Read Time:8 Minute, 32 Second
With the Cannes Film Festival officially underway this week, the film industry has been abuzz with excitement. Many industry professionals, filmmakers, and critics are returning for the first time since 2019 – and there has been much anticipation around the movies premiering both in and out of competition. Simultaneously, the Marché du Film is also back in full swing, with thousands of titles being screened – and potentially sold – for hundreds of studios, both big and small.
Yet, despite the prestige and media attention accorded to Cannes, the films that screen there and generate positive buzz often get forgotten in the months between their premiere and theatrical release. Some distributors try to balance this out by releasing the title immediately after its premiere. Others try to generate hype through subsequent screenings at other major festivals like Venice or Toronto. Unfortunately, most distributors wait almost a year before finally releasing titles from the previous edition of the festival. Movies like Paris, 13th District and Anaïs in Love received critical acclaim on their premieres in July of 2021, yet only hit theaters and streaming in the last month. There must be a better solution…
Blurring the Lines of the Distributor
There is a developing alternative for filmmakers who feel reluctant about signing their work off to the whims of a distributor. Filmmakers want to be sure their movie finds the audience it deserves. They want to capitalize on the buzz their work is generating, sooner rather than later. The restrictions of wide theatrical releases, the proliferation of streaming services, and the recent Covid-19 pandemic all contribute to the possibility of film festivals presenting their own form of distribution (as explored in Filmocracy’s latest podcast Should Film Festivals Become Distributors), for the movies they screen – an option that more emerging filmmakers and festivals should be considering.
“Festivals have flirted with taking more active roles in film distribution, but few have cracked the potential to leverage the hype they create. The movies create buzz, they find buyers, and then they wait until they find a slot on the schedule. By that time, the buzz is a memory. The business opportunity to fuse that gap is too obvious to go ignored.”
Between Premiere and Release
The past few years have seen theatrical windows shrink dramatically and disproportionately for independent, arthouse, and foreign films. Major Hollywood studios often pressure theater chains to put their latest big-budget franchise films on as many screens as possible, for as long as possible. As discussed in our “Movie Theater Revival” article, the jury is still out on what kind of real estate smaller films will have in movie theaters – even those that premiere and create a great amount of buzz at Cannes, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. The limited theatrical windows provided to these movies, combined with a release date months later, serves to severely diminish the audience a film could potentially receive.
One solution for distributors is to release films almost immediately after their premieres at Cannes. The opening film of last year’s Festival, Leos Carax’s musical Annette with Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, was released by Amazon barely a month after its premiere at Cannes, banking on its recognizable stars and positive reviews early on. This year, the distributor Neon is counting on a similar strategy with David Cronenberg’s body horror film Crimes of the Future, planning to release it in theaters on June 3 – barely two weeks after its festival premiere. The long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick is also having its world premiere at Cannes just before its wide release on May 27 – undoubtedly attempting to further build hype following several delayed releases over the past two years.
There may be less risk in releasing a film soon after its festival screening, since it can immediately capitalize on the hype produced from Cannes. However, many distributors often see potential in films at Cannes to be awards contenders. Therefore, they try to build on the buzz initially created at Cannes through the next few months for a fall or winter release date. Parasite is by far the best recent example of this: following its winning the Palme d’Or in May of 2019, its distributor Neon created substantial hype over the next few months before building off a limited release in the United States in October. The marketing campaign and distribution strategy paid huge dividends, with Parasite becoming a box office success and the first foreign-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The obvious alternative to theatrical releases are streaming services like Netflix, HBO, and Hulu, which have become major distributors in their own right. Though Netflix and other streamers have been at an impasse with premiering their films at Cannes, they have been an ever-growing fixture at other major film festivals like Sundance, Venice, and Toronto. For example, Jane Campion’s western drama The Power of the Dog had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival before being released on Netflix. One of the highlights of this year’s edition of Sundance was the comedy-drama Cha Cha Real Smooth, which is slated to be released in June by Apple TV+. However, streamers can often carry over the same problems as theatrical distributors (delayed releases following festival premieres), and – especially in the case of giants like Netflix – have such a glut of original content that marketing for smaller titles is practically nonexistent.
Covid and the Film Festival Response
Just over two years ago, the global Covid-19 pandemic transformed the film industry and the festival circuit. Suddenly, film festivals that were scheduled as in-person events were either canceled altogether (in the case of the 2020 edition of Cannes) or forced to move to virtual screenings. This move, surprisingly, was more successful than anyone could have guessed, especially for big festivals like AFI Fest and Sundance. The estimated audience for the 2021 virtual Sundance Film Festival was close to 600,000 people – over 2.5 times the number of in-person attendees from the previous year. In retrospect, the increase makes sense, since the online format allows people from across the world to see festival selections without having to carve out time and money to get tickets and travel to Utah for an in-person screening.
Even today, when festivals like Cannes are fully returning to in-person events, other film festivals have turned to hybrid formats: showing films in-person at the Festival’s primary location, and putting some or all of the selections online for global audiences to buy virtual tickets to and stream. The arguments for hybrid film festivals have been generally focused on how they increase access for audiences outside of the local Festival headquarters, but a case can be made for independent filmmakers who want their work to be received by a bigger audience im general, especially if they are not going to be part of the less than 1% being acquired by one of the top streamers. By putting their films online, festivals effectively act as distributors in their own right – a potential boon for directors and producers who either are hesitant about dealing with major distributors or simply don’t want to wait. Both the Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals this year were hybrid events, and will likely continue to be so in the years to come.
Smaller film festivals in particular gain from a hybrid approach, where they can get a dramatically larger audience and awareness through promoting online screenings alongside in-person events. Websites like Filmocracy have paved the way for hosting a range of different film festivals each year for premium subscribers to attend virtually and watch titles that they’d never be able to see otherwise. These smaller, virtual festivals also tend to focus on specific genres or filmmakers that have been overlooked in the larger film industry; one example is the recent Cinema Femme Short Film Festival, which showcases shorts made by women or non-binary filmmakers. The Festival’s increasing stature would not be possible without its virtual platform on Filmocracy that provides much broader access than small, in-person events could.
Unfortunately, for Cannes, the option of going hybrid is simply not feasible. They pride themselves on celebrating the art of cinema, in a theater. As mentioned above, rather than do virtual screenings, the 2020 edition of Cannes was simply shut down and postponed to the following year (even though the Marché du Film was much more willing to adapt). As their testy ongoing relationship with Netflix shows, Cannes is not interested in streaming and still holds that its in-competition titles be released theatrically. This doesn’t lessen the importance of Cannes as a film festival and event for recognizing and celebrating independent, arthouse, and foreign cinema. But it does mean that emerging independent filmmakers need more options for distributing their work for audiences to readily discover. As a substitute or supplement to theatrical release and streaming, hybrid film festivals are one of the most viable and rewarding possibilities out there today.
This article is part two of a three-part series on this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Last week, we discussed the history and significance of the Cannes Film Festival as a celebration of world cinema and its major role as a media event. Next week, we will focus on the Marché du Film: its importance in the global film industry, its different sections, and its place in the new film market landscape.
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
Average Rating