Crisis? What crisis? If the independent film industry went into this year’s fall festival season with a sense of impending doom — the double strike raising fears of a production slowdown and confusion over SAG-AFTRA’s interim agreements, worrying buyers and sellers alike — the initial signs coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival and Venice have been positive. Business is still being done and films are still being sold to AMPTP members and independents alike.
Netflix made three high-profile buys out of TIFF, including a reported $20 million deal for Richard Linklater’s rom-com action thriller Hit Man, which bowed in Venice to rave reviews. Top Gun: Maverick’s Glen Powell and Adria Arjona star. The streamer also pounced on Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, for around $11 million after its world premiere at TIFF, taking the U.S. and the remaining international rights to the true-life thriller. Kendrick plays a bachelorette on the hit 1970s TV show The Dating Game who discovers her fairy-tale bachelor is actually a serial killer. And Netflix nabbed Lucy Walker’s Mountain Queen, taking worldwide rights to the doc about Lhakpa Sherpa, the first Nepali woman to summit and survive Mount Everest.
It’s notable that these films did not have interim agreements (IAs) in place, meaning that buyers are not bound by the terms SAG presented to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that were rejected and are still major points of contention in the strike. Those terms include metrics for streaming residuals, something AMPTP members have so far shut down.
“The studios and the streamers aren’t looking at projects with IAs, but there are still plenty of other movies out there,” noted one seller at TIFF. “The big question is what happens if the strike goes on and production is really impacted and we have a lot fewer films available?”
SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, speaking at an informal talk at TIFF on Sept. 8, did not give buyers hope of a quick resolution to the labor battling, saying the union had no indication that the AMPTP is “willing to come back to the table and talk with us.” (WGA, on the other hand, is in talks with the AMPTP to resume negotiations the week of Sept. 18.)
The indies, for their part, were busy in both Venice and at TIFF, bulking up on films as security against a production slowdown.
Neon picked up two of Venice’s most talked-about titles, taking worldwide rights to Ava DuVernay’s critically acclaimed Origin, a drama inspired by the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson and starring Aunjanue Ellis and Jon Bernthal, which Neon will bow across the U.S. later this year; and, ahead of Venice, jumping on board Michael Mann’s car-racing biopic Ferrari, which stars Adam Driver alongside Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley and Patrick Dempsey.
Bleecker Street did a domestic prebuy out of TIFF with The Veterans for Fackham Hall, a British spoof of Downton Abbey-style costume dramas, while Brainstorm Media and Music Box Films picked up Ivan Sen’s crime drama Limbo. And Greenwich Entertainment jumped on Sorry/Not Sorry, Caroline Suh and Cara Mones’ documentary on Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct toward his female colleagues and the repercussions for both sides.
Still, none of the deals sealed in Venice or Toronto match the size of the studio and streamer buys of previous years. TIFF 2022 saw Focus Features put down $30 million for worldwide rights to Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, which could be a contender in the coming awards season.
In fact, the bulk of Venice and TIFF deals have been for smaller art house movies, the section of the market arguably hardest hit by theater closures during COVID. Art house streamer Mubi picked up Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, an A24 title, in multiple territories, including the U.K., Germany and Latin America, ahead of its world premiere in Venice (where Cailee Spaeny, who plays Priscilla Presley, won the festival’s best actress honor) and nabbed North American and other rights for Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, the new satire from director Radu Jude.
For the moment, the indies and majors seem dedicated to buying and releasing movies — but the specter of the strikes still looms.
“The market has gotten tighter since the pandemic, and we see a shift of audience in the theatrical market. The classic art house spectators are still a target audience but have come back in lower numbers,” says Maren Kroymann of m-appeal, which sold out Evil Does Not Exist, from Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), at Venice.
“It’s business as usual for now. People are pretending nothing has changed,” noted one veteran sales agent. “The real crisis will come in a few months. If we don’t have a [strike-ending] deal by then, we’ll all be in a very different world.”
A version of this story first appeared in the Sept. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
