Copyright Variety
“Las Vegas is a cinematic city, but it’s not cinema-friendly” is one of the more diplomatic reviews of the American Film Market’s — thankfully brief — stint in Sin City last year. As if recalling a bad dream, sales agents and buyers practically shudder when describing having to navigate a maze of slot machines and roulette tables to get to their offices in the Palms Casino Resort. That is assuming they could get in an elevator — lengthy queues meant meetings were often late or cancelled. Screenings, too, were wracked by technical problems. And in the middle of all that — an election. “It’s such a tightly choreographed ballet that we do with these markets,” says Scott Shooman, head of IFC Entertainment Group. “So the second you have an elevator line that’s longer than a 10 to 15 minute walk, people go bananas.” But AFM — still a vital stop on the industry circuit — is now making a triumphant return to Los Angeles, with a new location at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Century City. Global attendees appear to have an extra spring in their step, extending stays to meet with agencies and studios. Essentially, visitors are looking forward to doing all the important things they used to when they came previously (and couldn’t in Vegas). Ultimately, the location misstep isn’t the only issue the AFM has faced in recent years. The hurdle also reflects the fragile health of the independent film industry since the pandemic and double Hollywood strikes. It also reflects the increasing challenge of not just putting together packages, but ensuring they’re the right package for an extremely cautious market. And like any good Hollywood script, there’s optimism. Shooman is hopeful that this year’s AFM will bring out some solid packages on the back of a “very healthy Toronto Film Festival,” where he says he saw a “shift from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market, with a lot of robust MGs [minimum guarantees] paid for a lot of different movies.” He also notes that sales agents have a “slightly more competitive marketplace” with “new domestic distributors in the mix.” The issue for the indie film business now lies in the need for a “constant recalibration” on “how stuff is made and how much it’s made for,” he says. Case in point: IFC Films just scored big with Ben Leonberg’s directorial debut, “Good Boy,” a micro-budgeted horror pic — told from the perspective of a dog — that’s now grossed over $6 million at the box office. Shooman says it’s on track to become one of the year’s most profitable films. “‘Good Boy’ is a story that you root for and it’s how you want the independent business to come together,” Shooman says. “This film is going make us a lot of money, and it’s going to make him [Leonberg] a lot of money, and it’s got the right margins. And when you think about it, ‘Good Boy’ is going to make a lot more money than many movies out there.” The film wags a tail towards a trend echoed across the board of sales execs — that more risk-averse buyers want packages that have a clearly defined audience. “We feel that distributors want movies where they know exactly who it’s for so they know what to do with it,” says Janina Vilsmaier, senior VP of sales and distribution at Protagonist Pictures, which is launching sales on the Chloe Grace Moretz rom-com “Love Language” in LA. “Is it a genre? Is it an awards movie? Whatever it is, it needs to know what it is so distributors know exactly who to target. And for anything that sits in between, it’s much more difficult.” A recent film many critics suggested did sit in between, unsure of its precise crowd, was A24’s Dwayne Johnson-led wrestling drama “The Smashing Machine,” which came with a hefty $50 million price tag and buzzy noise out of Venice yet flopped at the box office. Then there’s romantic fantasy “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” — a major $45 million package launched out of Berlin in 2024 thanks to its two leads, Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell — which also crashed out after poor reviews cited its uneven tone. “It’s a tough time out there,” says Nick Shumaker, head of AC Independent, the sales and finance arm of Anonymous Content. “It’s the age-old question of marrying budget with market value. I think that the conversation is going to be more prominent now than it’s ever been.” With budgets often weighed down by top-tier talent wages, the woes faced by “Machine” and “Journey” point to another growing realization — that star wattage simply isn’t enough. “People won’t go and see and see a movie anymore because of the star in the movie,” says Mister Smith CEO David Garrett, who suggests that the value in a Hollywood A-lister is now their ability to create awareness, to hit the chat-show circuit and land magazine covers. “But they only have pulling power if the movie is good. If it’s no good, it still won’t work.” Even with an emphasis on the script and filmmaking team, putting together a package has become a labyrinthine puzzle. Garrett describes is as “like alchemy, turning lead into gold.” The alchemy recently worked with shark-meets-serial killer survival horror “Dangerous Animals,” which launched at the Marche du Cannes in 2024, premiered in the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight competition this year and became a box office success for Independent Film Company. Then there’s “Chasing Red,” a YA teen romance that began life as one of the most-read novels on writing platform Wattpad and is now heading into production having almost sold out via pre-sales. “Both of these films were ones that had a very, very clear demographic,” says Garrett, who this year has the animated fantasy “The Turning Door,” whose starring voice cast is led by Alivia Vikander and Jamie Dornan. But going into markets relying solely on territory pre-sales alone — once the norm at AFM — is today a rarity, with most packages having some financing already in place to mitigate risk — and jitters. There are also egos to consider, notes one sales exec, who claims agencies are now reluctant for projects featuring their bigger names to launch without some money committed to paper beforehand. “It’s embarrassing for them to take a project to market starring one of their clients and then come back saying they haven’t done any pre-sales so the film won’t work,” the exec says. (As a financier claims, it’s “more embarrassing” for the movie to be made, premiere at a festival and still fail to find a domestic distributor). Hence why “the role of equity is super important,” claims Delphine Perrier of Highland Film Group. “So are tax incentives and where you’re going to shoot. You’ve got to be crafty to make it all happen.” Kristen Figeroid, who heads up Neon’s international sales and distribution, contends that “the target to pre-sell scripts has become smaller and smaller for buyers in order to make money, and so they have become more discerning at the script stage.” Figeroid will be bringing to Steven Soderberg’s next film, “The Christophers,” which they picked up at Toronto for worldwide rights, to the AFM. While the being in the auteur business is more challenging than it used to, Figeroid says the “desire to make these passion projects for directors and actors is still very prevalent, and it’s the thing that studios have shied away from.” As such, “a lot of those projects fall into the independent market because of that,” she says. Dylan Leiner, Sony Pictures Classics’ executive VP of acquisitions, production and business affairs, says the reason why buyers are still attracted to auteur-driven movies is because the younger audience cares about name directors. While some assume that the younger generation — mostly fed on social media — could care less about auteurs, Leiner says they are in fact pickier with the precious hours at their disposal. “They have grown up in a time where everything happens faster and there’s less patience, and there’s more competition for their time and attention, so they are looking for entertainment that they already know going in will have some bona-fide success level or a guaranteed satisfaction,” he claims. “So the auteur films, just like with certain classic movies, they know them by reputation, and so it gives them more assurance that their time is going to be used satisfactorily.” The longtime SPC executive says the company’s acquisition strategy underscores the shake-up in moviegoing since the pandemic, skewing slightly younger demos. While the older audience hasn’t fully returned to theaters since COVID, “a younger audience is moving into that space and developing a new culture for theatrical films,” Leiner says. Besides prestige projects that continue to boast some appeal, such market stalwarts as genre and animation are expected to continue to drive dealmaking at the AFM. Shumaker will be showing footage of “Victorian Psycho,” which AC Independent began pre-selling at last year’s AFM and will also be launching “Buzzkill,” Joe Lynch’s horror comedy starring Billy Magnussen and Lulu Wilson. Genre and animation is also heading up Paris-based Charades’ AFM slate following a year illuminated by the phenomenal success — at the box office and Oscars — of “Flow,” which it sold worldwide in early 2024. “It’s a safe bet when it comes to the type of film you want to launch at the AFM,” says CEO Yohann Comte, who does note that a flood of mid-budget CGI family animation has made that area a “little tougher.” In its place — the rise and rise of Japanese animation, as marked by the recent box office smash “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle,” currently resting on a global haul in excess of $660 million (on a two-digit budget). “Obviously it’s better when it’s IP-driven, but the market is really growing and is super appealing,” Comte notes. Thanks to “Slayer” and Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters,” expect the word “Demon” to feature heavily across the promo posters on the walls of the AFM. “We’ve definitely seen an uptick in quality over the last 10 years because there are more high-end animation studios around the world,” says Leiner, noting the company is currently handling “Scarlet” by Mamoru Hosoda and “A Magnificent Life” by Sylvain Chomet. In fact, SPC has been “considering adult animation to be as relevant as any other genre for well over 20 years,” he says, citing a handful of Oscar-nominated SPC releases, such as “Persepolis,” “Waltz With Bashir” and “Red Turtle.” Genre, however, is starting to get over-supplied, with Shooman suggesting the quality has been pushed down. “The marketplace last year was saturated with mediocre genre products because everyone on the independent side and the studios had jumped into that space — if you look at the release calendar there’s an inundation of genre.” But the continued ability of genre to every now and then make an absolute fortune from a small budget will undoubtedly maintain its status as flavor of the day, especially at the AFM. Action-comedies and horror-comedies are also having a sustained moment, notes Perrier at Highland, which is selling 1980s throwback horror “Lice,” starring Emile Hirsch, Justin Long and Kevin Connolly. “Weapons” — which blended supernatural horror and dark comedy and scared up $268 million — is a film that nearly every sales exec cites. Again, it’s about finding the quality packages with that clear, defined target audience, like “Weapons” and, indeed, “Good Boy.” This year’s AFM will, as ever, be all about matching the latest crop of “Good Boys” with their perfect owners — owners who, hopefully, won’t be too busy waiting in line for an elevator or cursing the din from a floor of slot machines. As Vilsmaier notes on the markets return to L.A.: “Sometimes you need go somewhere else to realize what you’ve got.”
