The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
Specialty Films Forced to Take More Risks
Tár, The Banshees of Inisherin and others try expansions into more theaters sooner — to mixed results
After opening in two theaters in December 2017, Guillermo del Toro’s Searchlight drama The Shape of Water never played in more than 1,000 locations until its ninth weekend, after picking up 13 Academy Award nominations. Searchlight, like other specialty and indie distributors, has for decades relied on what’s known as a platform release to nurture art house titles. Now, the traditional platform model is an endangered species after consumer behavior changed in the pandemic era — particularly among older moviegoers — and two high-profile cinemas catering to indie fare closed in Los Angeles: the ArcLight Hollywood and the Landmark on the Westside. This year’s Oscar contenders are expanding more quickly because limited runs aren’t producing the sorts of grosses they previously did. But if a movie doesn’t capture a broad enough audience when going wide, it will lose screens almost entirely.
A classic platform release begins with a run in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles. Instead of the gross, the per-location average is the measure of success. In the pre-pandemic era, a “good” location average could easily be north of $75,000 or even more than $100,000. For example, the opening average for the Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) was $106,000. Those days are over. Focus Features’ Cate Blanchettstarring Oscar contender Tár, released in early October, posted a promising opening-location average of $39,655 from four theaters in New York and L.A. But it began to struggle as it expanded, earning only $1.1 million when booking 1,087 locations in its fourth weekend. As of Nov. 15, Tár is available on premium VOD and saw its screen count drop to 359 (its current box office cume is $4.6 million).
Among other current Oscar contenders, MGM and UAR’s Till leads the pack with a domestic total of $8 million, but so far hasn’t crossed over. The jury is out on Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and Searchlight’s The Banshees of Inisherin. Spielberg’s semiautobiographical movie launched in NYC and L.A. over the Nov. 11-13 weekend to a location average of $40,394. The film will face a major test over Thanksgiving, when it plays in roughly 600 theaters.
From Searchlight, Inisherin has certainly fared better than Tár, grossing $5.7 million to date after increasing its location count from 58 to 895 in its third weekend, but it likely won’t come close to matching Birdman’s domestic gross of $42.3 million. Adds a studio executive on the specialty landscape, “It is grim out there.”