” during Cannes, making it the sixt year in a row one of the company’s films has won the Palme d’Or. Federoff previously held roles at The Orchard, boutique label RADiUS, Oscilloscope Laboratories and Lionsgate. She received the Dan Fellman Show “E” Award at ShowEast in 2023.

Veronika Kwan Vandenberg

President of Distribution for Universal Pictures International (UPI)

As head of distribution at Universal Pictures International (UPI), Veronika Kwan Vandenberg oversees the studio’s international theatrical distribution operations across both company-owned territories and independent partner markets. Over the past year, she has led the global rollout of some of the studio’s biggest recent releases, including both “Wicked” films, “Jurassic World Rebirth” and the live-action remake of “How To Train Your Dragon,” helping drive sustained international box office growth across a wide range of genres and audience segments.

Prior to Universal, Kwan Vandenberg spent nearly three decades at Warner Bros. Pictures, including 18 years as President of International Distribution, steering the studio’s global theatrical strategy during some of its most successful box office periods. Over the course of her impressive career, she has supervised the international distribution of hundreds of titles and worked closely with filmmakers including Christopher Nolan, helping shape the modern global studio distribution model.

Cathleen Taff

President, Production Services, Franchise Management and Theatrical Distribution, Disney Entertainment, Studios

Overseeing global theatrical distribution is just one part of Cathleen Taff’s expansive remit at The Walt Disney Studios, where she works across Disney’s live-action and specialty banners as well as Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Studios and Searchlight Pictures. In addition to distribution, Taff leads franchise management and audience insights, helping align the studio’s theatrical strategy with long-term brand stewardship and audience engagement across The Walt Disney Company.

A 32-year Disney veteran, Taff also oversees production services, including technology, operations and labor relations supporting both theatrical and streaming content, along with Disney Theatrical Group and Disney Music Group. Across multiple eras of transformation for the studio business, she has played a central role in shaping Disney’s global distribution and franchise strategy during some of its most commercially and culturally significant periods.

Helen Lee-Kim

President of International, Lionsgate Motion Picture Group

Heading up the international licensing and distribution of Lionsgate’s diversified theatrical slate, Helen Lee-Kim plays a central role in shaping the studio’s global release and partner strategy across tentpole franchises and targeted genre titles. As a key member of the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group’s leadership and content strategy team, she works across theatrical and multi-platform releases as the studio continues to expand its international footprint.

In 2025, Lee-Kim and her team guided the global rollout of a slate that included “Ballerina,” “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” “The Long Walk,” “Flight Risk,” “Good Fortune” and the latest installment in the “Now You See Me” franchise. Since rejoining Lionsgate in 2017, she has overseen international licensing efforts that have generated nearly USD $1 billion in sales, while stewarding some of the studio’s most commercially durable and globally resonant properties.

Lisa Bunnell

President of Distribution, Focus Features

At Focus Features, Lisa Bunnell leads domestic theatrical distribution for a slate that continues to define the upper tier of specialty cinema. Known for pairing filmmaker-driven titles with disciplined release strategies, she has played a central role in positioning Focus releases for sustained theatrical runs in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

In 2025, Bunnell oversaw the releases of “Nosferatu,” “The Phoenician Scheme,” “Bugonia” and the upcoming literary adaptation “Hamnet,” the latter having already won several festival accolades, reinforcing the studio’s reputation for ambitious, adult-oriented cinema. She brings a rare dual perspective to the role, having spent 17 years at Loews Cineplex before serving as head film buyer for Landmark Theatres — an exhibition background that continues to inform her exhibitor-focused approach to specialty distribution.

Gina Glen

Director of Film Distribution, IMAX

At IMAX, Gina Glen plays a central role in bringing premium large-format releases to audiences worldwide, overseeing global film distribution across the company’s expanding international network. Working at the intersection of studio partnerships and exhibition, she helps coordinate the worldwide rollout of both original IMAX content and IMAX DMR titles, ensuring consistency and scale across diverse markets.

A veteran of more than two decades at IMAX, Glen has been instrumental in supporting the company’s growth as it continues to add new auditoriums and deepen relationships with exhibitors across multiple continents. Her long tenure has spanned numerous shifts in release patterns, technology and audience behavior, positioning her as a key steward of IMAX’s global distribution strategy during a period of sustained international expansion.

Toshi Yamasaki

President & CEO, TOHO-TOWA Company

As President and CEO of TOHO-TOWA, Toshi Yamasaki oversees one of Japan’s most influential motion picture importers and distributors, guiding the company’s acquisition, international partnerships and theatrical strategy across the Japanese market. A subsidiary of major Japanese entertainment company, TOHO, TOHO-TOWA has long handled releases for major Hollywood studios, with Yamasaki playing a central role in shaping and sustaining those global relationships.

In recent years, she has continued to expand the company’s international reach, including securing a new agreement that will see Warner Bros.’ feature slate released theatrically in Japan by the TOHO-TOWA Group beginning in 2026. Fluent in Japanese, English and French, Yamasaki was the first woman to serve as president within the TOHO Group and remains a key figure bridging Japanese exhibition and global studio distribution at a moment of renewed international collaboration.

Kathleen Gallagher

EVP & General Sales Manager Theatrical Distribution, Universal Filmed Entertainment Group (North America)

Leading Universal’s theatrical sales operations across the United States and Canada, Kathleen Gallagher oversees domestic distribution strategy for the studio’s North American releases, working closely with exhibition partners and Universal’s international distribution teams. In her role, she manages regional sales execution across a wide-ranging slate, helping align national strategy with local market dynamics.

A longtime Universal executive, Gallagher has spent more than two decades with the company in senior leadership roles spanning theatrical and home entertainment. Prior to her current position, she served as EVP and Managing Director of North America for Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, experience that continues to inform her cross-platform perspective on distribution and exhibitor relations. Across multiple release cycles and market shifts, she has remained a steady presence within Universal’s domestic distribution leadership.

Elizabeth Trotman

CEO Australia & New Zealand, Studiocanal

As CEO of Studiocanal’s operations in Australia and New Zealand, Elizabeth Trotman oversees theatrical distribution across the region, guiding a slate that spans studio titles, prestige releases and local productions. During her tenure of almost a decade, she has been responsible for the distribution of hundreds of films and continues to play a central role in shaping Studiocanal’s presence across both markets. A veteran of the industry with experience across exhibition, marketing and distribution, Trotman previously held senior roles at Warner Bros. and the HOYTS Group before joining Studiocanal. Her career trajectory — from cinema exhibition to regional studio leadership — has given her a uniquely holistic perspective on the Australasian theatrical landscape.

Helen Moss

Head of International Theatrical Distribution, Amazon MGM Studios

At Amazon MGM Studios, Helen Moss was hired this past year to lead international theatrical distribution, overseeing global release strategy as the studio continues to expand and formalize its presence in cinemas worldwide. In the role, she works across territories and exhibition partners to build cohesive international rollouts for Amazon MGM’s growing theatrical slate.

Prior to joining Amazon MGM Studios, Moss spent more than 15 years at Paramount Pictures, where she oversaw international theatrical distribution across more than 70 markets and played a key role in the global success of major franchises and event titles. Known for her strategic approach to film planning and international execution, she brings crucial, in-depth experience that scales releases across diverse markets as Amazon MGM sharpens its global theatrical ambitions.

Rebecca Kearey

EVP and Head of International Marketing, Distribution & Business Operations, Searchlight Pictures

At Searchlight Pictures, Rebecca Kearey oversees international operations and business strategy, guiding the studio’s global marketing and distribution efforts across its slate. Having been with Searchlight since its inception, she has played a central role in shaping the company’s international identity and approach to releasing prestige, filmmaker-driven cinema worldwide. With over two decades in senior leadership, Kearey has supervised the international rollout of Searchlight’s releases across multiple territories, including numerous award-winning titles. In 2025, she also joined the Board of Directors of the British Film Institute (BFI) America, reflecting her standing within the global film community.

Jody Pope

Director, Distribution EMEA, Universal Pictures International

Overseeing theatrical distribution for Universal Pictures International across more than 20 territories in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Jody Pope plays a key role in shaping the studio’s regional release strategy and execution. She works closely with local teams and exhibition partners, helping coordinate the rollout of Universal’s theatrical slate, which this year included blockbusters like the “Wicked” films and “Jurassic World Rebirth.” Pope began her career in UK distribution, holding senior theatrical sales roles at Soda Pictures and Revolver Entertainment before joining Universal Pictures UK. She later moved into exhibition as Head of Film at Everyman Cinemas, experience that continues to inform her exhibitor-facing approach to distribution. She returned to Universal Pictures International in 2015.

Finola Mcloughlin

Executive Director, EMEA Theatrical Distribution, Warner Bros. Picture Group

Finola McLoughlin heads up theatrical distribution for Warner Bros. Picture Group across a wide EMEA footprint spanning Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics, the Balkans, CIS markets, Africa, Portugal, Greece and Israel. In addition to overseeing these territories, she contributes to pan-regional initiatives drawing on more than 19 years at Warner Bros., including earlier experience working across Western European markets. McLoughlin began her career in anti-piracy operations at the Motion Picture Association (MPA) in Brussels before transitioning into studio distribution.

Subha-Orn (Soupy) Rathanamongkolmas

Vice President, South Asia, Universal Pictures

As Vice President for South Asia at Universal Pictures International, Subha-Orn “Soupy” Rathanamongkolmas oversees theatrical distribution across 18 markets spanning South and Southeast Asia. A veteran of nearly three decades in the industry, she began her career at United International Pictures (UIP) Thailand before spending 18 years at The Walt Disney Company, where she held senior regional roles including Head of Distribution for Studio Entertainment in Southeast Asia. Since joining Universal, Rathanamongkolmas has continued to build studio and exhibitor partnerships across the region, earning recognition in 2024 with CineAsia’s Distributor of the Year Award for her long-standing leadership, innovation and commitment to theatrical distribution.

Yit-Ching Lee

Vice President, Distribution EMEA, Paramount Pictures

At Paramount Pictures, Yit-Ching Lee oversees theatrical distribution across the EMEA region, a role she has held since joining the studio’s regional office in 2007. In 2025, she helped guide the rollout of major releases including “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” and “The Naked Gun,” continuing her long-standing role executing Paramount’s international theatrical strategy across diverse markets. In addition to her distribution leadership, Lee has served as chair and co-chair of Paramount’s inclusion and diversity initiatives for women and parents, and has participated as a mentor for UNIC’s Women’s Cinema Leadership Programme. She began her career at United International Pictures, working on the development of international emerging markets.

Mary Kouinoglou

Senior Vice President, Theatrical, EMEA Licensees, Sony Pictures

Mary Kouinoglou leads theatrical distribution strategy for Sony Pictures across the studio’s EMEA licensee markets, working closely with local partners and exhibitors to coordinate regional release planning and execution. In her role, she supports the rollout of Sony’s theatrical slate including recent releases such as “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle,” “28 Years Later” and “Sisu: Road to Revenge.” Kouinoglou is participating in UNIC’s Women’s Cinema Leadership Programme this year, reflecting her engagement in industry collaboration and commitment to leadership across the region.

Nathalie Grison

Director of Distribution, The Walt Disney Company France

Nathalie Grison is Director of Distribution at The Walt Disney Company France, managing theatrical distribution strategy across the studio’s releases in the French market. Appointed to the role in May 2024, she works closely with the marketing team to coordinate release planning and execution of Disney’s slate, which this year includes the live-action “Lilo & Stitch,” “Zootopia 2” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”

Grison joined the company in 1993, when it was named Gaumont Buena Vista International, beginning her career in finance before moving into studio operations and sales, ultimately becoming head of programming for France. With more than three decades of experience within Disney’s French operations, she brings deep institutional knowledge and a long-standing understanding of the French theatrical landscape to her current role.

Satomi Odake

Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Gaga

Satomi Odake is Chief Operating Officer at Gaga, one of Japan’s most respected independent film distributors, where she has spent nearly three decades shaping the company’s international and domestic film strategy. Having joined Gaga in 1997, she has held a series of senior roles across foreign film acquisition, licensing, procurement and international sales, including leading the company’s global division and overseeing the acquisition and release of numerous internationally acclaimed and Oscar-winning titles. Odake was elevated to COO in 2025 and is currently helping expand Gaga’s presence as a key bridge between Japanese audiences and global cinema by launching Noroshi, a division dedicated to distributing international arthouse titles.

Nathalie Cieutat

Deputy Managing Director, Distribution, Pathé Films

Nathalie Cieutat has led theatrical distribution at Pathé Films for nearly four years, bringing significant experience from across both French exhibition and distribution markets. After training in distribution and exhibition at La Fémis, she held senior sales roles at Warner Bros. France and Wild Bunch Distribution before spending six years on the exhibition side as Director of Programming for Les Cinémas Pathé Gaumont. Since returning to Pathé’s distribution arm, she has helped shape a slate that blends French and international cinema, including recent releases such as Paolo Sorrentino’s “Parthenope” and “Le Chantier,” alongside a range of culturally resonant titles.

Melanie Valera

SVP General Sales Manager, Paramount Pictures

Melanie Valera is Senior Vice President and General Sales Manager at Paramount Pictures, where she oversees the studio’s domestic theatrical sales operations nationwide. A 20-year Paramount veteran, Valera rose through the ranks after previous roles at DreamWorks and Miramax, bringing considerable experience in exhibitor relations, regional sales strategy and team leadership. Widely respected throughout the cinema community, she has long been active in industry philanthropy and mentorship, serving on the boards of the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation and the Motion Picture Club, and as the founding president of Film Row, an initiative dedicated to cultivating the next generation of industry leaders. In 2024, Valera was honored with ShowEast’s Al Shapiro Distinguished Service Award, recognizing her longstanding commitment to giving back to the theatrical community.

Susan Cotliar

Vice President, Cinema Partnerships, The Walt Disney Studios

At The Walt Disney Studios, Susan Cotliar leads cinema partnerships, overseeing in-theatre marketing strategy across Disney’s theatrical slate in close collaboration with exhibition partners throughout North America. Her remit spans trailer placement, lobby and on-site marketing campaigns, and the coordination of in-cinema assets designed to support theatrical releases. Cotliar previously spent 27 years at Twentieth Century Fox, where she rose to Senior Vice President of In-Theatre Marketing before joining Disney following the studio’s acquisition of Fox. In addition to her studio responsibilities, she serves on the board of Variety of Southern California, reflecting her broader engagement with the industry community.

Patricia Gonzalez

EVP, In-Theatre Marketing, Paramount Pictures

Patricia Gonzalez continues to head up in-theatre marketing strategy for Paramount Pictures’ domestic theatrical releases, working closely with exhibition partners on everything from trailer placement and on-site activations to exhibitor-specific campaigns and theatrical fan events. In 2025, her team supported the cinema rollout of titles including “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” and “The Naked Gun,” continuing Paramount’s long-standing emphasis on exhibitor collaboration and theatrical visibility. Gonzalez has spent more than two decades at Paramount, following a decade leading in-theatre marketing services at DreamWorks. She is widely respected for her vast experience and exhibitor-first approach to studio marketing. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and serves on the board of Variety of Southern California.

Giselle Abbud

Managing Director, Diamond Films Latam & General Manager, Diamond Films México

Giselle Abbud is pulling double duty as both Managing Director of Diamond Films Latam, while also serving as General Manager of Diamond Films México, where she leads theatrical distribution, sales strategy and exhibitor relations across one of the region’s most competitive markets. With more than 20 years in film distribution, she has guided the release of over 300 films, spanning major international franchises and landmark local successes, including some of Mexico’s highest-grossing domestic titles. Abbud joined Diamond Films more than a decade ago after earlier roles in distribution at Universal Pictures. Earlier this year, she became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Amy Wood

Vice-President, Global Theatrical Distribution, Crunchyroll

Amy Wood has been kept busy over the past year leading global theatrical distribution and crafting international release strategies for Crunchyroll’s expanding slate of anime features. Based in Los Angeles, she manages distribution teams spanning North America, Europe and Australia, coordinating global rollouts for major releases including “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle” and “Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc.” Prior to joining Crunchyroll, Wood spent a decade at Lionsgate overseeing international distribution, following on from roles on the exhibition side at Pacific and Arclight Theatres — experience that continues to inform her exhibitor-first approach to anime’s growing theatrical footprint.

Ann-Elizabeth Crotty

EVP, Global Customer Experience, Marketing, Sales & Operations Specialist, Sony Pictures Entertainment

In 2025, Ann-Elizabeth Crotty celebrated her 25th anniversary with Sony Pictures Entertainment, where she heads up the team that works with worldwide cinema operators, theatres and even streamers to market the studio’s movies. She has been in exhibitor relations since the late 1990s and has built a reputation as a hands-on leader with a thorough understanding of how studio priorities translate in theatrical settings. Over the course of her career, Crotty has overseen exhibitor-facing initiatives across numerous global releases, which in 2025 helped bring popular franchises back to movie theatres, including “Karate Kid: Legends,” “28 Years Later,” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”

Kezia Williams

Managing Director, UK & Ireland, Universal Pictures International

Kezia Williams heads Universal Pictures International’s operations in the UK and Ireland as Managing Director, overseeing theatrical distribution, marketing and day-to-day business across one of the studio’s key territories. She brings more than two decades of experience in film distribution and marketing, having previously held senior roles at Entertainment One, where she served as Managing Director of the UK film business. Williams is returning to Universal, having worked on the studio’s UK marketing team earlier in her career. She is also Chair of MediCinema and a voting member of BAFTA.

Karyn A. Temple

Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel, Motion Picture Association

Karyn A. Temple plays a critical role in protecting the films that reach cinemas worldwide in her capacity as Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel of the Motion Picture Association (MPA). She manages the organization’s global legal affairs and content protection efforts, working with governments, law enforcement agencies and industry partners to combat piracy and strengthen copyright enforcement. A leading authority on copyright law, Temple previously served as Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office for eight years and earlier held senior litigation roles at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), where she focused on anti-piracy enforcement. Her work continues to shape the legal framework supporting the global theatrical ecosystem.

Christine Eloy

Managing Director, Europa Distribution

Christine Eloy has spent more than a decade representing the interests of independent European distributors as Managing Director of Europa Distribution, the association of independent film distributors founded in 2006. Under her leadership, the network has grown to include around 130 leading distributors across 32 countries in Europe and beyond, serving as both a professional network and a think tank dedicated to strengthening the circulation of independent and non-national European cinema. Eloy steers Europa Distribution’s activities spanning training, knowledge exchange, advocacy and peer-to-peer collaboration, helping members navigate shared challenges around audience development, marketing innovation and policy engagement while reinforcing the sector’s role in cultural diversity and independent theatrical distribution.

Arianna Bocco

Head of Global Distribution, MUBI

Arianna Bocco was hired this year by MUBI to help build the company’s global distribution capabilities. She is responsible for MUBI’s international theatrical strategy as it continues to expand its footprint as both a distributor and a global streaming platform. She joined MUBI following a 16-year tenure at IFC Films, where she rose to the role of president and helped shape the company’s reputation for filmmaker-driven independent cinema. Throughout her career, Bocco has been involved in the release and positioning of a wide range of acclaimed titles, bringing her crucial experience in acquisitions, international rollout and specialty distribution to her new role. Prior to IFC Films, she held senior positions at Miramax Films and the Gersh Agency, and began her career at New Line Cinema and Fine Line Features. Bocco is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and BAFTA, and previously served as Chair of BAFTA New York.

Silvia Cruz

CEO, Vitrine Filmes

Silvia Cruz is the founder and CEO of Vitrine Filmes, the Brazilian distribution company she launched in 2010 with a mission to bring local and international arthouse cinema to audiences nationwide. Under her leadership, Vitrine has distributed more than 150 titles and established itself as a key platform for contemporary Brazilian auteurs, including films by Kleber Mendonça Filho such as “Aquarius,” “Bacurau,” and the upcoming “The Secret Agent,” which is currently part of the international awards conversation. Since expanding operations to Spain in 2019, Cruz has overseen Vitrine’s activities across both territories, balancing prestigious cinema with audience-building initiatives that strengthen the independent theatrical ecosystem.

A former executive at Pandora Filmes, Europa Filmes and Coração da Selva, she is widely regarded for her close collaborations with filmmakers and her role in amplifying Brazilian cinema on the global stage, as Vitrine marks its 15th anniversary in 2025.

Anna Chettle

Managing Director, International, A24

A24 continues to be an indie darling of the cinema business, releasing hits like “The Materialists” and “Warfare” over the past year. Playing a pivotal role in the company’s continued expansion beyond North America, Anna Chettle oversees A24’s international sales and distribution operations. Based in London, she leads A24’s international strategy across multiple territories as the studio increasingly handles global releases directly rather than relying solely on local partners. Chettle joined A24 after five years at Hanway Films.

Ariane Toscan du Plantier

Director of French and International Cinema Distribution, Gaumont

Ariane Toscan du Plantier oversees French and international cinema distribution at Gaumont, managing the studio’s theatrical releases in France and across international markets. A veteran with nearly three decades at the company, she leads a distribution team of more than 30. In addition to her studio responsibilities, Toscan du Plantier plays an active role in France’s broader film ecosystem as vice-president of the Association for the Promotion of Cinema (APC), the body overseeing the César Awards, demonstrating her long-standing influence on France’s national film culture.

Katarina Nyman

Country Manager & Director of Film Distribution, Nordisk Film, Finland

Katarina Nyman is Country Manager and Director of Film Distribution for Nordisk Film in Finland, where she has spent more than two decades overseeing the theatrical release of both local and international titles. A strong advocate for Finnish cinema, she has played a central role in positioning Nordisk Film as a leading force in the domestic market, including the release of major local successes such as “Sisu.”

Beyond her studio responsibilities, Nyman is President of the Finnish Chamber of Films and is active in industry development, including currently serving as a mentor in the UNIC Women’s Cinema Leadership Programme, reflecting her commitment to strengthening both the national film sector and the next generation of industry leaders.

Eve Gabereau

Director of Distribution, Vue Lumière

Eve Gabereau leads distribution at Vue Lumière, the newly launched film distribution arm of international cinema chain Vue, where she is responsible for shaping the company’s theatrical strategy and release model. Appointed at the beginning of this year to establish and run the division, Gabereau brings substantial experience from the independent sector, having founded and led Modern Films and, before that, co-founded Soda Pictures, where she handled hundreds of acclaimed international and arthouse titles.

Known for championing world cinema and filmmaker-driven releases, she has built a career spanning distribution, production and strategic partnerships, positioning her to bridge exhibition and distribution as Vue Lumière expands its presence in the theatrical marketplace.

Sarah Timlick

Head of Theatrical Distribution, Canada, Amazon MGM Studios

Sarah Timlick began a new role at Amazon MGM Studios in 2025, where she now oversees the company’s theatrical distribution in Canada. Her new position follows more than a decade in Canadian distribution, most recently as Head of Theatrical Distribution at Elevation Pictures, where she managed the release of a wide range of high-profile independent and awards-driven titles. Timlick began her career at Alliance Films and is widely regarded as a leading voice in the Canadian distribution community, serving on the boards of the Canadian Association of Film Distributors and Exporters (CAFDE) and Canadian Picture Pioneers, and as the youngest executive to be elected Chair of the Ontario Film Authority Board of Directors.

Ladun Awobokun

Chief Content Officer, FilmOne Entertainment

Ladun Awobokun is Chief Content Officer at FilmOne Entertainment, where she is in charge of content strategy across distribution, acquisitions, licensing and studio relations throughout West Africa. Promoted to the role in 2024, she oversees the curation and release of both Hollywood studio titles and Nollywood films, while also guiding FilmOne’s approach to cinema, streaming and ancillary platforms as the regional market continues to evolve. Awobokun has been a central figure in advancing greater transparency and standardization within the West African film industry, including playing a key role in the adoption of Comscore across the region. With experience spanning finance, marketing and film distribution, she is widely regarded as one of the leading strategic voices shaping the future of Nollywood and theatrical exhibition in English-speaking West Africa.

Elba McAllister

CEO, Cineplex (Colombia)

Elba McAllister is the co-founder and CEO of Cineplex, the Colombia-based independent distribution company she launched in 1993, which has since grown into a key platform for arthouse and independent cinema across Latin America. Over more than three decades, McAllister has overseen the distribution of over 500 films across theatrical, home entertainment and television windows. Under her leadership, Cineplex has developed tailored distribution strategies spanning festivals, cinemas, OTT platforms and television, releasing an average of 20-25 films per year across multiple territories.

In addition to distribution, McAllister represents Colombian films for international sales, helping bridge Latin American cinema with audiences worldwide.

Erika Lewington

Marketing Director, Universal Pictures UK & Ireland

As Marketing Director for Universal Pictures UK & Ireland, Erika Lewington shapes the theatrical campaigns across the studio’s releases in the territory. She brings more than 20 years of experience in film marketing, having previously held senior roles at Sony Pictures and The Walt Disney Company before joining Universal, where she is now in her ninth year. Throughout her career, Lewington has worked on many of the industry’s most recognizable franchises, including James Bond, “Despicable Me,” “Star Wars,” “Jurassic World” and Marvel titles. Most recently, she oversaw the UK and Ireland campaigns for “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” and “Wicked,” both of which delivered record-breaking results.

Camila Pacheco

Executive Marketing Director, Sony Pictures Entertainment

Drawing on more than two decades in theatrical campaigns, Camila Pacheco shapes Sony Pictures Entertainment’s release strategies across Brazil and Latin America, overseeing promotion for the studio’s regional slate. She joined Sony in 2019 after more than a decade at 20th Century Fox, where she served as Marketing Director in Brazil and led major studio campaigns across multiple platforms and territories.

In recent years, Pacheco has been closely associated with some of Sony’s most high-profile releases in the region, including the Brazilian title “Ainda Estou Aqui” (“I’m Still Here”), which went on to receive Academy Award recognition, as well as a wide range of global studio films.

Isabella Okechukwu

General Manager, Silverbird Film Distribution

At Silverbird Film Distribution, Isabella Okechukwu oversees the company’s theatrical distribution operations across West Africa, guiding film acquisitions, studio relationships and market expansion in one of the region’s fastest-growing cinema territories. With more than a decade of experience spanning distribution and exhibition, she has played a key role in strengthening Silverbird’s partnerships with Hollywood studios such as Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures while expanding the company’s footprint across Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia. Okechukwu began her career with Silverbird Cinemas, rising through operational leadership roles before transitioning into distribution, where she has been closely involved in bringing both global studio releases and locally produced films to market.

Shannah Miller

Vice President, Marketing, Fathom Entertainment

Shannah Miller manages marketing and communications at Fathom Entertainment, positioning one of the world’s leading specialty distributors of theatrical event content. Since joining the company in 2021, she has guided campaigns for roughly 100 event cinema titles each year, reaching thousands of screens across a global exhibition network, while working closely with studios, content partners and exhibitors.

Miller played a central role in the company’s January 2025 rebrand from Fathom Events to Fathom Entertainment and has helped build strategic partnerships with organizations including Fandango, IMAX, Walmart and Xbox. Prior to Fathom, she held senior leadership roles at Atom Tickets and began her career in the music industry, serving as a senior executive across several Sony Music labels.

Pia Grünler

Head of Nordic Theatrical Distribution, SF Studios

With more than 25 years of experience in Swedish film distribution, Pia Grünler oversees SF Studios’ theatrical business across the Nordic region, with responsibility for both strategy and team leadership. Appointed Nordic Head of Theatrical Distribution in 2023, she directs the release of SF Studios’ own productions alongside local-language titles from leading independent producers, as well as major international films through long-standing studio partnerships, including Sony Pictures and MGM. Grünler joined SF Studios in 2016 after holding senior roles across sales and marketing at Nordisk, and is widely regarded for her extensive market knowledge and ability to navigate a rapidly evolving theatrical landscape.

Danielle Bonatto

Sales Director, Brazil, Sony Pictures Entertainment

Danielle Bonatto has more than 15 years of experience in theatrical distribution and sales, and currently leads Sony Pictures Entertainment’s sales operations in Brazil. She joined the studio in 2019 and was promoted to Sales Director after serving in regional distribution roles across Latin America. Bonatto’s career includes senior positions at Warner Bros. Pictures, Diamond Films and Universal Pictures, with experience spanning major franchises such as “Harry Potter,” “Fast & Furious,” “Despicable Me,” and “Spider-Man.” Over the past year, Bonatto participated in the release of Sony’s 2025 Academy Award-winning title “Ainda Estou Aqui” (“I’m Still Here”), as well as the anime hit “Demon Slayer: Castle Infinity.”

Shelley Schulz

Vice President, Theatrical Sales, Angel Studios

Shelley Schulz heads up theatrical sales at Angel Studios, where she manages release strategies and exhibitor partnerships for the studio’s growing slate. Her career began in exhibition at AMC Theatres before she became an independent sales and theatrical distribution consultant, experience that has given her a strong understanding of the needs and dynamics on both sides of the distribution equation. Since joining Angel Studios, Schulz has risen through the ranks, helping guide the theatrical launches of titles such as “His Only Son,” “Sound of Freedom,” and “David,” while building trusted relationships with exhibitors nationwide.

Natalie Ralph

Director of Distribution, Europe, MUBI

Natalie Ralph has been a key figure in building MUBI’s European theatrical presence since joining the company in 2021, helping shape its international cinema strategy as the streamer-turned-distributor expanded into wider theatrical releases. Her background spans roles at the BFI and Soda Pictures, followed by six years with StudioCanal UK, where she worked on major campaigns including “Paddington 2,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “Room.” At MUBI, Ralph has overseen the rollout of a growing slate of arthouse titles, contributing to box office successes such as “The Worst Person in the World,” “Aftersun,” and “The Substance,” reinforcing the company’s commitment to cinema-first distribution across Europe.

Michelle Maddalena

Global Content and Industry Relations, Dolby Laboratories

Kymberli Frueh

EVP, Content Acquisitions and Programming, Trafalgar Releasing

Kymberli Frueh oversees content acquisitions and programming at Trafalgar Releasing, where she was elevated to Executive Vice President following a record-breaking year for the global event cinema distributor. In her role, she leads relationships with artists, producers and rights holders across a wide range of event content, spanning music, film, faith-based programming and specialty releases. Frueh has been central to the expansion of Trafalgar’s slate, which has grown to its largest-ever lineup, building on a track record that includes high-profile concert films and live cinema events alongside theatrical presentations of cultural programming. Prior to joining Trafalgar, she spent a decade leading programming at Fathom Events, helping establish event cinema as a significant and sustainable part of the global theatrical marketplace.

Cristina Batlle

Head of Theatrical Distribution, Studio TF1

Cristina Batlle has been tapped to build and lead the theatrical distribution division at Studio TF1 as the Paris-based media group expands its cinema ambitions. Joining from Warner Bros. Discovery where she most recently served as Executive Director of Theatrical Distribution in France, Batlle brings extensive experience across sales and distribution leadership roles, including extended tenures at Warner Bros. France, Studiocanal and TF1 International. In her new role, she is tasked with establishing Studio TF1’s in-house theatrical operation, including assembling a dedicated team, as the company prepares to distribute its own film productions in France beginning in 2026. Her appointment is seen as a cornerstone move as Studio TF1 accelerates plans to significantly scale its film output over the coming years.

Nicole Weis

Head of Theatrical Sales, IFC

Heading up theatrical sales for IFC, Nicole Weis has been instrumental in shaping release strategies across the company’s labels, including IFC Films, RLJE Films and Shudder. Since joining the company in 2023, she has helped drive some of IFC’s strongest recent domestic performances, particularly with independent genre titles such as “Late Night With the Devil,” “In a Violent Nature,” and “Good Boy,” through flexible, exhibitor-focused booking approaches.

Prior to IFC, Weis spent four years at A24 as Vice President of Sales and Distribution, contributing to the theatrical success of films including “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Midsommar,” “Minari” and “The Whale.” She began her career at Universal Pictures, where she spent seven years rising through the distribution ranks, experience that continues to inform her pragmatic, data-driven approach to theatrical sales.

Amanda Rufener

Vice President, Account Executive, PaperAirplane Media

Amanda Rufener plays a central role at PaperAirplane Media, working closely with studios, distributors and exhibitors to support in-theatre marketing campaigns across North America and select international markets. In her role, she helps shape and execute theatrical marketing strategies ranging from digital asset creation to coordinated exhibitor programs with national, regional and independent cinema partners. Rufener has also been deeply involved in the development of PaperAirplane’s group sales management platform, The Tower, which has become a key tool for exhibitors and distributors running large-scale group sales initiatives. Prior to joining PaperAirplane, she spent more than a decade at Lionsgate as Vice President of Exhibitor Relations, where she collaborated on in-theatre campaigns for over 190 theatrical releases, including franchises such as “The Hunger Games” and “John Wick,” as well as films like “La La Land” and “Knives Out.”

Odessa Stafford

Senior Manager, Film Distribution, EMEA, IMAX

Odessa Stafford manages film distribution for IMAX across the EMEA region, coordinating releases and partnerships across more than 50 markets and a network that continues to expand. With over 15 years of experience in theatrical distribution, she works closely with major Hollywood studios, regional sub-distributors and exhibitors to deliver IMAX presentations of global blockbusters, local-language films, event cinema and alternative content. Stafford joined IMAX in 2020 and has steadily expanded her remit, following earlier roles at Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox in Ireland, where she built a strong foundation in exhibition relations, booking strategy and campaign execution. Widely respected for her market knowledge and operational fluency, she plays a key role in aligning IMAX’s premium-format strategy with the realities of diverse theatrical markets across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Katrin Mathe-Cotillon

Senior Manager of Theatrical Marketing EMEA, Crunchyroll

Katrin Mathe-Cotillon shapes theatrical marketing strategy for Crunchyroll across EMEA, guiding the regional rollout of anime feature films in more than 80 territories. With over 13 years of experience spanning theatrical and event cinema, she oversees integrated campaigns that combine creative positioning, partnerships and audience-driven activations to expand anime’s footprint on the big screen. Most recently, Mathe-Cotillon led EMEA campaigns for titles including “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” and “Jujutsu Kaisen,” delivering event-led releases that reinforced anime’s growing cultural and commercial impact across the region. Her earlier career includes senior roles at Kinepolis Group and CGR Events. Mathe-Cotillon is also a participant in this year’s UNIC Women’s Cinema Leadership Programme.

The post CJ’s Top Women In Global Distribution – 2025 appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.