Virtual cinema has saved the day – for now
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 bricksand-mortar movie venues, they vowed 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 Joonho’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 wholeheartedly 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 very 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 Co-President 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.
But some distributors are tinkering with the traditional theater-first formula. In the wake of coronavirus closures, small distributors like Kino Lorber, Oscilloscope, Film Movement and Music Box Films have seized an opportunity to release their films as digital links, often through art-house and independent theaters that have eagerly accepted a chance to earn some revenue and keep their homebound audiences engaged.
It’s an experiment that
Quinn watched with interest and, after some soul-searching, has decided to join. “I was grappling with the extraordinary amount of uncertainty, and asking myself how we chart a path forward and what do we do now,” he recalls. “And it dawned on me that it’s more important than ever that we do our job and bring new films to market . ... How do you do that in a virtual world with any semblance of the power of what we’ve done in the last few years? That’s the hard part.”
On Friday, “Spaceship Earth,” a documentary that chronicles the two-year Biosphere 2 experiment in closed-system, self-sustained living, will open 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.
“Honestly, I don’t know if it’s going to work,” Quinn says, “but it’s been such a wonderful distraction in this current situation.”
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.
One reason Lorber was able to pivot so quickly was that, nine months ago, he 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.
“The scourge of art houses is the limitation of the number of screens,” Lorber explains. “Very few have more than two or three screens, some even only have one. Distributors like ourselves often have films that open strongly but get bumped in a week because the theaters have calendars and commitments to other companies to play their films at a particular time.” Virtual cinema, he notes, gives theaters a way to hold movies indefinitely. “We’ve moved from a screen-scarcity environment to screen plenitude.”