In view of the major shifts in the movie industry in recent years, successful release strategies are becoming more complicated and specific, calling for tailored strategies to create evergreens and attract communities while still relying on festival premieres, social media promotion and wowing Academy members, according to high-profile guest speakers at the Zurich Summit on Saturday.
Providing the lowdown on the current state of the business were Patrick Wachsberger, head of 193, Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, Megan Colligan, president of Row K Entertainment, and 30West’s co-president and COO Daniel Steinman.
Perhaps offering a more novel take, Barker praised the Zurich Film Festival’s industry conference for helping to create greater unity in the independent film sector – something that was not always the case.
“When I started in the business, it was not such a collegial business,” Barker noted. Pointing to the success of independent films in the 1980s and 1990s, Barker said the sector had become much more “collegial in the last 10 years or so, more out of survival than anything else. And this particular place has done a lot for that.”
He added that the indie business “is always hard because you have to watch your expenses, because there’s limited upside on so many of the films. You have to roll with the changes in history, in how to find that niche audience, how to reach out to that niche audience.”
With many independent theaters going out of business, many films that would not normally play in the multiplexes now have to play in the multiplexes. “So you have to make totally new models on how you release a film. You have to pay attention to every revenue stream,” Barker said.
While every company has a different mission and a different agenda, for Sony Classics, “theatrical still has to remain the primary even if the gross goes down.”
It’s essential to “make that marketing impression on the public that these films are the films that become evergreens,” Barker stressed.
“One of the keys to Sony Pictures Classics is not only opening a movie and getting the widest audience possible theatrically, but making that film into an evergreen. And those opportunities are there more than ever in making films evergreens if that marketing impression is made on the public, and hopefully they come to the movie theater.”
What’s become more difficult is that every film is different and needs to be treated differently, he added. “The distributor has to be more creative than ever before. We have a movie called ‘Becoming Led Zeppelin‘ and we worked it out with Imax on how to present that documentary with Imax. We were doing Imax again with this anime film we have called ‘Scarlet.’ We’re going to release ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ with Fathom because they have access to a wide number of screens.”
Wachsberger stressed that “the traditional spend, I think those days are over. It is more like you have to be completely digital. Everything is interconnected. … For independent movies, it’s really about going to festivals.”
Underscoring the importance of authenticity, Colligan said it used to be “that the genius marketing was to be able to convince an audience that a movie was something and then let them find out later it wasn’t that. I think that’s a lot harder in this day and age, and you can get really burned doing that. I think you have to kind of find what the most authentic truth of your movie is and really lean into that.”
Communal connection can likewise play a significant factor. “I think people are looking for how they connect into community,” Colligan said. “So if you’ve read a book and a movie’s based on a book, that can be a sense of community. If you love Pierce Brosnan, that can be a sense of community. There’s lots of ways to tap into the concept around community, but I think fundamentally, people want to spend their time watching things, spending time with things that they’re likely to love. Their time is valuable and the things that they choose to do also reflect who they are.”