Your house and art house
Mubi, a subscription service that supports independent cinema, has tickets to L.A.
Streaming services and movie theaters are often portrayed as opposing forces on the fast-changing media battlefield.
But for film buffs, that’s not necessarily the case.
At least that’s the argument from one art house film streamer, which is using its cachet with cinephiles to bring more attention to critical darlings and foreign gems playing in the nation’s smaller movie houses that have been struggling to recover from the pandemic.
The company, Mubi, which charges $10.99 a month, has been rolling out a membership program that allows customers a chance to see a movie in theaters every week for no additional charge. The service, called Mubi Go, previously launched in Britain, India and New York. Mubi Go debuted in Los Angeles on Friday with the release of Apple’s Sundance Film Festival acquisition, “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” which is streaming simultaneously on Apple TV+.
JOINING THE PACK
Subscription services are no longer novel for the cinema industry, where the major chains — AMC, Cinemark and Regal — all have their own programs with various ticket pricing schemes and discounts on snacks. But rather than the all-you-canwatch MoviePass model, Mubi picks which film members can see in theaters, and partners with specific cinemas where patrons can redeem their tickets.
“Oftentimes, some of the best things don’t have huge marketing budgets behind them,” said C. Mason Wells, Mubi’s director of U.S. distribution. “These are movies that maybe you haven’t heard of before. But if you trust us and our curatorial vision, you’re going to be surprised more often than not by what we offer.”
In Los Angeles, Mubi began offering tickets to “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” starring Dakota Johnson and directed by co-star Cooper Raiff, at Laemmle Theatre’s Monica Film Center, Glendale, NoHo 7 and Town Center 5 locations. Wells expects to have the vast bulk of L.A.-area independent cinemas participating when all’s said and done.
The Mubi program rolled out in New York last year with theaters including Film at Lincoln Center, Film Forum and IFC Center, and featured titles such as Oscar winners “Drive My Car” and “The Power of the Dog.”
The idea is to boost attendance for certain movies that don’t have the studiobacked marketing extravaganzas or the kind of pop culture awareness that helps blockbusters like “Top Gun: Maverick” dominate ticket sales. While the AMCs and Regals of the world play some independent movies too, Mubi wants to direct fans to the mom-and-pops.
Wells — who previously worked at film distributor Kino Lorber and helped relaunch the Quad Cinema in New York — also sees it as a way to get younger people out to art house cinemas, which have typically been the domain of the over-40 crowd. About 80% of Mubi Go users are 44 and under. “That is not the traditional art house movie demographic in the United States,” he said.
After establishing itself in Los Angeles, Mubi plans to continue the program’s expansion in cities including Chicago and Portland, Ore., following a pattern similar to the “platform release” of an indie film, in which a distributor starts in the biggest locales and spreads out to other parts of the country as momentum builds.
There are plenty of streaming services that specialize in independent cinema and documentaries, including Kanopy and Fandor, even since the demise of FilmStruck, which was killed by WarnerMedia under AT&T for being too “niche.”
In that universe of offbeat streamers, I’ve always thought of Mubi, which has 10 million members worldwide, as one for film lovers who find even Criterion Channel too mainstream.
NOT FOR BINGING
Mubi’s film-a-week method builds on the highly selective ethos of the streaming service. Rather than lay out a full smorgasbord of options, Mubi takes a curatorial approach to streaming, promoting a movie a day to its subscribers. On offer Monday was “The Demons of Dorothy,” a 29-minute French film that the company’s blurb describes as “a cross between John Waters and Ryan Trecartin.”
The single-movie approach is a way to counter the problem of subscribers being paralyzed by the number of options on the bigger streaming platforms, a phenomenon identified in other contexts by psychologist Barry Schwartz in the 2004 book “The Paradox of Choice.” While the biggest streaming services want to be Walmart, Mubi and Mubi Go are more akin to an exclusive book club .
The postpandemic recovery has been an uphill trudge for art house theaters and smaller chains. During government-mandated closures, digital distributors such as Kino Lorber did what they could to support theaters by setting up “virtual cinema” screenings, basically digital rentals that allowed local cinemas to make a little money while their doors were closed.
But the shuttering of the business continues to have ripple effects, even in big movie towns. In Los Angeles, the Landmark on Pico Boulevard closed last month after 15 years in business. Landmark Theatres picked up the lease at Pasadena’s Playhouse 7, previously operated by Laemmle. The former ArcLight in Hollywood remains closed and the Vista in Los Feliz is shuttered for renovations.
A comeback for indie cinema will depend on more movies being released in theaters. Streaming services such as Netflix and Apple TV+ have shown a growing interest in putting their festival selections, as well as their expensive blockbusters, on the big screen, recognizing the cultural clout that a theatrical campaign has compared to dropping a prestigious movie into the online void of infinite choice.
Mubi is hoping to accelerate the return, believing that streaming and theaters are not competing in a zero-sum game any more than VHS tapes and Blu-ray discs cannibalized Hollywood’s traditional business. People who stream the most content online also tend to be the most frequent moviegoers, and vice versa, according to a 2020 Ernst & Young survey commissioned by the National Assn. of Theatre Owners. Those who streamed the most — 15 or more hours of content a week — were the most likely (35%) to go to the movies nine or more times a year.
“These things work together and talk to each other and don’t have to cannibalize each other,” Wells said. “That’s at the heart of what we’re trying to do.”
This article is taken from the June 14 edition of the Wide Shot, a weekly newsletter about everything happening in the business of entertainment. Sign up at latimes.com/newsletters.