Is Cannes Back? Why a Wave of ‘Vibrant’ Film Sales Has Buyers ‘Very Happy’
Is Cannes back? Ahead of the 75th Cannes Film Festival, insiders told TheWrap that the Marche du Film might bring a healthy number of deals for packages and completed art-house films alike. And with sales for films big and small and from mega streamers to indies, buyers are leaving Cannes “very happy” with a volume of deal-making that some sales agents said hearkens back to the golden days before COVID.
“100%, I think we’re definitely back to pre-pandemic levels. Key buyers need movies, want movies, and hopefully these movies are going to be a success for them,” Nicolas Chartier, CEO of sales agent Voltage Pictures, told TheWrap. “We need people to make money, and it’s good when our buyers are happy.”
Jeffrey Greenstein, a producer and president with Millennium Films, agreed. “I can tell you the buyers were very happy with the amount of product there was. As long as most of those get made, they’ll continue to be happy,” he said. “People are focused on business moving forward. They need content, they’ve got distribution companies, and I’ve seen a confidence in their business, saying we’re buying, we need content, and what do you got?”
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Greenstein acknowledged that the theatrical market still isn’t 100% back either domestically or abroad, but at this year’s Cannes he said that there was no longer chatter about whether theatrical distribution would return. Instead, the focus of this year’s in-person marketplace — the first in three years, after 2020’s was canceled and last year’s adopted a hybrid model — was on doing business and getting back to seeing movies.
Other sales agents described the Cannes sales activity as “vibrant,” with aggressive bidding on larger titles, such as Netflix shelling out $50 million for an Emily Blunt package, and distributors such as Searchlight and A24 circling Ruben Östlund’s competition title “Triangle of Sadness” before Neon won out. And if you’re an indie distributor who in past years has been lamenting streamers snapping up everything in sight, suddenly many of those titles are still available.
That includes international rights deals for some of the biggest packages hyped ahead of the market, such as the Jason Statham action film “The Bee Keeper,” “The Crow” remake or Lionsgate’s two packages for the “Hunger Games” prequel and its “Dirty Dancing” sequel. The expectation however from sales agents is that many of these deals may still be closing even today or in the coming days, with bidding driving up prices as high as possible up until the last minute.
IFC Films, Neon, A24 and Sony Pictures Classics, as well as surprise newer players like Mubi and Utopia, have been battling for the rights to just about every competition title that didn’t already have a home at the festival, chasing the critical buzz and picking up arthouse titles like “R.M.N.,” “Corsage,” “Broker,” “One Fine Morning,” “Holy Spider” and “Aftersun,” among others, all of which could still walk away with one of the festival’s top prizes.
But it’s not as if the streamers were quiet either. Netflix, despite its recent stock market woes, plunked down a hefty $50 million for an Emily Blunt film called “Pain Hustlers” that has “Fantastic Beasts” director David Yates attached. That was followed by another package acquisition, including Apple spending on a sci-fi romance called “Fingernails” that stars Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed.
All that said, Chartier and Greenstein noted that Asian buyers in particular were almost completely absent from this year’s Cannes, with many theaters in the region still shuttered and a backlog of titles sitting on the shelf until they reopen. They chalked that up to COVID and some new lockdowns that have left some regions worse off rather than any impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it hasn’t stopped healthy sales for others in Europe and Latin American territories.
“People are seeing the world coming back, and now it’s an upward trend. And we’ve had ancillary revenue streams, whether that’s your digital media, new forms of pay TV, or the AVODs and SVODs of the world that are emerging in countries where it hasn’t before,” Greenstein said.
But if the activity of the Cannes market proved one thing, it’s that even as buyers and sellers have grown accustomed to doing deals remotely, there’s an appetite for the stability of a festival marketplace as rich as the one in the French riviera. “The markets are incredibly important. It’s a time and place where we sit down, see everybody and we get to go through and negotiate our deals for films,” Greenstein said. “If you ask me, markets should always be essential.”
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