“I’d like it to be sold out by Sunday night, but not by Friday night,” the Epic Theatres executive explained during Celluloid Junkie’s CJ Cinema Summit, held October 14. Sell out too early and disappointed fans may take their business elsewhere. Order too much, however, and movie theatre operators can find themselves stuck with expensive inventory once opening-weekend enthusiasm fades.

That balancing act is becoming increasingly important as movie merchandise evolves from a concessions novelty into a significant retail opportunity. Joining Herrle were Tim Sparrow, Director of Retail at Cineworld, and representatives of three major merchandise suppliers: Julia Howard of Snap Creative, Rod Mason of Zinc Group, and Jeff Waaland of Golden Link. Their discussion revealed a business in which growing consumer demand is matched by increasingly complicated decisions about product development, manufacturing, inventory and marketing.

From Cup Toppers to $100 Collectibles
The transformation has been years in the making. “We invented the cup topper back in the early 2000s,” recalled Golden Link’s Jeff Waaland, who remembers exhibitors doubting whether consumers would buy a novelty item costing cinemas just over $1.

A turning point came in 2019, when AMC offered an R2-D2 collectible developed by Zinc for nearly $50. More recently, Golden Link introduced an $80 Galactus item and a Godzilla collectible retailing for $100. “Fans are willing to pay if it’s right,” Waaland said. For Zinc’s Rod Mason, the appeal goes beyond novelty. His team tries to create “something that’s a tangible memory” for moviegoers by drawing on iconic characters or objects from a film.

Higher prices have also changed how audiences use the products. Many collectors have little interest in putting popcorn inside their elaborate purchases.

“We’d offer them a bag of popcorn on the side, so they can take it home clean,” Herrle said. Sparrow agreed that premium merchandise increasingly attracts collectors rather than casual concession customers.

The merchandise can even outperform its associated film. Zinc’s Rod Mason cited strong collectible sales for titles with disappointing box office results. The decisive factor, he argued, is often an established fan base: “It’s got to be beloved IP.”

For exhibitors, coveted merchandise can also influence which cinema a fan chooses, drawing visits that might otherwise go to competitors.

The Problem With Predicting the Next Viral Hit
Predicting those purchases, however, is considerably easier in hindsight.

Snap Creative’s Julia Howard said development typically begins “about nine to 12 months out,” with products arriving at cinemas three to six weeks before a film opens. Designing, securing studio approvals, manufacturing and shipping all take time.

Consequently, by the time a collectible goes viral on social media, opening-weekend production quantities may already be locked in.

“It’s a crapshoot from the beginning,” Herrle acknowledged. Had Epic known how popular the merchandise for “The Devil Wears Prada” would become, he said, the circuit would have ordered twenty times more.

Other bets leave exhibitors discounting unsold inventory. Cineworld’s Sparrow faces the added challenge of predicting tastes across different cinemas and countries. “It’s incredibly unpredictable,” he said. Scalpers seeking items for resale can further disrupt availability.

Neither exhibitor wants to manufacture scarcity. Sparrow said, “I don’t think we are trying to drive scarcity, but you have to get the balance right.”

Nor can suppliers simply turn out more stock overnight. “The only way to do it is a pre-order that you deliver to the consumer,” Waaland explained. “You’re taking orders that you’re promising to deliver four months later.” Fans who missed the initial sale may still get their item, but there’s no immediate fix for opening-weekend shortages.

Epic generally waits until a film’s second or third weekend to offer merchandise through its Shopify store, prioritizing opening-weekend cinema visits. Cineworld has recently moved away from online sales to emphasize the in-cinema experience.

Independents Have a Place in the Business
Smaller exhibitors, meanwhile, need not sit on the sidelines. Waaland said independents, considered collectively, are Golden Link’s fourth-largest customer category. Some high-end products, including Godzilla, ship in cartons containing just two units, allowing small operators to test demand without a major investment.

Howard said Snap Creative accepts orders as small as one carton and encouraged operators to start with films they believe will resonate with their audiences.

Crucially, all three suppliers urged exhibitors to maintain relationships with each of them, rather than relying on just one manufacturer. “They should really have a relationship with all three of us,” Howard said, so cinemas do not miss opportunities tied to different licensing arrangements. Waaland likewise advised “talking to all three vendors, making sure you know what’s coming up well in advance,” while Mason recommended joining suppliers’ mailing lists, identifying account managers and planning months ahead.

That access can help independents raise per-capita spending and give fans another reason to choose their local cinema.

A New Kind of Cinema Retail Business
Successful merchandising, the panel agreed, requires much more than selecting an appealing popcorn bucket.

Operators must know their audiences, forecast demand, coordinate with suppliers and prominently display their products. As Herrle reminded cinema managers, “People cannot shop from your back room.”

Waaland said analytics are increasingly replacing what “used to be a gut feel” when exhibitors and suppliers decide which merchandise to order and in what quantities. He also emphasized closer cooperation among studios, suppliers, film-booking departments and food-and-beverage teams.

What began as a way to sell more popcorn is becoming a business combining retail, movie marketing and fan engagement. Well-chosen collectibles can generate revenue while giving audiences another reason to visit a theatre.

The unanswered question is still which products fans will want, long before anyone knows whether the associated movie will be a hit.

Watch the complete CJ Cinema Summit #119, “From Popcorn Buckets to Premium Collectibles: How Movie Merchandise Became Big Business for Cinemas,” on demand for the full discussion, additional product examples and practical advice from the panelists.

The post Cinema Collectibles Are Big Business, but Knowing What to Order Requires Strategy appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

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.

Five years removed from some of the darkest days the movie theatre business has experienced, the industry conversation has changed considerably. According to Cinema United’s newly released Fall 2026 Cinema Investment Report, North American exhibitors have spent USD $2.7 billion on capital improvements over the past two years, including USD $1.2 billion during the most recent year. The eight largest exhibitors accounted for USD $1.8 billion of the two-year total and USD $840 million during the past year. 

The obvious takeaway is that exhibitors are investing in their theatres. They clearly are. The more interesting question is what kind of exhibition industry all that money is building.

More Than a Fresh Coat of Paint
Cinema United’s report also serves as a counterpoint to a stubborn narrative that movie theatres are somehow standing still while the rest of the entertainment business moves on around them. As a trade organization representing exhibitors, making the case for continued investment in moviegoing is part of its job.

The report is not a comprehensive audit of every cinema in North America, nor does it pretend to be. Cinema United itself says the document showcases “just a few” examples of the investments being made across the industry. Conducting a detailed survey of the physical condition and capital spending of every member company would likely require an entirely different research exercise… and presumably quite a bit more time and money. 

There are certainly theatres across North America where it can appear the last meaningful capital improvement arrived sometime around 2002. Maybe even earlier. But that doesn’t negate the billions being spent elsewhere. If anything, it helps explain why continued investment matters.

More importantly, the money isn’t simply going toward replacing worn carpet and applying a fresh coat of paint.

Cinema United estimates that installing a new digital projector in a single auditorium carries a median cost of USD $88,000. A new sound system runs about USD $58,000. Installing 1,000 seats across multiple auditoriums can cost roughly USD $1.1 million, while adding a kitchen costs around USD $450,000 and a full-service lobby bar about USD $575,000. Reopening and completely transforming a closed cinema can reach USD $8 million. Building a new cinema entertainment center from the ground up? About USD $45 million. (Just ask the folks at B&B Theatres.)

Suddenly USD $2.7 billion starts looking less like an abstract corporate expenditure and more like a very large collection of projectors, seats, screens, kitchens, bars, auditoriums and construction costs.

Follow the Money
Perhaps more revealing than the amount being spent is where exhibitors are choosing to spend it.

During the first half of 2026 alone, Cinemark added 21 premium large format auditoriums — seven XD, 12 ScreenX and two IMAX — along with 112 D-BOX motion-seat auditoriums. The circuit says 72% of its auditoriums now feature recliners, while 60% of its locations serve alcohol.

Arizona-based Harkins Theatres says it invested more than USD $30 million during the past year, adding 13 CINÉXL premium auditoriums and four CINÉBAR locations while continuing a major remodel of its Norterra location in Phoenix, including Arizona’s first Lumma 4D E-Motion auditorium. 

Epic Theatres renovated its Deltona, Florida flagship with recliners, expanded food and beverage, a bar, arcade and a Lumma 4D E-Motion system. Megaplex’s Downtown Daybreak location combines premium auditoriums with bowling, lane-side dining, games and private event space. 

There are smaller-scale examples as well. CineLux renovated its Tennant Station location in Northern California with a reimagined lobby, digital marquee and luxury recliners across 11 auditoriums. Classic Cinemas, which remarkably seems to always be upgrading at least one of their locations, recently completed what it describes as a decade-long capital expenditure initiative across its circuit. 

All this spending suggests that cinema operators increasingly see their competitive advantage not simply as having a movie on a big screen, but, as that hackneyed mandate goes, in providing an experience that is demonstrably different from watching that same movie at home. Yes, that means premium formats. Better projection and sound. Recliners. Improved food and beverage. Motion seating. Social spaces. In some cases, bowling, arcades and other entertainment options that turn the cinema into something closer to a broader entertainment destination.

In case anyone was wondering, this is the kind of investment studios love, and apparently they’d like more of it.

When Disney’s Head of Global Theatrical Distribution Andrew Cripps appeared at a June industry discussion marking the renovation of Regal’s Sherman Oaks Galleria in Los Angeles, the panel generally agreed that cinemas remain under-screened when it comes to premium large format auditoriums.

Cripps explained the distributor’s interest rather plainly: when a studio spends hundreds of millions of dollars producing and marketing a film, it wants those first moviegoers seeing it in the best possible environment. Those customers then become some of the film’s earliest advocates. “You want as many premium screens as possible,” he said.

The contrast with just a few years ago is hard to miss. In 2021, studios were still experimenting with shortened windows, day-and-date releases and, in some cases, sending films directly to streaming.

Now one of Hollywood’s largest distributors is saying there aren’t enough premium screens. For movie theatre owners, that is a considerably better problem to have.

About That USD $1.2 Billion
There is an interesting wrinkle in Cinema United’s numbers. If exhibitors spent USD $2.7 billion over two years and USD $1.2 billion during the most recent year, simple arithmetic puts spending during the preceding year at roughly USD $1.5 billion.

In other words, annual capital spending declined. Now, that sounds more ominous than it necessarily is. After all, capital spending is inherently… well, lumpy, for lack of a better word.

A circuit that spends several million dollars converting a theatre to laser projection, recliners and premium auditoriums in one year doesn’t need to spend those same millions upgrading the same location again twelve months later. The equipment is installed. The seats are there. The work has been done. Ideally, capital can move on to the next location or be used for other purposes.

Some of the equipment being displaced can move on as well. Projectors, servers and other cinema hardware don’t necessarily reach the end of their useful lives simply because one exhibitor has upgraded. Refurbished equipment can find a second life with smaller operators, meaning one cinema’s capital investment can sometimes put better technology within reach of another at a lower cost than buying new.

So while the decline from approximately USD $1.5 billion to USD $1.2 billion is worth noting, it would be difficult to draw much of a conclusion from that movement without knowing the timing of individual renovation programs. Annual expenditures can decline even while the number of upgraded cinemas continues to grow.

Nor is all of the spending coming from the largest chains. Roughly USD $900 million of the USD $2.7 billion spent over the two-year period came from exhibitors outside the eight largest circuits. During the latest year, that figure was approximately USD $360 million.

In an industry whose investment story can sometimes sound as though it begins and ends with AMC, Cinemark and Regal, that’s kind of refreshing to hear.

There is another way to appreciate the scale of the spending. Cinema United puts the 2025 North American box office at approximately USD $9 billion. On that basis, USD $1.2 billion in annual capital investment is equivalent to roughly 13% of an entire year’s theatrical box office.

That is not the same thing as saying exhibitors are spending 13% of their revenue, much less their profits. Theatre operators keep only a portion of ticket grosses and, naturally, generate substantial revenue from concessions, advertising and other sources. But the comparison is useful if you’re looking for a measure of scale.

Put another way, the industry has gone from a business that emerged from the pandemic wondering how much of its physical infrastructure it could afford to preserve to spending an amount equivalent to more than one-tenth of annual box office on improving that infrastructure.

The Job Isn’t Finished
None of this means every moviegoer walking into a cinema this weekend will encounter laser projection, a premium auditorium, a freshly renovated lobby and a bartender waiting to make them a martini (I take mine stirred, not shaken, no matter what James Bond says).

They won’t. The experience remains highly uneven, sometimes even within the same chain or market. Cinema United’s featured locations are illustrative examples, not a statistically representative sample of the average North American cinema.

The report also stretches beyond North America for some of its case studies, spotlighting investments by Major Cineplex in Thailand and HOYTS in Australia, even though the headline USD $2.7 billion capital expenditure figure applies specifically to North American exhibitors. 

But that distinction doesn’t obscure what the report does demonstrate.

And those expenditures are beginning to reveal what exhibitors believe the future of moviegoing looks like: fewer generic auditoriums, more premium experiences; better projection and sound; more comfortable seating; broader food and beverage offerings; and, increasingly, venues designed to offer customers more than the movie itself.

The more interesting question is how quickly that investment can move through enough of the cinema estate that upgraded moviegoing stops feeling like something customers have to seek out and starts becoming what they simply expect when they go to the movies.

The post Cinema Owners Have Invested $2.7 Billion in Theatres. What Is That Money Buying? 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

California Attorney General Rob Bonta had a peculiar assignment on Monday: announce the settlement in his antitrust lawsuit that effectively clears the way for Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery while making clear that he still does not think the two companies should merge.

“This settlement is not a vote of support for this merger,” Bonta said at a September 21 press conference. His written statement was similarly careful, calling the agreement “the best course of action” rather than suddenly discovering virtues in combining two of Hollywood’s five remaining major film distributors.

Paramount CEO David Ellison sounded significantly less conflicted. In a memo to employees after both the states and Writers Guild of America settled their antitrust lawsuits, Ellison said Paramount now has “complete clearance for this merger” and expects the transaction to close in approximately two weeks.

Between those two statements lies one of the most consequential Hollywood antitrust settlements in decades.

This was a merger much of Hollywood did not want, involving a company whose last several decades have already been defined by difficult combinations, restructurings and breakups. Cinema operators did not get the merger stopped. More than 5,000 actors, directors, writers and other industry workers signing a public letter did not get the merger stopped. The Writers Guild did not get the merger stopped. Ultimately, a lawsuit brought by 12 state attorneys general did not get the merger stopped either.

What those efforts did produce was a set of protections intended to cushion some of the consequences — for a while.

And before getting to what movie theatres received, it is worth stating what Bonta did not get; There is no structural remedy that Paramount must undertake before it can acquire Warner Bros.

No studio is being spun off. No cable network must be sold. Warner Bros. Pictures and Paramount Pictures are not required to remain separately controlled competitors. The merger closes intact.

That is rather noteworthy for a case in which Bonta repeatedly argued that a structural competitive problem required structural remedies rather than promises about future corporate behavior. Instead, the structural remedies wound up becoming the punishment if Paramount violates the behavioral remedies Bonta once said were insufficient.

But we’ll come back to that.

This Time, They Put It in Writing
For theatrical exhibition, the settlement is considerably more substantial than the headline promise that Paramount-Warner will release “30 movies a year” suggests.

For cinema operators, the headline terms of the proposed five-year consent decree are unusually specific:

• 30 theatrical releases annually for years one and two, rising to 32 for years three through five
• At least 20 wide releases annually, rising to 21, with “wide” defined as 2,000 screens
• A 45-day exclusive theatrical window and 90-day SVOD holdback
• At least 20% of the slate must have production/acquisition budgets of at least $50 million and reach 3,000 screens
• Marketing support comparable to similar releases
• Three years of protection around existing film-rental terms
• Five years of continued access to the Paramount and Warner Bros. catalogues
• USD $30 million per-film consequences for output shortfalls, with Miramax divestiture after an uncured breach

Just as important are the anti-gaming provisions behind those headlines. A film released on fewer than 600 U.S. screens does not count unless it expands to 1,000 within 30 days. Re-releases, commemorative editions and repackaged versions of previously released intellectual property do not count at all. At least four films each year must qualify as Independent Films, though the definition is considerably looser than the label implies: any film based on an original screenplay qualifies, even if developed and financed entirely in-house. The word “independent” is doing some unusually heavy lifting. Separately, the decree creates a USD $5 million-a-year fund to acquire independent films. And at least half of the annual slate must be produced or jointly produced by the combined company — a qualification that becomes important later. The decree also calls its USD $50 million/3,000-screen titles “tentpoles,” a fairly modest budget threshold for what the industry usually means by that word.

For anyone who has spent the past decade listening to theatrical promises made during studio mergers, the important difference is obvious.

This time, somebody put them in writing. In an industry where assurances have become a depreciating asset, that is incredibly important, even if it does not make the underlying consolidation any easier to trust.

That matters given that movie theatre owners have been here before.

When Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, exhibitors repeatedly warned that combining two major suppliers of theatrical films would eventually mean fewer films and greater negotiating leverage for the surviving studio. The state attorneys general later cited what happened next: Disney and Fox averaged roughly 28 wide releases every single year before combining; from 2022 through 2025, the merged company released 54… in total.

The lesson exhibition carried forward from Disney-Fox was not simply that studios sometimes make optimistic promises before mergers. It was that those promises have limited value once the merger is complete and the negotiating leverage has changed.

Cinema United’s position earlier this summer was therefore remarkably specific. The trade association wanted a long-term commitment to theatrical output backed by meaningful exclusivity and marketing; protection against higher film-rental terms; safeguards ensuring theatres of all sizes could obtain films without programming restrictions that undermined local decision-making; and continued reasonable access to both studios’ libraries.

The state settlement meaningfully addresses three of those four demands, with perhaps the most consequential being film rental.

For the first three commitment years, Paramount-Warner must maintain rental terms consistent with the pre-merger “best practices” of Paramount and Warner Bros. for each exhibitor. The language includes honoring existing rental rates and terms and establishing a benchmark based on the terms each studio offered that same exhibitor before closing.

That is not a universal film rental freeze, and it does not mean a single-screen independent suddenly receives AMC’s economics under a most-favored-nation deal. What it does is anchor each exhibitor to its own pre-merger relationship with Paramount and Warner Bros. and attempts to prevent the combined company from immediately using its increased leverage to impose materially worse terms. The precise application of the decree’s “higher of the rental rate schedule” language will bear watching, even if the verbiage is convoluted.

For theatre owners who remember the rental changes that followed Disney-Fox, that is not a minor provision.

The decree also requires both Paramount and Warner Bros. film catalogues to remain available to exhibitors throughout the commitment period on terms broadly comparable to those offered during 2025, with limited exceptions around major reissues.

Cinema United President and CEO Michael O’Leary was broadly positive about the settlement, saying the agreement “accomplishes many of exhibition’s objectives.” He pointed to increased film production, theatrical exclusivity and wide distribution, protection against cost increases and continued access to both studios’ catalogues, while acknowledging that “no settlement can eliminate all risk from a merger of this size.”

Notably absent from O’Leary’s statement was Cinema United’s earlier demand for broad film access and programming autonomy for theatres of every size. The decree contains no comparably explicit prohibition on minimum-play requirements, clean-screen demands or other booking conditions that can be particularly burdensome for smaller operators. That omission matters beyond this deal: had such limits been written into a federal consent decree, they could have established a benchmark other distributors would have had a much harder time ignoring.

Thirty Movies Is Not Thirty Paramount-Warner Productions
There is another important distinction buried beneath the whole “30 movies” clause.

The decree requires Paramount-Warner to release 30 films in the first two years and 32 thereafter. It only requires half of them to be produced or jointly produced by the combined company.

Thirty movies sounds somewhat different once you read the verbs.

In the first two years, only 15 must be produced or co-produced by Paramount-Warner. In the final three years, the number is 16. A Legendary-style arrangement in which an outside company originates or substantially finances a project while Warner participates as co-producer and distributor can satisfy that requirement. The remaining films can be acquired for distribution.

That may be perfectly satisfactory to a theatre owner whose immediate concern is having attractive movies to put on screens. A ticket buyer does not particularly care which corporate balance sheet financed the negative cost.

But it matters enormously when analyzing what the merger does to Hollywood’s industrial structure. The decree guarantees a pipeline of movies. It does not guarantee the survival of the two independent studio pipelines that existed before the merger. Again, see Disney-Fox for how that turned out.

There is no requirement that Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures maintain separate greenlight processes, acquisition departments, distribution strategies or corporate priorities. One independent buyer of scripts, talent and projects still disappears when the companies combine. That means ParaBros or Warnermount or whatever the name of the new company is, may be trying to make more movies than they do today, with what will likely be fewer human resources.

The first two years’ 30-film floor is also less expansive than it might sound. Paramount itself said earlier this year that it planned 15 theatrical releases in 2026 and that Warner Bros. also had 15 on its calendar. In other words, the initial 30-film commitment largely makes the combined companies’ already-planned level of output enforceable rather than requiring an immediate increase above it. The meaningful additions are the definitions, release thresholds, windows, marketing requirements and enforcement provisions surrounding that number.

The Exhibitors Who “Flipped”
The settlement is already producing a convenient narrative in which theatrical exhibitors — particularly AMC, Regal and Cinemark — helped collapse the states’ case by switching sides.

There is some truth buried inside what is surely convenient shorthand. Bonta’s lawsuit alleged that the merger would harm theatres. When the three largest U.S. circuits individually reached accommodations with Paramount and publicly supported a negotiated path toward closing, the states were left arguing that exhibition needed protection while several of its largest companies were saying they had found a way forward.

That unquestionably complicated the litigation. But saying exhibitors simply “flipped” mistakes a negotiation for an ideological conversion. AMC, Regal and Cinemark appear to have reached the practical conclusion that Paramount would probably acquire Warner Bros. one way or another. They used the period in which Ellison badly needed industry support to negotiate commitments before the merger closed.

While AMC has the size and financial might to protect AMC, a regional circuit with 30 screens — much less an independent operator with one or two — cannot negotiate with Paramount from remotely the same position.

That imbalance is precisely why Cinema United’s August position mattered. The trade group did not endorse the merger. It said that if Bonta and Paramount were going to negotiate a resolution, any settlement needed protections covering output, windows, film rental, booking practices and catalogue access across the exhibition market.

As we previously detailed, Cinema United changed tactics. It did not suddenly announce that eliminating one of five major theatrical distributors was a wonderful idea. That nuance has been increasingly lost as the merger reaches the finish line.

The decisions by AMC, Regal and Cinemark unquestionably made Bonta’s case harder. It is difficult to argue that theatres need protection from a transaction their three largest operators have decided they can live with. But blaming exhibitors for the settlement confuses a loss of leverage with the decision to settle. Exhibitors did not settle the lawsuit. Twelve attorneys general did.

The Structural Remedy That Became a Penalty
Which brings us back to the biggest contradiction in the agreement.

Bonta spent weeks distinguishing between behavioral promises and structural remedies. On September 18, just days before settlement, Reuters reported that he continued to regard structural remedies as the most effective way to protect competition.

Yet, the final decree requires no structural change before Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Instead, the agreement contains two possible future divestitures.

If Paramount-Warner fails to hit the annual theatrical-release requirement, it gets six months to cure the shortfall. If it still fails, the combined company must divest its ownership interest in Miramax. Separately, Paramount owes USD $30 million for every missing film, whether or not the shortfall is subsequently cured. None of that money goes to exhibitors: 50% goes to union health and retirement trusts, 40% to the Motion Picture & Television Fund and 10% to the National Association of Attorneys General Fund. In other words, it is a deterrent, not a make-whole remedy for the theatre that did not get the movie.

Should Paramount eventually fail to release enough movies, the answer to excessive studio concentration is therefore, apparently, to sell Miramax. 

Sure, Miramax possesses a valuable library and recognizable intellectual property, of which Paramount owns a 49% stake. What it does not possess is anything resembling the scale, distribution infrastructure or current production output of Warner Bros. Pictures or Paramount Pictures. Selling it after a violation would be a structural action. But it would not recreate the major independent theatrical distributor eliminated by the merger.

The cable remedy, however, is more substantial. Paramount and Warner Bros. must negotiate basic-cable carriage separately for five years and cannot use their combined leverage to tie the two portfolios together. (Why the same kind of remedy wasn’t applied to theatrical distribution is a mystery.) An uncured violation can ultimately force the divestiture of BET — a network Paramount has shopped in recent years — along with VH1, Comedy Central and several other cable networks.

That would be a meaningful structural penalty. But again, it is a penalty for violating a behavioral remedy, not a structural remedy imposed on the merger itself.

Wall Street’s reaction was more mixed than a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Warner Bros. Discovery shares rose more than 10% Monday as closing risk receded, while Paramount fell nearly 3%. With many settlement terms already circulating before the announcement, the moves are better read as a repricing of certainty and deal costs than as an antitrust verdict on Bonta’s concessions.

Five Years Is Not A Long Time When It Comes to a Warner Bros. Merger
There is another fundamental mismatch in the settlement; The merger is permanent. Most of the protections are not.

The commitment period covers five full calendar years following closing. Worse, after only two full commitment years, Paramount-Warner may ask the court to modify the decree if it can demonstrate that the restrictions impair its ability to operate successfully or compete effectively and that the requested modification is not substantially likely to lessen competition. Paramount bears the burden of proving that case, so this is not an automatic two-year escape clause. It is nevertheless an explicit opportunity to seek relief from a settlement being sold publicly as a five-year commitment.

Five years is on the very low end of where this agreement should land. The Justice Department’s consent decree permitting Comcast to acquire NBCUniversal imposed behavioral conditions for seven years. The original Live Nation-Ticketmaster decree ran for ten. When DOJ later alleged that Live Nation had repeatedly violated that settlement, the decree was strengthened and extended another five-and-a-half years.

Indeed, a Justice Department antitrust official once described the central problem with temporary behavioral merger remedies using Comcast-NBCUniversal: when the decree expired, the merger remained. The department contrasted those temporary restrictions with structural relief intended to solve the competitive problem permanently.

That observation could have been made about the Paramount-Warner agreement. For an industry that greenlights films years before audiences see them, five years is not especially long. Ten would have covered something closer to multiple complete development and release cycles and provided a far longer test of how the combined company behaved once integration was complete.

Warner Bros., meanwhile, has spent much of the past quarter-century demonstrating that its mergers deserve a warranty longer than five years.

AOL and Time Warner combined in 2001, only for major pieces of that empire eventually to be spun back out. AT&T acquired Time Warner in 2018 and then, less than four years later, separated WarnerMedia and combined it with Discovery to create Warner Bros. Discovery in April 2022. Now Warner Bros. Discovery is preparing to disappear into Paramount Skydance.

The corporate structure keeps changing. The WB water tower, on the other hand, seems to have remarkable job security.

Enforceable — But By Whom?
Then there is the word “enforceable,” which has appeared repeatedly in descriptions of the settlement… and appropriately so.

This is not simply a David Ellison promise from a CinemaCon stage. The commitments sit inside a federal consent decree overseen by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Paramount must appoint an internal compliance monitor. An independent monitoring trustee, jointly selected by Paramount and a committee of the states, receives access to relevant personnel and records and reports on compliance. The CEO and general counsel must certify compliance annually.

That is somewhat meaningful since an antitrust decree does not enforce itself.

If Paramount disputes compliance, any of the plaintiff states can bring an enforcement proceeding in federal court. The decree requires notice and a meet-and-confer process before enforcement litigation, with non-binding mediation also available.

More importantly for exhibitors, theatre owners are not third-party beneficiaries of the decree. The agreement expressly says no outside person or entity may claim rights as a beneficiary under it. Meaning, if an exhibitor believes Paramount-Warner has violated the rental, catalogue, window or output commitments, the theatre cannot simply march into federal court and enforce the decree itself. It needs the states to care. And it needs them to continue caring three, four or five years from now, potentially under different attorneys general, after the merger has ceased to dominate Hollywood headlines.

The decree also includes a force-majeure provision covering events including wars, pandemics, strikes, labor disruptions, supply-chain failures and economic recessions. Paramount is excused only to the extent such an event actually prevents performance, and the states may ask the court to review an invocation of the provision. It is not the blank check some critics have suggested.

Bonta Ran Out of Room — Not Reasons
None of this means the states had an easy path to victory if they continued litigating. The exhibitors were only one part of a much broader squeeze. By September, Bonta’s room to maneuver had narrowed considerably.

California political figures had pressed for a resolution. Paramount was threatening a possible (if impractical) relocation of corporate operations. Federal regulators had already cleared the transaction. The Justice Department had even intervened in the recent bond dispute on Paramount’s side of the procedural question. And every additional delay increased Paramount’s financial exposure under the merger agreement.

At Monday’s press conference, Bonta did not pretend he had suddenly become enthusiastic about the transaction. He defended the settlement as the strongest practical result available while continuing to say he would have preferred the companies remain separate. That is worth taking seriously. Litigation has risk, and antitrust plaintiffs do not get to substitute certainty about their own theory for certainty about what a judge will ultimately decide. But that does not make the difference between Bonta’s original position and his final settlement disappear.

The states sued over what they characterized as a structural reduction in competition. They settled for temporary behavioral protections backed by monitoring, monetary consequences and structural penalties for future violations.

That is a legitimate settlement strategy. It is not the structural solution Bonta spent much of the summer saying was necessary. The decree is not insubstantial outside exhibition: it also requires at least USD $1.5 billion in incremental U.S. production spending over five years, with higher domestic-production thresholds if new federal and state tax credits are enacted, and creates a News Editorial Independence Board for CNN and CBS News. Both are meaningful commitments. Neither changes the merger’s structure. Bonta has said he intends to pursue tax-credit legislation that could trigger the higher production requirements.

What Exhibition Actually Won
Calling the settlement a victory for theatrical exhibition would probably be an overstatement, even if being considered of primary importance during a USD $110 billion merger was a nice change of pace.

Exhibitors did not ask for the number of major film distributors to fall from five to four. Cinema United spent months arguing that such concentration would increase studio bargaining power, threaten output and make smaller operators particularly vulnerable. The merger still does all of the structural things they worried about.

But in a deal they were increasingly unlikely to prevent, exhibitors did accomplish something they failed to secure during Disney-Fox: important protections were written into an enforceable court order rather than left in an executive’s talking points. The particulars are familiar by now, but the achievement is straightforward: output, release width, theatrical windows, catalogue access, film-rental terms and consequences for noncompliance are no longer merely negotiating promises; they are written into a federal consent decree. 

That will be important beyond Paramount-Warner.

The next time Hollywood decides that three major film distributors would be more efficient than four — because apparently this remains an evergreen corporate brainstorming exercise — Cinema United and individual exhibitors will not begin negotiations with a blank sheet of paper.

They can point to Paramount-Warner.

If one merged studio could accept minimum output, defined release widths, theatrical windows, catalogue access and film-rental protections, the next studio combination will have to explain why those provisions suddenly became impossible. That may prove to be one of the more durable results of this entire fight.

The battle also demonstrated something else. Disney-Fox moved through the regulatory process without anything approaching the sustained resistance Paramount-Warner encountered. This transaction required months of litigation, a federal no-close order, negotiations with major exhibitors, concessions to organized labor, thousands of entertainment-industry opponents, intervention by political leaders, settlement with 12 states and a 32-page federal consent decree.

Paramount got its merger. Nobody contemplating the next one can reasonably conclude that it was effortless. Whether that makes another combination less likely is impossible to know. It certainly increases the regulatory, financial and reputational cost that anyone considering such a move will have to price into the transaction.

For Hollywood stakeholders, the list of unambiguous winners is fairly short. David Zaslav stands to be handsomely rewarded for completing the transaction, while David Ellison gets the company he fought so hard to buy and avoids the enormous financial consequences of a failed deal. For theatrical exhibitors, the achievement is more defensive than triumphant: they did not make the merger desirable; they forced some of the risks exposed by Disney-Fox to be acknowledged and turned corporate promises into enforceable obligations.

Now comes the harder part. The protections have to survive integration, economic pressure, management changes, future litigation over their meaning and the simple passage of time. They exist for five commitment years, with Paramount permitted to seek modification after two.

Paramount and Warner Bros. will still be one company in year six. Most of the obligations intended to make that combination tolerable will not. That is when the industry will find out what this settlement was really worth

The post The Paramount-Warner Merger Is Permanent. The Guardrails for Movie Theatres Are Not appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.