SAN SEBASTIAN — Running Sept. 24-25, San Sebastian’s 3rd Creative Investors Conference, organized in collaboration with CAA Media Finance, proved the most intense yet as panel after panel described in detail and nuance the ever more visible contours of a post-COVID film and TV landscape.
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One conclusion, however, is that such contours could change yet again. Notwithstanding that, some takeaways from two full mornings of discussions:
Change Changing So Quickly
In history, the only absolute is change,” British historian Lord Acton wrote. But has change ever come so fast? “We had this huge pandemic, then we had a strike, and now we have AI coming, right very rapidly. I’ve seen a lot of changes in the business over many years but not at this speed,” said David Linde at a Wednesday Conference wrap-up panel, Where Are We Going Next? “The business is cyclical, but this cycle is faster,” agreed Goodfellas’ Vincent Maraval. “It’s how technology is moving so fast. Before things took place over five-to-seven year periods. Now it’s a couple of years.
The New Audience Revolution
Maybe the biggest change is audience.“The specialty market is much more genre-friendly. Things you could not release in a specialty way before, you now can, as audiences are more receptive and have gotten younger,” said Scott Shooman, head of film at AMC Networks, during the opening round table Conference, Taking The Temperature Of The U.S. Market. “Largely due to genre film,” A24, Neon and Magnolia Pictures are experiencing their best weekends of all time in 2024,” he noted. The shift is as enormous as that seen in the ‘70s, chronicled in Peter Biskind’s seminal book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” he argued.
Cinemagoers Evolve in Age and Class in Europe
Cinemagoer demos have pivoted in Europe as well, Charades’ Yohann Conte noted at a second session, Perspectives Across Europe. “In France, after Covid, like the end of the ‘60s, when TV arrived, an elderly audience stayed home and a younger audience is feeling that the place to discover disruptive, provocative or different content is in theaters,” he said. In Italy, even clientele’s social class has transitioned. “Rai Cinema’s Italian film slate used to be bourgeois drama. Now in Italy, you don’t make movies about that class because it doesn’t go to the cinema almost anymore. You make movies where the drama has been moved – to lower classes,” said Lorenzo Gangarosa, ex-Wildside and now at Our Films.
Looking to Europe
No sector in no country has suffered so much as U.S. indie production from U.S. studio and streamers’ pull back in investment in movies and a move to more “commercial” production parameters. In some ways, the name of this panel should be: ‘Is it f*cking sustainable?’” ironized Christine Vachon, outlining the brutal, epic experience Brady Corbet went through to get “The Brutalist” made. Fixed union shooting costs makes it “incredibly challenging to make American independent movies,” said producer Jennifer Fox. “It’s almost impossible to make anything interesting in the U.S. right now because the budgets are so contracted,” said CAA Media Finance’s Roeg Sutherland. The obvious solution for U.S. producers is to look to Europe, he added, casting their films as European movies, tapping the continent’s fulsome tax incentive schemes. One of the ways to do that, said Gangarosa, is to have a European director and a U.S. cast.
The Pre-Sales Model is Fairly Broken
Among the litany of challenges the U.S. indie sector faces is a one change, building for several decades. “The ways in which we have financed independent films for the past gazillion years, which is foreign sales based financing, pre-sales, etc. that system is broken,” said Vachon. At best, there’s a “handful” of territories – Germany, Japan and Latin America – that are “really active” where projects can work, sell and trigger financing, said Jonathan Kier at Upgrade Productions. Notably the U.S., once the make-or-break for bigger films’ finance and marketing, is not on Kier’s list. “The U.S. piece is itself less important than it used to be because there’s not an expectation that a movie will sell.”
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Yet This Is an Age of Opportunity
“Change” was probably the word mentioned most at the Conference. “Opportunity,” however, would have run it a close second. The largest comes from the very factor that bedevils much U.S. indie production: the contraction of investment from U.S. studios. “For people like us that work in the independent space there, we thrive in these moments because studios are not making the movies that they should be making, but they still have to fill slots,” said Sutherland. He cited the case of the $110 million “Better Man,” on which CAA Media Finance arranged the finance, about Robbie Williams who is portrayed as a monkey. “That movie would have never gotten made before independently. Those movies now exist independently because financiers feel they can fill the void that studios have provided us, that we’re going to have an opportunity to really take advantage of the distressed market in the next two years.”
Let’s Hear It for Animation
2023 was the best year in for Goodfellas’ Maraval and ex-Wild Bunch honcho in the last 25 years. Much of that was down to animated feature “The Boy and the Heron” which, thanks to the streamer popularization of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, grossed $47 million in the U.S. when “Spirited Away” made $10 million. “When it comes to animation, for some reason we never lost €1 on animation. But we’re still trying to figure out why,” said Conte at Charades, a doyen of European animation sales agents, handling “Mirai” and “I Lost My Body.”
A Tale of Two Countries: the U.K.
The U.K. is in a mess, dependent on big studio films’ inward investment or for independent productions U.S. distribution and, post-Brexit, shored or easy co-production with the rest of Europe, increasingly focused on just big inward investment films, said Danny Perkins, at Elysian Film Group. “When it comes to locally funded films, the budgets are getting smaller and smaller, and the international films are getting bigger. And then the market just seems to have just disappeared,” he said. On the upside, it has IP and buckets of talent. “I look to focus on relationships,” such as Studio Ghibli and Wonka co-scribe Simon Farnaby, said Perkins. The Farnaby-penned $50 million “The Magic Faraway Tree,” went into production this summer, starring Andrew Garfield.
A Tale of Two Countries: Spain
Meanwhile, in many but not all ways, Spain is motoring, juiced by some of the most muscular tax incentives in Europe, which were the talk of the Conference. “The content we develop has to have a very local focus to attract streamer or broadcaster finance,” said Mariela Besuievsky at Tornasol Films. Yet it can break out spectacularly on global platforms. Non-English stories were “hugely popular,” Netflix said in last week’s data dump. Titles from Spain led the way, Netflix claimed, citing “Society of the Snow” (104 million, “Berlin” (49 million), “The Asunta Case” (31 million) and “Raising Voices” (25 million). “Spanish writers and authors and the filmmaking community is really important,” said David Davoli at Anonymous Content, which has launched a joint venture with Spain’s Morena Films.
The Creatives: An Update
Another way forward for the industry is certainly more forms of collaboration. One, the Creatives, the Fremantle-backed alliance of 10 leading independent production companies, provided at the Conference an explanation of its rationale and progress. “Our job as producers is basically to deal with difficult situations and clearly it’s easier to do it collectively. I think the collective mind of our business is the key to resist what is happening right now,” said Caroline Benjo, at Haut et Court. “Organically, we have started working together on projects,” added Mike Goodrige at Good Chaos, adding he has projects with eight of the 10 companies at The Creatives. One, “Sukwan Island” by Vladimir de Fontanay, is produced by Haut et Court, Versus, and Good Chaos which brought in another member, Maipo Film as a co-producer, since it shot in Norway.
More to come.
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