Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
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When Tom Quinn and Tim League formed the film company Neon in 2017, they shared at least one mission: Even as Hollywood was being upended by the streaming giant Netflix and questions regarding the viability of movie theaters that their films would always play in theaters.
“We built our whole business on the power of cinema in theater,” Quinn said recently by phone, noting that League is the founder of the Alamo Drafthouse chain. “That’s everything to us, it’s everything that we’ve put into our release strategies, it determines every film that we buy.”
Neon’s biggest breakthrough to date — Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which won best picture and best international feature film at the Oscars this year — exemplified Quinn’s philosophy of filmgoing, which means “the communal experience of going to a theater and committing yourself to a filmmaker’s vision for one or two hours with no breaks.” So when most American theaters closed in March, just as Neon was preparing to release its Sundance acquisition Spaceship Earth, Quinn faced an existential quandary.
“It seems like a distant memory that we were at the Academy Awards celebrating Parasite, which was a historical Academy Award for my favorite filmmaker in the world and his masterpiece, but was really about the power of cinema.” Just a few months later, he says, “That’s no longer possible. And for us, we’ve never released a film that wasn’t built around the sacred and committed power of theaters and exhibition.”
Some of Quinn’s fellow distributors are hanging on to their movies until they can play in theaters: A24, which had just released Kelly Reichardt’s exquisite period drama First Cow when theaters shuttered, decided not to release the film as a streaming title. Sony Pictures Classics has made it clear that it will not be releasing any new movies digitally.
“Without theatrical, the business disappears,” insists Sony Classics CoPresident Tom Bernard, describing the typical life cycle of a film that goes from theaters to airplanes and hotels to video-on-demand and finally to cable. “All those stops unlock value,” Bernard says, “but it has to start with theaters” and the reviews, trailers and audience awareness they generate.
Last Friday, Spaceship Earth, a documentary that chronicles the two-year Biosphere 2 experiment in closed-system, self-sustained living, opened virtually across a number of on-demand platforms. Neon has also pursued partnerships with theaters, bookstores, restaurants and museums that will provide links to the film on their websites. And Spaceship Earth
will be shown in a handful of drive-ins that are open for business, thanks to the glorious self-isolation of the family automobile.
Quinn is banking on Spaceship Earth’s timeliness: What could be more relatable right now than a movie about a historic experiment in self-quarantining? But he’s also aware of some recent streaming success stories: Oscilloscope’s Saint Frances,
which had just opened in theaters when they were forced to shutter, has made around $100,000 as a virtual release, reaching a much wider audience than would have been able to see it on the big screen. Similarly, Bacurau, a quirky political satire from Brazil that began streaming in mid-March after a brief theatrical run in New York, has earned Kino Lorber far more than it would have in a traditional theatrical revenue-share model, according to Chairman and CEO Richard Lorber.
Nine months ago, Lorber had launched Kino Now, an on-demand service that would be an “art house iTunes,” allowing patrons to stream or download one of the company’s 3,000 foreign and indie titles. Now, that entity has become host to the company’s new virtual cinema initiative Kino Marquee, which Lorber sees as a form of “filmanthropy,” but also a means of self-preservation for theaters.
That might sound promising — especially to anyone who has read a rave review of a new independent film, only to discover it has left the theater by the time they get there. But not everyone is convinced that virtual cinema is a sustainable longterm strategy. Andrew Carlin, director of theatrical distribution at Oscilloscope, is wary of theaters creating a two-tiered system, whereby they save their main auditoriums for the Sony Classics, A24s, Searchlight Pictures and Focus Features of the world, and send films from smaller companies like his into the virtual ether.
“It’s already a struggle getting on screens in some of these markets,” Carlin says. “So if there’s effectively no need to get these smaller companies on screen, it would make what is already a challenging business even more challenging.”
It also bears noting that the most successful virtual cinema releases thus far had the advantage of being promoted in theaters before they closed; the fate of films “opening cold” as digital titles has yet to be determined.
For now, Lorber believes, virtual cinema has provided a useful tool for the post-lockdown re-entry period.
“In the near future, when theaters do reopen, a sold-out show will be a theater that’s half full,” he says. “So we think theaters will still probably want to have some supplemental income. The possibility of duplex releases — some combination of virtual and physical — gives them that option.”
Past that, he observes, virtual cinema might offer audiences more time to see a highly regarded film.
“The real value to the theaters is that when an art-house gem gets an inordinate amount of publicity and its footprint is bigger than its shoe size, it gets a chance to be on screen for more than a week,” Lorber says.