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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Studios Bypassed Venice
Like Cannes 2026, the studios stayed away from Venice. In competition, only the Disney-owned Searchlight Pictures pitched up with “Wild Horse Nine”, although one imagines that director Martin McDonagh would’ve insisted on it, given his last two award-winning films, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” also launched in Venice. Is this studio absence the shape of things to come? Or just a blip? Perhaps it was bad timing; films like Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook tale “The Social Reckoning”and David Fincher’s “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” were both expected to come but were reportedly undergoing reshoots in August, meaning a festival berth was impossible. But other films deliberately skipped the Lido, like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Warner Bros. title “Digger,” starring Tom Cruise – a repeat of what the studio did last year with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” Does this mean Hollywood has really gone cold on using the major festivals as a launchpad?

In the past, Venice had a wonderful track record premiering films that went on to win the Best Picture Oscar (“Spotlight,” “Nomadland” and “The Shape of Water,” to name but three), however the Academy Award wins for “One Battle After Another” showed that a festival splash isn’t the only route to success. “The studios are in such a state of stalemate, struggling and redefining themselves by merging,” artistic director Alberto Barbera told Variety ahead of the festival. “Or in any case, experiencing an identity crisis, that auteur films usually destined for festivals just aren’t there.” Certainly, that’s a reasonable explanation. But between the rising costs to take a film to Venice — the eye-watering prices to stage a press junket in the Lido’s Excelsior Hotel will surely put some off — and the increasingly risk-averse studios concerned that a film might tank after poor reviews — must also be a contributing factor. Whatever the case, after this year’s Cannes and Venice, it will be interesting to see what happens in 2027, and whether the festivals will become primarily a platform for world cinema, which they always have been, of course, as Hollywood tries to figure out how best to market its product in the era of TikTok. 

Female Directors Were Back on the Agenda
Ahead of the festival, the main talking point was the fact that the main competition line up had just one female filmmaker; May el-Toukhy. Noting that 50% of the selection committee is female, Barbera told Deadline during the festival that they tried “very hard to find more films by women for the competition.” True or not, the Venice team could breathe a sigh of relief that the jury, headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, was taken with el-Toukhy’s searing post-World War II drama “Woman Unknown.”  Not only did the film win the Golden Lion, making the Danish-Egyptian filmmaker just the eighth woman to claim the prize in the festival’s history, but it also won Best Actress for leading lady Mathilde Arcel. Quite brilliantly, she plays Marie, a nanny whose past threatens to destroy her at a time when women in Copenhagen were being exposed for fraternising with German soldiers.

The female quota in competition was also slightly nudged up by the late addition of the documentary “NAZA,” co-directed by Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, the duo behind the Oscar-winning “No Other Land.” But until more women are given the opportunity to direct, such fallow years will naturally draw attention. Outside of the main competition, there were some excellent female-driven works, including Chinese filmmaker Michelle Zhou’s same-sex relationship drama “Big Little Things,” which played in the Orizzonti (Horizons) sidebar. Laura Poitras, the last woman to win the Golden Lion for “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” was back with “They’re Here,” a haunting 25-minute movie, co-directed with Rachel Lauren Mueller, which depicts Minnesotan residents combatting the work of ICE in the United States. Gyllenhaal herself also presented “Flesh Impact,” an elegant short she made to celebrate Marilyn Monroe’s 100^th birthday, starring Dakota Johnson and Ellyn Burstyn as two very different versions of the screen icon. 

The Robert Pattinson Roadshow Continues
While it was harder than usual to spot the awards contenders in this muted Venice line-up, the battle for Best Actor this awards’ season heated up with John Malkovich claiming the Volpi Cup for his work as a world-weary CIA agent in “Wild Horse Nine.” Malkovich has been nominated for an Oscar twice before, and never won, suggesting a victory for him will be a popular vote. But can he do anything to stop Robert Pattinson? This feels like Pattinson’s year, following his headline appearance in “The Drama,” opposite Zendaya, and his role as the conniving Antinous in “The Odyssey.” With a turn in “Dune Part Three” still to come, in Venice, he took the lead as real-life TV presenter Chris Hansen in Lloyd Oppenheim’s A24-backed “Primetime.” Set all around the world of ‘To Catch a Predator’, the Dateline NBC news segment in the early 2000s that set up stings to ensnare internet paedophiles, it was another slick performance from the British actor, who turned 40 in May and could yet cap it with a first Oscar nomination — and maybe even statue — of his career. Certainly, he was willing to put every effort into promoting “Primetime,” arriving on the Lido over the weekend as he nipped away from the London shoot of Matt Reeves’ “The Batman: Part II.” At the A24 party to celebrate the film, he graciously greeted well-wishers desperate for selfies. This man knows how to work a crowd. 

Documentaries Were Out In Force
This year, the Venice Film Festival announced a new non-fiction strand, Films On Films, based on the wealth of documentaries they’d received as submissions. Featuring documentaries that explored cinema, among those that made the cut, Walter Fasano’s “Nino – A Film About Nino Rota,” a deep dive into the work of “The Godfather” composer; “Joie de vivre,” Luca Guadagnino’s 7hr 25min look at Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci; and Sophie Fiennes’ “The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias,” her third collaboration with philosopher and critic Slavoj Žižek. The Hollywood Reporter even titled one article: “Forget the Red Carpet — Venice’s Real Stars Are in the Documentaries This Year.”

Indeed, it was impossible to argue against the fact that the biggest stars at this year’s Venice were not movie actors, but musicians: Oasis’ Liam and Noel Gallagher hit the red carpet ahead of the world premiere of “Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger,” a moving look at the power of music that followed the famously fractious siblings on their 2025 reunion tour. If that was something of a surprise — never mind the grown men pictured crying on screen, there were plenty of nostalgia-inspired tears in the Sala Grande auditorium — it wasn’t the only documentary to move people. 

The aforementioned “NAZA,” which dug into the Israeli military tactics used in the hunt for Hamas operatives after the 7 October attacks, drew a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation when it played towards the end of the festival. Winning a Special Jury Prize, it felt like the first port of call for a film destined to run the distance in the awards season. Then there was “Musk,” a four-hour odyssey from Alex Gibney that burrowed into the life and largesse of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, tracing his time from Tesla Motors and SpaceX to the Twitter takeover and his controversial time heading up DOGE. A typically forthright work from Gibney (“The Armstrong Lie,” “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks”), it was another example of the healthy state of documentary film right now.

Japanese Cinema Continues its Renaissance
Whisper it quietly, but Japan is going through a rich period of filmmaking. After strong showings in Cannes 2025 as well as 2026, when it was the official Country of Honour, Japanese cinema was also in the spotlight at Venice. Among the selection, cult filmmakers Takeshi Miike (“Audition”) and Shinya Tsukamoto (“Tetsuo: The Iron Man”) were present with two very different movies. In competition, Tsukamoto’s “Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?” — just his second English-language production — told of the real-life Vietnam veteran Allen Nelson, played by Rodney Hicks. Hicks gave a blistering performance of a man who overcomes his PTSD. Miike, meanwhile, delivered his first documentary feature, “Shumei: The Living Legacy of Kabuki,” which explored the Japanese theatrical art form and in particular the 2022 succession ceremony of Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII Hakuen as he is named heir to the Kabuki dynasty. 

Also, in competition, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s gorgeous manga adaptation “Look Back” – marking his second film in three months, following “Sheep in the Box.” Speaking at the festival, Kore-eda said that while Japan is lagging behind Korea when it comes to making an impact in the international market, things are beginning to change. “Compared to somewhere like Korea, there has been almost no support from the government for film for decades, and then I think they’ve realized that because, as of last year, there is now some support for overseas film promotion… but I think that there’s a lot of work to do to make sure that this continues for another 20 years, so that we can see the next generation coming through as well.”

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

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

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

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

Yet even those assets did not make success automatic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet both distributors intend to keep following the filmmaker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was one of the more interesting takeaways from one of the events panel discussions, “Exhibitors & Tech Partners Fueling Box-Office Growth.” Inevitably, much of the conversation turned to premium formats, as cinema industry panels tend to do these days. But the discussion moved beyond the familiar argument that audiences will pay more for experiences they can’t replicate at home.

The more complicated question is what happens once a multiplex contains several of those experiences.

A Portfolio, Not a Single Format
B&B Theatres, for instance, has built a strategy around offering moviegoers a range of formats and concepts rather than relying on one premium auditorium. Depending on the location, that can include the circuit’s proprietary Grand Screen, ScreenX, 4DX, MX4D, D-BOX, screenPLAY! and other concepts ranging from Max Relax seating to Lyric and Marquee Suites. “We love concepts. We love to give customers a lot of options,” said B&B Theatres’ Brock Bagby.

At a 12-screen location, Bagby said, perhaps half the auditoriums might contain some kind of differentiated concept while the remainder retain a more traditional recliner configuration. The idea is not to premiumize every room, but to give audiences a choice in how much they want to spend and how they want to experience a particular film.

“What we continue to find on movies such as ‘Spider-Man’ is people have their format they want, and they’re seeking it out,” Bagby said.

Premiumization is no longer necessarily about steering a moviegoer toward the biggest screen in the building. Increasingly, exhibitors are offering multiple versions of “premium,” each with its own technology, price point and value proposition.

Which creates another problem: moviegoers have to understand what all of them are.

Daniel Loria, editorial director of Boxoffice Pro and moderator of the CinéShow panel, summed up the evolution neatly. “We’ve gone from marketing a movie to marketing a theatre, and now we’re marketing auditoriums,” he said.

That may be one of the less discussed consequences of exhibition’s continuing investment in premium formats. A consumer may already understand what IMAX means. Explaining the difference between a circuit’s proprietary large format, motion seating, 4D, enhanced audio, an upgraded seating concept or some combination of those technologies requires more work.

The Branding Problem
Regal Chief Commercial Officer Adam Rymer acknowledged that branded offerings can be particularly challenging. “We all suffer a little bit from some of our proprietary formats, whether that’s XD or RPX or SuperScreen or whatever it might be, and having the consumers understand what that is,” he said.

For exhibitors, that means the marketing job doesn’t necessarily end when a studio convinces somebody to see a movie. The theatre still has to explain why the customer should see it in one auditorium rather than another, and why the experience merits an additional charge.

Bagby said B&B has increasingly tried to do that directly, including through a social video series in which he explains the technology behind various theatre concepts. “A lot of them don’t get it,” he said of consumers. “They know it’s a big-ass screen, right? But they don’t get anything else.”

Explain the sound system, screen or projection technology, however, and Bagby said audiences — including a new generation of technically curious cinephiles — become considerably more interested.

The challenge becomes even more complicated when studio marketing enters the equation. Rymer said Regal works with distributors to understand which premium formats they intend to support and to obtain marketing assets appropriate for individual locations. Sometimes, however, those efforts collide with format-specific studio campaigns.

Regal has received one-sheets promoting a film in IMAX for theatres where the circuit does not operate an IMAX auditorium. Putting that poster in the lobby can amount to advertising another theatre in the same market. “We’re basically promoting our competition,” Rymer said. “This is something we need to push back on.”

It is a small example of a much larger change in theatrical marketing. As premium formats proliferate, a studio campaign built around one branded experience may help sell the movie while simultaneously steering customers toward whichever exhibitor in a given market happens to offer that format.

Disney is already trying to address a version of this problem with Infinity Vision, the premium-auditorium certification and marketing program it unveiled at CinemaCon earlier this year. Disney’s head of global theatrical distribution, Andrew Cripps, said during an ICTA event in Barcelona in June that there were roughly 75 exhibitor-owned premium large format brands in North America and more than 320 worldwide. “It’s very difficult — impossible — for us to effectively market all of those brands,” Cripps said. Infinity Vision is intended, in part, to give Disney a common marketing label it can use to steer moviegoers toward qualifying premium auditoriums that might otherwise carry dozens of different exhibitor-owned names.

That doesn’t eliminate the branding problem. If anything, the need for a program like Infinity Vision illustrates how complicated the premium marketplace has become. A cinema may have invested substantially in an excellent proprietary large-format auditorium, but unless audiences understand what the name means, the exhibitor still has to persuade them that the experience is worth seeking out… and paying more for.

What the Market Will Bear
There is also no universal formula for deciding which premium experiences make sense.

Cinemark International President Valmir Fernandes said the premium-format conversation in Latin America has evolved much as it has in the United States, with exhibitors offering customers more choice, but price sensitivity makes the economics considerably different.

“The formulas that work for some premium formats here, cost-wise, don’t work necessarily in Latin America,” Fernandes said. That doesn’t mean audiences in the region won’t pay for premium experiences. Fernandes said they will, when the location and product are right. The challenge is being more selective about where to make the investment and how much of an upcharge a particular market can sustain.

Fernandes said one of the more reliable ways Cinemark has found to build that audience is through its loyalty program, steering its most frequent moviegoers toward premium formats first. “They value cinema more than the non-frequent user,” he said, and those members tend to be more receptive to trying a premium auditorium once they’re offered the chance. He described it as a lower-risk way to accelerate the shift from standard to premium screens, market by market, rather than relying on price cuts or broad marketing to do the job.

The same calculation applies within the United States. Bagby said B&B has learned to set lower base ticket prices in smaller markets, allowing it to add a premium-format surcharge without pushing the total ticket price beyond what the local market will bear.

“That’s something we actually had to learn the hard way in a couple markets,” he said.

The lesson is particularly relevant for independent and regional exhibitors looking at premium-format investments. Adding a premium auditorium is only one part of the equation. An operator also has to determine what the local audience will pay for it, how often suitable films will be available and how the format fits with the other auditoriums at the complex.

The Scheduling Problem
Pricing is only part of the calculation. The next challenge is keeping a premium room productive. As operators add more premium rooms, those screens become valuable assets that have to be kept productive. Rymer said Regal spends significant time analyzing when audiences are coming, which customers are likely to respond to a particular format and how different films might be scheduled across those screens. “You now have an asset inside of your theatres which needs to be monetized,” he said.

That becomes especially tricky when multiple films capable of supporting premium pricing arrive at roughly the same time.

It is one reason Lumma partner and board member Rolando Rodriguez argued that the next stage of premiumization may involve not simply adding a premium format, but adding enough differentiated experiences that an operator is not forced to choose between titles.

Rodriguez, whose company offers 4D E-Motion and the lower-cost Magnify 8 format, cited investments ranging from roughly $60,000 to $70,000 for Magnify 8 up through substantially more expensive large-format installations, with motion-seating auditoriums falling somewhere between.

The precise economics of any installation will naturally vary by theatre, market, utilization and deal structure. But the larger point echoed what exhibitors on the panel were saying: premium has become less a single category than a portfolio.

Nicole Woods, RealD’s vice president of cinema and content partnerships for the Americas, framed that same portfolio logic from the opposite direction: for exhibitors with 3D-capable auditoriums already in place, differentiated premium inventory may already be sitting in the building. RealD is encouraging operators to treat 3D as a year-round strategy — spanning animation, concert films, anime, horror and repertory releases — rather than as an occasional offering tied primarily to tentpoles.

Whether every one of those formats ultimately earns a meaningful premium from audiences will depend on the market. The important shift is that exhibitors are increasingly thinking about their auditoriums in much the same way they think about their film slate: as a collection of different products aimed at different customers.

That makes the multiplex of the future considerably more complicated to operate… and arguably more resilient, provided audiences can find their way to the right room.

Right now, exhibitors are largely solving that problem individually rather than collectively. Bagby’s answer has been to go directly to consumers himself, on camera, explaining what a laser projector actually does. Rymer’s answer has been to push back on studios for sending the wrong marketing assets to the wrong theatres. Both are reasonable responses to the same underlying gap: the industry has not yet developed a shared consumer vocabulary for premium formats comparable to the one IMAX built for itself over decades. Infinity Vision is one attempt at a shortcut. It won’t be the last.

For an industry that spent decades largely marketing what was playing, the next competitive battleground is explaining, room by room, why it’s worth paying more to watch it there instead.

The post Cinemas Aren’t Just Marketing Movies Anymore. They’re Marketing Auditoriums appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

At CinéShow 2026 in Dallas, two consecutive sessions examined different systems for reducing friction in theater operations. One focused on the technology and processes that help exhibitors identify lost sales; the other showed how redesigning the concession stand can make purchases faster and easier.

Two Panels, One Diagnosis
During “The Cost of Guessing in Theatre Operations,” speakers examined how exhibitors can use analytics, apps, kiosks and regular testing of the customer journey to identify operational friction that top-line sales figures may not reveal. Brandon Calder of CinemaPlus offered one particularly striking example.

Calder said the conversion funnels his company reviews sometimes show between 65% and 87% of customers who begin an online ticket purchase abandoning it before checkout. He did not present that as an industry-wide rate, but as evidence that exhibitors should investigate where their systems introduce friction — a broken page, payment redirect, difficult seat map, unexpected booking fee or slow mobile transaction.

The operations panel examined how technology, data and routine testing can expose and reduce those obstacles. In the session immediately afterward, Epic Theatres Director of Food and Beverage Dan Herrle applied the same principle to a more physical system: the concession stand.

“When you’re on your websites and you’re clicking through, where is that friction? What is stopping that transaction?” Herrle asked. “It’s the same thing that happens in the concession stand. Where is the friction? Why are people turned off? Why are they walking past your concession stand instead of just browsing and shopping and making it part of the experience?”

The alternative Herrle described looks less like a conventional concession counter and more like a retail marketplace. Customers move through a deliberately designed shopping area, pick up packaged products, serve themselves popcorn and beverages and complete the transaction at either a staffed register or self-checkout kiosk.

“It should be easy,” Herrle said. “We’ve got to remove that friction.”

From Line to Marketplace
In a traditional cinema lobby, the concession line is primarily a mechanism for keeping customers orderly while they wait to reach the counter. In a marketplace layout, the queue becomes part of the sales floor. Operators can place candy, packaged food, collectibles and other merchandise directly along the purchasing path, giving customers time to browse and decide before they ever reach the register.

A conventional counter, by contrast, processes customers largely one at a time: an employee takes an order, retrieves the products, fills drinks, handles payment and repeats. Even a simple transaction can become a bottleneck when several auditoriums are seating at once. Marketplace designs separate product selection from payment, so a guest who already knows what they want can move quickly while someone browsing does not block the next customer.

Herrle presented results from NCG Cinemas showing how consequential that change can be. NCG had started from an especially traditional model, with everything kept behind the concession stand and not even impulse candy racks positioned in front of customers. Working with NCG’s Jason Brown, Herrle said the circuit introduced a relatively simple queueing and grab-and-go system that let customers move through the space, pick up products and let other guests pass while they kept deciding.

According to figures NCG provided to Herrle, revenue increased 51% at one test location and 165% at another, while per-capita spending increased 41% and 36%, respectively. Herrle said the new system generated approximately $7,454 in additional monthly revenue and paid for itself in roughly two months.

Those unusually large increases should be considered in light of NCG’s starting point. A theater that already displays products throughout its concession area is unlikely to replicate the same gains. But the results demonstrate how much revenue can be constrained when nearly every purchasing decision must be made at the counter.

Putting a Buc-ee’s in the Lobby
Herrle’s marketplace vision extends beyond a few candy racks alongside a conventional queue.

“You can put a Buc-ee‘s in your lobby,” he said, invoking the Texas convenience-store chain known for turning roadside retail into something approaching a tourist attraction. That could include reach-in coolers, packaged food, novelty merchandise and even a bar, folded into the same shopping environment rather than operated as a separate destination. The approach lets an exhibitor expand its number of stock-keeping units without forcing every product to compete for limited menu-board space or a single coveted spot beside the register.

Design matters. Herrle pointed to Cinemark’s own queue redesign (credited to David Haywood, the circuit’s senior vice president of food and beverage) as a model: aisles wide enough for one customer to browse while another passes, low fixtures that preserve sightlines across the lobby, and familiar brands positioned at both the start and end of the shopping path to draw people in and reassure them on the way out.

The model also suits the growing assortment of film-related merchandise exhibitors now sell — premium popcorn buckets, drink vessels and collectibles priced well above the ticket itself, which are better suited to a retail display customers can browse and examine than to a line on a menu board. None of this means every lobby needs to become a convenience store. It means the product mix has outgrown the counter it’s traditionally sold from.

Self-Service Changes the Labor Equation
Every Epic Theatres location now uses a marketplace-style, grab-and-go model with self-checkout, Herrle said, with products barcoded and scanned at the end of the shopping path. One employee typically welcomes customers at the entrance; another stays near checkout to help when needed. “Customers know what to do,” Herrle said.

Self-service popcorn and Coca-Cola Freestyle machines extend the same logic. Herrle said customers enjoy filling and topping off their own popcorn, and that Freestyle machines encourage two people who might once have split a large drink to buy separate ones because they want different flavors.

The bigger change is staffing. Herrle said it is possible to run concessions at a 14-screen complex with one person behind the counter, supported by an usher overseeing self-service — a setup he said could replace work that might otherwise require five to seven employees. During a packed “Spider-Man” weekend, he said, Epic’s concession lines never built up; employees spent their time popping corn and restocking while customers moved through on their own.

On the operations panel, Rob Crocker of The Boxoffice Company described apps and kiosks as tools that can automate transactions and compensate for staffing constraints. Think of an app, he said, as “an employee that’s working for you 24/7 and never calls in sick.” Herrle’s marketplace model applies much the same principle to the physical concession stand: product selection, dispensing and payment no longer require an employee at every step. That flexibility matters in a business where traffic can move from quiet to hundreds of customers arriving before an evening show.

Employees are still needed — to welcome guests, restock, assist with kiosks and troubleshoot — but no longer to perform every stage of every transaction. Herrle said leaving customers entirely on their own isn’t the goal, even though he has seen the system keep running when an employee calls out sick. For exhibitors, the more useful measurement may be throughput per labor hour: how many customers a cinema can serve during its busiest periods, and how much they buy while they are there. Pairing self-checkout with cashless payment can add further savings by eliminating cash handling, trips to the bank and armored-car pickups.

Efficiency or Inconvenience?
Whether self-service feels like an improvement depends entirely on execution. A system that moves quickly and gives customers control feels convenient. One that leaves a guest confronting an unresponsive kiosk with nobody nearby to help merely exchanges one kind of friction for another.

The same applies to mobile ordering. Herrle said apps work well once a customer has already downloaded one and connected payment and loyalty information. Requiring someone to download an app, create an account and enter a credit card while sitting in an auditorium introduces precisely the obstacle the technology was supposed to remove.

The lesson isn’t that every human interaction should be automated. It’s that exhibitors need to distinguish between service that adds value and steps that exist mainly because that’s how the theater has always operated.

More Sales, Less Control
The marketplace model also asks operators to reconsider a principle that shaped concession design for decades: inventory control.

A traditional counter keeps most products behind employees, where customers cannot handle them before purchase. That reduces theft, limits waste and makes inventory easier to monitor. Moving products onto the sales floor inevitably creates more opportunity for shrinkage. Herrle said Epic has not experienced significant losses and that most customers scan and pay for everything they select. The circuit continues to inventory certain items but no longer treats the possible loss of an individual cup, bag or piece of candy as the overriding concern.

That is the fundamental tradeoff. Keeping every product behind the counter may reduce shrinkage, but if it slows service, discourages impulse purchases or causes customers to abandon the line, some of that control is being purchased with revenue the theater never records. A successful marketplace still requires disciplined replenishment and enough supervision to prevent self-checkout from becoming the new bottleneck. Control does not disappear; it shifts from restricting access to managing inventory and customer flow across the sales floor.

Converting Demand Already in the Building
Much of the cinema industry’s attention understandably focuses on creating demand: finding the right films, marketing them effectively and convincing audiences to leave home. The CinéShow discussions raised a more immediate question. Once someone has decided to visit a cinema, how much potential spending is lost because the transaction takes too long, the purchasing path is confusing or the theater lacks the capacity to serve everyone during a short peak?

“The number one data point that operators don’t focus enough on,” Calder said, “is not what sales did I close, it’s what sales did I not close, and why.” Herrle’s marketplace argument applies the same idea to the lobby instead of the website: the moviegoer who arrives prepared to buy concessions but meets a line or ordering process that makes the purchase feel like too much trouble. In both cases, the customer’s intent already exists. The operator simply fails to convert it.

Crocker recommended that exhibitors regularly become their own customers — buying tickets, joining loyalty programs, attempting refunds — and Calder added that they should do it on the mobile devices and cellular connections their audiences actually use, rather than testing everything on an office desktop with reliable broadband. The same principle belongs in the lobby: walk the concession queue at peak times, try to read the menu, pick up products and complete a purchase exactly as a customer would.

There is no single model for every theater. Older buildings may lack the lobby space for a retail-style queue, and some locations will keep benefiting from personal service where menus are more complex. Others may land on a hybrid: grab-and-go products and self-service beverages, backed by staffed registers. But the underlying question applies everywhere: how much of the concession operation is organized around making it easy for customers to buy, and how much simply reflects the way cinemas have always sold?

For decades, the concession counter controlled the transaction by placing an employee between the customer and nearly every product. The marketplace reverses that logic, putting customers inside the selling environment and asking employees to support the transaction rather than personally conduct every part of it.

The popcorn machine is not going anywhere. The line in front of it might.

The post The Cinema Concession Stand Is Becoming a Marketplace appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

All three are worth exhibitors’ attention. But it was Reagan’s acceptance speech — which veered almost immediately away from beer, box office and the usual industry thank-yous toward bombed-out cinemas and Ukrainian orphans — that left the room quiet in a way awards luncheons rarely do.

Cinergy and Halstead Take Home Inaugural Honors
Cinergy, the Dallas-based dine-in cinema and entertainment chain, picked up CinéShow’s first-ever marketing award for a five-person team led by Chief Marketing Officer Traci Hanlon and including Sydney Cruz, Jordan Michael, Elizabeth Ramirez and Melanie Yang.

The group has made a specialty of turning relatively small opportunities into outsized attention. A stolen Brad Pitt “F1” standee at Cinergy’s Odessa location became a “Where’s Brad?” social campaign that generated local news coverage, while a “The Devil Wears Prada 2” couture night and Prada bag giveaway became one of the year’s stronger promotional tie-ins.

It’s a reminder that as studios have thinned their own marketing ranks, the creative burden — and the audience-building payoff — has shifted further onto exhibitors themselves.

Halstead, Cinema United’s director of government relations and independent theatre owner engagement, received the inaugural Byron Berkley Leadership Award, named for the retired theatre owner and longtime industry leader who served as president of NATO of Texas, was instrumental in forming Theatre Owners of Mid-America — now Cinema United of Mid-America — was a founding board member of the Independent Cinema Alliance and played an important role in CinéShow’s growth.

The award recognized Halstead’s own contributions to the exhibition community, including helping launch CinéShow, building the regional organization that became Cinema United of Mid-America and, more recently, spearheading Cinema United’s Independent Theatre Owners Coalition.

Accepting the first award ever given in Berkley’s name, Halstead couldn’t resist a bit of humor before turning sincere.

“I’m humbled by this award, but that humbleness will pass,” he told the room.

He then said the honor meant so much “because of the name that’s on it.”

A beat.

“Mine.”

Eventually, Halstead got to the other name on the award, describing Berkley as a mentor and industry leader who taught him that leadership “isn’t just about being the loudest or taking credit. It’s about listening, giving people the opportunity to contribute, to grow, being collaborative, and keeping everyone focused on the goal.”

From a Bombed Threeplex in Irpin to a Rebuilt Shopping Mall
Then Reagan took the stage, and the room’s temperature changed.

The 72-year-old founder of Flix Brewhouse — who stepped down as CEO in 2022 but remains the company’s founder and executive chair, with Chance Robertson now running the 15-location, six-state chain — used most of his remarks not to talk about the dine-in cinema business he built, but about a small three-screen cinema in Ukraine he’d never set foot in before it was destroyed.

The theater, called Perun Cinema after the Slavic god of thunder and lightning, had opened in August 2018 inside the Giraffe Mall in Irpin, a Kyiv suburb of roughly 65,000 people. Russian forces destroyed much of the mall during the Battle of Irpin in the opening weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.

Searching for cinemas damaged in the invasion, Reagan tracked down Perun’s owners, who weren’t interested in rebuilding. They pointed him instead to the mall’s owners, who were.

“How could a middle-aged guy from a cinema chain known for brewing beer come and help?” he recalled asking himself.

Showing the CinéShow audience an image of the devastated property, Reagan didn’t soften the description. “This is what happens when war comes and visits you in your shopping center.”

What followed became, by Reagan’s account, Irpin’s first unsubsidized foreign commercial investment after the invasion — a loan with equity participation, done at deliberately favorable terms. “I didn’t do this to make money,” he said. The rebuilt Giraffe Mall reopened 20 December 2024, anchored by Silpo, Ukraine’s second-largest grocery chain, alongside JYSK, Comfy, Sinsay and EVA, and equipped with a backup generator and basement air raid shelter — requirements that change the operating calculus in ways American exhibitors rarely have to contemplate.

“We used to have guests squeamish that they might catch something bad from COVID if they go to the movies,” Reagan said. “Well, how about catching something coming through the roof that you didn’t expect?”

Reagan says the mall is now essentially fully occupied. A phase two, including a roughly 35,000-square-foot dine-in theater, is sketched out and waiting on a durable peace before construction starts.

It’s worth sitting with how unusual that sequence is for exhibition: a U.S. dine-in cinema operator becoming, almost by accident, the financing partner behind a foreign shopping center’s reconstruction in an active war zone — because a threeplex he initially set out to save couldn’t be saved, and he chose not to walk away. “Movie theaters do a whole lot more than show films,” Reagan said. “They create places where communities gather and lives can change.”

The Flixmobiles
Reagan’s second thread involved a documentary, “No Sleep Till Kyiv,” which Flix screened as part of a string of Ukraine-themed fundraiser nights — eight titles in total across Flix’s Round Rock, San Antonio, Frisco and Oklahoma City locations over three years — raising money for the Texas- and Kyiv-based Liberty Ukraine Foundation.

The film follows volunteers who source and prepare pickup trucks in Tallinn, Estonia, then drive them roughly 30 hours across Europe to Kyiv before handing the keys over to Ukrainian military units.

Reagan prescreened the documentary at home and came away convinced he could make the journey himself.

His wife was less enthusiastic. “You’re flipping crazy,” Reagan recalled her telling him.

He went anyway.

Reagan has since made the run twice — first in July 2025 and again this past May — as part of four total trips to Ukraine since 2023, totaling roughly 50 days on the ground.

The broader Help99 program typically moves 25 to 30 vehicles a month, Reagan said, with convoys divided into smaller groups for the drive across Europe. Reagan has dubbed the vehicles supported through his and Flix’s efforts the “Flixmobiles.” Five have now been donated through a combination of fundraising and direct support.

In his prepared remarks, Reagan said his May convoy included the truck program’s 1,000th donated vehicle, with 26 vehicles delivered during that single run. The organization has since passed 1,100 vehicles.

Each truck, Reagan said, is estimated to save an average of 50 lives. “So it’s a pretty good ROI,” he told the audience. “I promised we wouldn’t talk about ROIs, but to me, 50 lives saved for the price of a truck is a pretty darn good deal.”

One Flixmobile later turned up unexpectedly in Kyiv, where two of Reagan’s Giraffe Mall partners recognized it, stopped the driver and took a photograph with the vehicle.

Ukraine Finds Its Way Behind the Bar
There is another Ukraine connection that didn’t make it into Reagan’s CinéShow remarks.

Flix Brewhouse’s original Round Rock location has employed Ukrainian-born Oleksandra “Sasha” Berezhnyk as its head brewer since July 2023. Reagan says he had nothing to do with hiring her, only for the two to later discover some remarkably overlapping ground.

Berezhnyk has twice brewed a seasonal beer called Kutia, inspired by the traditional Ukrainian holiday dish made with wheatberries, poppy seeds, honey, dried fruit and nuts. She has also collaborated on recipes with Ukrainian breweries VarVar and Brewery 2085.

After Berezhnyk joined Flix, Reagan helped connect her with the Central Texas Ukrainian-American community.

Then came an even stranger coincidence.

On one of Reagan’s trips to Ukraine, he visited an underground brewpub where patrons continued eating and drinking while air raid sirens sounded above street level. He later discovered it was a place Berezhnyk had worked before coming to Texas.

For a company built around movies and beer, it would be difficult to devise a more improbable connection.

How to Help Keep the Story Going
Reagan pointed CinéShow attendees toward two organizations he has worked with personally.

Liberty Ukraine Foundation, an all-volunteer organization based in Texas and Kyiv, is currently mounting a $100,000 campaign for portable heat and power units ahead of winter, with another donor offering to match contributions up to $50,000.

Patriots for Ukraine serves as the U.S. fundraising arm supporting the Estonia-based organization behind the vehicle convoys, allowing U.S. donors to make tax-deductible contributions toward the effort.

Reagan named a third organization, Soborna Ukraine, which supports programs for children who have lost a parent in the war, mostly their fathers. Reagan told the room. “These kids really represent the future of Ukraine, and they deserve to live in peace and freedom.”

The connection back to cinema was never far away. “For us, movie theaters have always been places where communities gather to experience stories that can change lives,” Reagan said.

Four years ago, one destroyed neighborhood cinema led Reagan halfway around the world looking for a way to help. He never rebuilt that theater. Instead, the search led him to help rebuild the shopping center around it, raise money through cinemas thousands of miles away, drive vehicles across Europe into Ukraine and forge relationships he could not possibly have anticipated when he first went searching for a damaged threeplex in Irpin.

He closed with a line he said has stayed with him: “Freedom is not defended by extraordinary people alone. It’s defended when ordinary people decide to do extraordinary things together.”

Then Reagan returned to what Ukraine had taught him personally. “Ukraine has taught me that courage really is contagious. Thank you for helping keep freedom alive. Slava Ukraini!”

The post Cinergy and Cinema United’s Todd Halstead Honored at CinéShow as Flix Brewhouse’s Allan Reagan Puts Ukraine Center Stage appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Audience really is the infrastructure,” she said.

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

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

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

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