The discussion, “Building Resilient Media Companies in the Age of Disruption,” brought together Cakarel, MUBI’s Founder & CEO, Kevin Mayer, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Candle Media, and John Sloss, Founder & CEO of Cinetic Media. Representing “quite a breadth of experience in their respective sectors,” as moderator Andreas Wiseman, Deadline’s Executive Editor for Film & International, put it, the executives considered what scale can deliver and what it cannot.

Scaling to Support the Films
When he created MUBI because he “just loved movies” almost 20 years ago, Cakarel was very much a beginner. “As an industry participant, I didn’t know a single person in the industry.” He learned quickly, however, “that this is a very conservative business that moves slowly. People are very traditional in their approach to all aspects of filmmaking, and they want to continue the way they’ve been doing things.”

Even so, Cakarel kept holding on to his vision for MUBI. “It took 15 years of putting brick upon brick into that vision,” he recounted. MUBI’s growth from 40 to 400 employees in the past four years was not about ambition for its own sake, he explained. “Scaling is necessary to become able to do the things that you want to do.”

Like working with “one of my heroes,” he said. “If you want to green light and fully finance an Edward Berger film, and release and distribute it globally, you need both capital and capabilities. Our goal was to get to that place as soon as possible,” Cakarel stated. “But not sooner. The road to growth and success is never a straight line.”

Adopting a Beginner’s Mind
For Candle Media’s Kevin Mayer, adapting to audiences starts with a “very fresh, beginner’s mind.” After leaving The Walt Disney Company to run TikTok, “I saw entertainment from an entirely different angle.”

At Disney, taking “fewer creative swings” and putting more behind each one created a better product for the audience, he observed. “Coalescing around brands” reduced the business risk as well.

TikTok, by comparison, relies on “a great recommendation engine that arranges tiny, atomized pieces of video in a certain way that is appealing.” Hugely appealing, he added, and “a shame in many ways” for long-form storytelling, as younger audiences devote more of their time and attention to short videos.

In building Candle Media, with its spectrum of storytelling from long-form to social media entertainment, Mayer and team need “to respect the traditions of storytelling.” Paying attention to those consumption dynamics “without losing your principles is super important,” he elaborated. In ever-changing times, “agility trumps scale, size; it trumps all of that. You really do need to be open to new things, react to them in the right way and embrace them.”

Looping back to the principles, he is “not saying, ‘Movies are going away.’ Nothing like that. But in the way they are made, and the way you market and deliver them to people, you must be open-minded and extremely agile. Take a beginner’s mind approach. That’s how you win it.”

Consolidation and the Theatrical Future
The debate over scale took on more immediate theatrical stakes with Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which subsequently closed on October 6. Speaking before the deal’s completion, Mayer argued that consolidation could make the industry stronger than a future with “a larger number of very weak companies that are unable to define much of the future.”

“That is the future you’ve got to measure this consolidation against; not against some fanciful future where everything is as good as it was five to 10 years ago.”

“It’s basically physics at this point,” Mayer believes. In his view, one healthier buyer, able to finance and distribute films, could be preferable to two weaker ones. Necessary cost savings, however, have dire consequences. “$6 billion in synergies is a euphemism for a lot of layoffs,” he said.

Mayer expected David Ellison to keep his public promises about making movies and releasing them theatrically. He anticipated a five-year safety net for theatrical output, with the two studios operating somewhat independently. Beyond that period, he acknowledged, the outlook was much harder to predict.

Assuming there will be four or five global platforms for media consumption going forward, Sloss sees consolidation as a necessity too. He found it “interesting,” however, “that the industry seemed to be on the side of Netflix winning over Paramount in this transaction.” He did not understand that rationale because “with Netflix, there was very little opportunity for theatrical to survive from Warner Bros.” As for Ellison’s approach, “I guess we’ll see what’s coming,” Sloss said.

The Influence of Cultural Blockbusters
For Sloss, expanding the pool of film investors offers another route to supporting creative work. Cinetic Media’s newest initiative, Vertical Leap, aims to attract a “sector of potential investors that is incredibly attractive, wildly underserved” to invest and take ownership of film and media projects that they are passionate about.

“Athletes are very media curious people. There has never been an organized way to bring them into our space,” Sloss elaborated upon his plan. “And they will bring with them the ability to augment the projects they believe in with their public media following.”

Access to finance is one part of the picture. Discussing the health of independent filmmaking, Sloss also urged the industry to look beyond the size of theatrical returns. “There’s so much talk about scale and size of theatrical, but just not enough talk about cultural influence,” he said. “There is something you could call a Cultural Blockbuster that maybe doesn’t perform at the level of these tentpoles, but that influences in a disproportionate way the people who affect culture.”

Such films can have an extended shelf life, he argued, even if that influence is difficult to quantify. With a “creator centric company,” Cinetic is well positioned, he declared. Technology has democratized capital and delivery, but “the one thing that remains scarce is imagination, human imagination. Our purpose is to empower that scarce segment of the delivery chain.”

Cakarel recalled his own younger days when his mother would take him to the “beautiful” art house cinema in his hometown, now closed. He noted how that experience was being replaced by blockbuster IP in multiplexes, and with an addiction to immediate, short-form content today. Nonetheless, “I am observing that some younger audiences are quite discerning. They are not easily fooled, and they seek high-quality entertainment in a world where they can reach anything.”

And they value experiences, he added. “I think the experience of watching original, bold storytelling is here to stay, and it’s going to grow. As an industry we need to embrace it, continue to produce and finance these films that tell bold stories. And we need to try to find their audiences because they exist.”

The post Financing Bold Films Takes More Than Money appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

The discussion at The Dolder Grand, billed as “The Theatrical Box Office Resurgence!” within the Summit’s “Movies, Box Office and Awards” program, brought together “Backrooms” director Kane Parsons, Mattel Studios President and Chief Content Officer Robbie Brenner, Sony Pictures Classics Co-President Michael Barker, and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences CEO Bill Kramer. Kramer delivered a keynote immediately before joining the panel, moderated by Andreas Wiseman, Deadline’s executive editor for film and international.

From Online Fandom to Cinema
For Kramer, “Backrooms” and “Obsession” offered an encouraging view of where the industry is heading.

“Young people want to go back to movie theatres,” he stated. “Fandoms shifted: Theatrical can inform a fandom; YouTube can inform a theatrical fandom. It is all connected in a way that I don’t think we thought was possible. For me, that was the big takeaway of the summer. It gives me great hope for the film industry.”

The architect and builder of “Backrooms,” Parsons was the panel’s theatrical newcomer and summer box-office wunderkind. While his name had been omnipresent throughout the Summit, he readily deferred to his fellow panelists on what the summer’s success meant for the industry as a whole. “Whatever insight I can give is going to be within the pool of what I do,” he said. Flooded with the day-to-day work of getting the film out into the world, he had had little time to consider its broader theatrical implications. “Backrooms” benefited from an existing online following, albeit a decentralized one, but Parsons also saw an appetite for something unfamiliar.

“I think people are just looking for that newness, for a detachment from more cyclical cultural icons that keep eating themselves,” he explained.

Brenner, who had counted on an established fan base for “Masters of the Universe,” was struck by the scale of the response to “Backrooms” and “Obsession.” “The way in which they took over was unbelievable to watch.” Their success also reinforced her belief in the social appeal of cinema: audiences want an experience they can share.

“We want to hear other people breathe and laugh with us, and we want to emote, and be together,” she said.

Looking at Mattel’s biggest brand and biggest smash so far, Brenner recalled that “Barbie” “was truly the last movie that I thought we were going to make first.” Audiences already had such a strong relationship with the character that finding a successful approach was daunting. Greta Gerwig brought a distinctive point of view and something to say about the world. Brenner drew a direct line from “Barbie” to “Backrooms” in that respect.

“It’s about finding these fresh, authentic voices that feel unexpected.”

Barker Sees an Inflection Point
Sony Pictures Classics’ Barker connected the present with the industry’s past, finding echoes of earlier generational shifts. “If you look at the history of the motion picture business, there are these major inflection moments of transition,” he said. He recalled seeing “Easy Rider” as a teenager in 1969, in the middle of the Vietnam War.

“The film spoke volumes to young people in that moment, and they responded in huge numbers, affecting the movies that were going to be made afterwards.”

With “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” Barker felt the industry might be experiencing another such moment. He also pointed to the Barbenheimer summer of 2023 as a turning point for studio films.

“Not many of us in the business had ever imagined ‘Barbie’ was going to have such depth, and that a film like ‘Oppenheimer’ would be a box office smash,” he said. “That’s mad, that’s magic in its own way.”

Established properties remained part of the summer’s theatrical lineup. Barker cited “Toy Story 5,” “Spider-Man” and “Masters of the Universe” as examples of films built around familiar names. Alongside them, however, he saw younger viewers developing broader and more sophisticated tastes.

Back in Sony Pictures Classics’ wheelhouse, Barker found an unexpected ally in the pandemic. Watching new and different offerings at home helped turn viewers in their teens, 20s and 30s into cinephiles with increasingly sophisticated tastes, he argued. A decade or more ago, intelligent art house films had been drawing predominantly older audiences.

Kramer agreed that home viewing had broadened the range of films people were willing to explore. “So many started watching movies at home in ways that they had not done before,” he said. “Blurring lines between documentaries, animated feature films, shorts, non-English language films, classic cinema, people watched films in a much more holistic way.”

That curiosity was also bringing audiences into the Academy Museum’s theatres. Kramer said the museum’s screenings were selling out and half of the ticket buyers for repertory films were under 40. “People love seeing movies in movie theatres, we just needed to attract new fans.”

The Academy Follows Its Audience
That same search for film lovers is taking the Academy onto YouTube. Beginning with the 101st Oscars in 2029, the ceremony will be available live and free on the platform worldwide. Kramer’s keynote placed the move within the Academy’s international expansion; the subsequent panel turned to what the partnership would mean for audiences.

“We are an organization that celebrates theatrical movie making. At the same time, The Oscars, as a television show demands that we reach a very large audience,” he said. More people already watch the ceremony outside the US than within it, Kramer noted. YouTube offers a way to reach more of them, while giving the Academy greater control over its engagement with film lovers and fans.

Already in discussions with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and his team, Kramer expects a different-looking Oscars, with viewers able to engage with the show in more interactive ways. The agreement also extends beyond the ceremony to the Academy’s educational initiatives, filmmaker conversations and other year-round programming.

For Kramer, the move follows where audiences are going. Asked whether the decision felt like a risk, he replied: “It almost feels risky to not do it, because we’re looking at the future…”

Knowing the Audience
However, an online following does not automatically become a theatrical audience. Parsons said that before the release of “Backrooms,” there had been no clear sense of how its existing familiarity would translate into attendance. The first trailer gave people a reason to investigate, whether to ask “Okay, how did Hollywood mess this up,” or to see if the film had done justice to the core idea.

Parsons involved himself in the marketing as much as he could, right down to mixing the sound for the trailers. The aim was to corral the campaign into something that would make sense to the people who were actually going to be his audience.

Parsons said “marketing is just as much part of the piece as anything else.”

Barker asked how often Parsons had considered the audience while making the film. Some successful filmmakers Barker works with “do not really think about the audience” during that process, he noted, while others consider them at every turn.

Parsons said he thought about his audience quite a bit. “But not in an obsessive, paranoid way, like constructing a group of people, who are going to shout at me for every micro decision that I make in my own mind.” Adapting his web series came with expectations about continuity, but he also understood himself as part of that audience.

“I care a lot about all the things that I was trying to achieve,” he confessed. “Ideally, my core audience is a collection of people who have similar tastes and interests. So, it’s mostly just kind of catering to myself.”

Protecting the Theatrical Experience
The summer’s renewed momentum did not remove the industry’s responsibilities. Barker identified two urgent concerns: the opportunities and risks of AI, and the need to protect theatrical cinema.

“One is AI and the responsibility of that. As you know, there are great things about AI, and there are things we must protect ourselves against.”

His second concern went beyond immediate ticket sales to the lasting place of films in the culture.

“We have to protect … the theatrical world,” he implored. “If the theatrical goes away, film culture is gone, to be honest with you. Even those theatrical films that don’t do huge box office, they tend to become evergreens. Theatrical is what gives them the distinction to become evergreens, even if the box office isn’t there. And I think that’s the moment we’re in.”

A moment of truth for the theatrical experience.

The post At Zurich Summit, Online Fandom Finds Its Way to the Big Screen appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

TIFF reported close to 7,000 Market delegates by the festival’s end, compared with 5,000 industry attendees in 2025. The launch sought to turn the festival’s cinephile appeal and international reach into more structured business opportunities.

For Lucky Number’s Ola Byszuk, Toronto proved more useful with one film than it had with five. The international film sales company’s sole selection this year was Sabu’s “Arrested Memory” in Midnight Madness, against five titles, including three world premieres, last year.

“Much more useful than last year,” was her assessment. “But I clearly felt that the organizers of the TIFF market brought many buyers to Toronto.”

Michelle Arocha of Ascot Elite, a Zurich based film production and marketing company, also welcomed the expanded contacts. “It was great to meet some European companies that don’t usually attend TIFF,” she said, explaining that she felt the organizers had succeeded in attracting a significantly larger buyer contingent to Toronto

An Appetite, But Not For Everything
More opportunities to meet did not necessarily mean faster buying decisions. “The biggest trend I noticed was buyer hesitation, which has been consistent all year,” said Geremia Biagiotti, the Sales, Marketing & Acquisitions Manager at Intramovies, a production and distribution firm. “Just like at Berlin and Cannes, distributors aren’t rushing in with wild offers to fight over every official selection. Most buyers are playing it safe: waiting to read reviews, watching what other distributors do, and waiting for organic buzz to build before pulling the trigger.”

Sasha Manning, an independent film sales consultant attending for The Launch Company, described a similar balance. “There’s selective appetite. Buyers are relatively active but disciplined. More positivity than expected, though risk is still being carefully compartmentalized,” she said. “The challenge? It’s still a screening-heavy market, so pre-selling remains tough. There’s a lot of ‘wait and see’.”

Genre fare offered some openings. “We’ve seen horror taking off recently, but there were also some rom-com titles being discussed for pre-buys,” Arocha said. “Overall, buyers seem open to different genres as long as the project is a strong film.”

Byszuk found considerable buyer interest in Midnight Madness, but a tougher environment for arthouse films elsewhere in the program. With fewer buyers than at Cannes or Berlin, she said, “Those who are there are mostly focusing on more commercial films so it’s difficult to get them interested in numerous more arthouse titles in the very rich festival program.”

Norwegian arthouse distributor Frank L. Stavik of Fidalgo offered a less downbeat perspective. “The mood seems upbeat from an acquisitions point of view,” he said, citing younger audiences returning to cinemas and an encouraging supply of projects. “As for willingness to take risks, that’s what we do all the time; in the bigger picture it depends on what part of the industry one looks at; the more commercial side maybe not so much, while the more ‘arthousy’ side maybe more so.” At the time of his response, however, Fidalgo had not found any standout discoveries at this year’s market..

What Counts As Business?
Biagiotti cautioned against measuring a market only through immediate deals. “For sales agents, business is an ongoing process now. Markets aren’t really about making impulse deals on the spot anymore; they’re where we wrap up existing negotiations or launch new titles after weeks of prep work,” he said. “Between digital screeners, remote B2B tools, and year-round pitching, we don’t strictly need physical markets to trade content the way we used to.

“What we do need are events that facilitate human connection,” he added. “TIFF’s market proved its value by bringing people together – helping us get to know new players in an industry that still has a high turnover, compare notes on distributor strategies, and get a realistic pulse on different regional markets.”

For Arocha, that longer view also mattered. “I think the main value was networking and maintaining strong relationships,” she said. “It was a good opportunity to reconnect with existing partners and meet new potential contacts, which can hopefully lead to concrete business opportunities further down the line.”

Manning saw Toronto as complementary to established markets, allowing companies to reconnect after summer and introduce projects before the American Film Market. Its proximity to the festival was central: “It sits you next to programmers, critics, talent and press in a way that creates genuine conversation around the work, not just the marketplace.”

She also saw opportunities on the filmmaker and financing side. “Compared to other markets where you’re stacking meetings like speed dating, at TIFF you can breathe, and that creates space for other kinds of discussions,” she said.

A More Focused Meeting Place
The physical setup attracted more qualified praise. “The convention center itself is very nice, although there seemed to be quite a lot of free space and less movement than perhaps expected,” Arocha observed. “By the end of the day, people shift their focus to TIFF and the films.”

Biagiotti wanted a smaller footprint. “Moving away from the crowded Hyatt lobby was the right call, but the Metro Toronto Convention Center felt way too big and spread out for what was actually needed,” he said. “The top priority should definitely be scaling down the market venue to create a more focused, cohesive space.”

Stavik likewise favored a more compact location closer to the cinemas. Biagiotti also called for improvements to accreditation, ticketing and the app, while Arocha wanted more international buyers and networking opportunities.

Manning’s prescription was to accommodate the business activity already happening elsewhere. “Formalize the hotel infrastructure rather than fight it,” she said. “Deal-making still centers around a few specific hotels,” she stated. The TIFF Market would be stronger if it worked with that existing ecosystem rather than trying to replace it.”

TIFF’s spot on the festival calendar produced less agreement. Biagiotti valued TIFF’s position after the summer festivals: “Coming right after summer, it’s perfect for catching up on titles that premiered at Venice, Telluride, and Locarno, while setting the stage for San Sebastian and Busan.”

Byszuk, however, proposed a shift. “I’d move the dates to October to reinforce its position as the main fall market, which would allow for more projects to be launched there.”

The disagreements suggest TIFF’s next step is not simply expansion, but a setup that works with buyers’ and sellers’ schedules, screening priorities and existing relationships. Whether this year’s promising contacts become business will help determine how firmly the new market earns its place on their calendars.

Byszuk’s suggestion of an October move also points to a larger question about what TIFF wants its Market to become. Greater distance from the September festival rush could give sales agencies more room to launch new projects and strengthen Toronto’s claim to being the key autumn meeting point. But it would also push the event closer to November’s AFM, intensifying competition for buyers, sales agents and travel budgets. The challenge for TIFF, therefore, may be less about simply attracting more attendees than establishing a sufficiently distinct commercial function within an already crowded international market calendar.

The post Did TIFF’s First Market Deliver for Buyers? The Answer Is Yes, With Caveats appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

n Basner and CAA Media Finance and International Film Group co-head Roeg Sutherland argued that the traditional role of the international sales agent is expanding well beyond selling territories. Pre-sales remain crucial to independent film financing but are increasingly unable to carry the burden on their own.

“In a basic sense, we are sort of the connective tissue between someone’s creative endeavor and how the marketplace will respond to that creative endeavor,” Basner said, describing a sales company’s role as increasingly collaborative.

Rather than simply taking a finished package to buyers, he argued that sales companies need to engage filmmakers much earlier, offering market intelligence that can help a project become financeable without dictating its creative direction.

“Even in a challenging environment as we’re in right now, international pre-sales are the backbone of the infrastructure of independent film financing at any real scale,” Basner said.

But the mechanics of those pre-sales have changed dramatically.

“There was a time where you would just go into Toronto or Cannes or Berlin or AFM and you could go and pre-sell 80% of a movie,” Sutherland said. “That’s not true anymore. You’re lucky if you can go and pre-sell four or five major territories, and then you still have to figure out how to make the puzzle work.”

That shift has pushed companies such as FilmNation beyond the conventional sales-agent model. Sutherland pointed to FilmNation’s ability to put its own equity into projects when the international market alone cannot provide sufficient financing.

When a company truly believes in a movie, he suggested, the question can no longer simply be whether enough territories will pre-buy it.

“You have to do that because the movies and voices that he likes, sometimes it’s easy to go and pre-sell, sometimes it isn’t,” Sutherland said of Basner. “When it isn’t, when he believes in these small movies, he just commits to going and fully financing the movie.”

Forget the Formula, But Know the Market
Perhaps paradoxically, both executives argued that the more market information becomes available, the more important instinct becomes.

FilmNation, Basner said, gathers constant feedback from distributors around the world. But that data is not supposed to become a formula for determining which projects deserve to exist.

“We get all the information from the market every day,” he said. “We’re speaking with distributors in most countries every single day. We want to understand that, and then we want to throw it away.” Instead, the two questions FilmNation asks are: “Do we love it creatively?” and “Does it feel unlike anything that’s out there right now?”

“If those two things are yes, follow your instincts, and let’s go make it happen,” Basner said.

Sutherland similarly warned against becoming too comfortable with whichever assumptions currently dominate the business. “Instead of having to reset yourself every six months, you have to reset yourself every two weeks,” he said. “You have to stay ahead of information.”

His own reminder of how badly apparently obvious commercial logic can fail is the largely forgotten film “Surfer, Dude,” the 2008 Matthew McConaughey comedy whose investors, he recalled, effectively lost its entire USD $3 million budget.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” in 2010. Sutherland said the project received 76 passes before eventually becoming a major commercial and awards success.

The lesson, he argued, is not that market intelligence is useless, but that seemingly rational assumptions are never guarantees of future success.

Packaging for Theaters, Not Algorithms
Basner reserved some of his sharpest criticism for what he sees as an overly conservative approach to packaging among independent distributors. “It’s a very traditional approach to packaging,” he said. “This actor means this much money and this director, and it’s got to have X, Y and Z for it to make sense.”

That calculus, he argued, increasingly reflects buyers’ efforts to reduce risk and ensure downstream value from pay television and streaming.

“The only problem is that we’re building movies for the streaming companies,” Basner said. “It may work great on streamers, but it’s not the same thing as building a theatrical proposition.”

For FilmNation, the better question is how to make a film compelling enough that audiences feel they need to see it theatrically. He cited Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite,” which unfolds with four actors largely in a single apartment over one dinner party. Both streamers and theatrical buyers, Basner said, initially questioned its limited physical scope.

FilmNation’s response was that “this is Olivia Wilde’s version of this movie, and that’s what’s going to make it special.”

“That movie worked because Olivia Wilde made a great movie,” Basner said. “Therefore it breaks the packaging rules.”

Sutherland added that packages are also being assembled further upstream. CAA may become involved with a book, article or idea before a screenplay even exists, provided some creative element  – such as a writer or producer – is already attached.

Studios’ retreat from traditional development has, in his view, created “an unbelievable opportunity to the independent community.” At the same time, CAA is reluctant to expose projects to the market before their downside risk has been accounted for.

“It used to be that you would be comfortable going out with a script and actors,” Sutherland said. “Now you kind of want to go out with a script, actors, and know that you have the financing in place before you actually introduce it to the marketplace.”

Filmmakers Now Have to Think Like Marketers
Another major change concerns the filmmaker’s own responsibilities. Sutherland argued that the sheer volume of audiovisual content has created a discoverability problem that cannot simply be handed to a distributor once production is complete.

“You as a creator have a responsibility to almost pre-market everything that you’re doing,” he said.

That does not mean every filmmaker needs to become a conventional marketer, but they do need a clearer understanding of who a project is for and how it might reach that audience – whether through theaters, social platforms or YouTube.

“That’s a layer of responsibility that did not exist,” Sutherland said. “Filmmakers five years ago did not really have [it], but that’s your responsibility.”

Both executives remained notably bullish about theatrical exhibition. They welcomed exhibitors experimenting with distribution, arguing that additional routes into cinemas could help smaller independent releases secure and retain screens.

Basner also pushed back on the industry’s constant language of crisis, whether around artificial intelligence, shrinking windows or changes in audience behavior.

“I think it’s going to be another great year,” he said when asked for a prediction for 2027. “Filmmakers are finding a way not just to get their films made but to tell their stories from their own unique perspective the way that they want to – and audiences are responding.”

For all the structural upheaval described during the session, the pair’s ultimate playbook was surprisingly straightforward: know the numbers, prepare for the worst-case financing scenario, embrace new tools and distribution channels – and then be willing to disregard conventional wisdom when a project is simply too good to ignore.

The post The Global Film Sales Playbook Is Changing as Pre-Sales Carry Less of the Load appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

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.”

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

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.

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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.

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