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Recent gung-ho wide release strategies for indie titles don’t appear to be working, despite stella critical reviews. What’s going wrong?
The release formula for lower budget, arthouse or indie
films used to entail a slow build to generate publicity including festival
plays, critical reviews before limited release on half a dozen screens,
expanding it to 50 screens, then 300 screens, then (if it did well enough)
1,000 screens.
Even the most popular and celebrated independent films were
treated to such a platform release schedule
“They were seen as requiring special nurturing,” says
Variety.
“What we once called the mass audience needed to
be enticed into seeing them. But with the right amount of teasing,
that audience would go and fall in love with these movies too.”
However, recent indie titles including Zola (release
over the July 4 weekend), Spencer and Belfast have been opened
wide: Belfast in 580 theaters domestically; Spencer in 1000 theaters and The
French Dispatch in 780.
And it’s not working – at least according to Owen
Gleiberman. Variety suggests that Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, a drama about
Princess Diana, is “limping its way toward $10 million,” and that neither it
nor Kenneth Branagh’s nostalgic look back at his home town Belfast
“aren’t exactly setting the box office on fire.”
It’s not universal. Variety points out that many art films
and documentaries still open on just a few screens, like The Rescue and
Camerimage Golden Frog winning C’mon C’mon.
It also rates Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the
season’s “bona fide breakthrough indie hit” on account of mustering $13 million
on 800 screens.) despite receiving some of the most dyspeptic reviews of the
director’s career.
“This instant wide-release pattern may be linked to the
pandemic (the perception that a movie now has to grab your attention or be
consigned to oblivion),” offers Gleiberman. “It may also be considered a kind
of loss leader for streaming (a way to advertise a film for home viewing, and
the box-office tally be damned). But it reflects a throw-it-out-there strategic
crudity that is not doing these films any favors.”
The critic’s chagrin is mostly about explaining the
disappointing box office return for Spencer which features a performance
by Kristen Stewart widely considered the Oscar frontrunner “but the heat around
that movie has not been allowed to build.”
The strategy behind the wide release seems to be to open big
so as not to be perceived as arthouse but a genuine must-see at the cinema.
Distributors want to maximize their own success, and if the
new wide-release strategy is perceived to be floundering, who’s to say that the
old strategy won’t become new again?
Of course, the key factor behind all this may simply be the
demon of streaming — the voice in viewers’ heads that now says, “If it’s not
Bond or Godzilla or Ghostbusters or Marvel, why bother to go out to see it?” As
Variety sees it, there’s no platform in the world that can support audience
indifference.
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