Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Apple: it’s a quadruple tick for this year’s Sundance Festival. All four major streaming platforms have already sealed some deal or other.
From Hulu’s $2 million (£1.53 million) purchase of Untitled Amazing Johnathan Documentary – an impressive achievement for a documentary, which typically aim for half that money – to Amazon’s $13 million deal for the rights of Mindy Kaling’s comedy Late Night. That’s the second biggest acquisition in the history of Sundance, after Fox Searchlight’s $17.5 million deal on The Birth of a Nation in 2016.
For independent filmmakers who are trying to make a name for themselves, coming to Sundance is a huge opportunity. But in reality, it’s only half the way to success. Once in Park City, Utah, it’s all about wooing the studios that make the industry go round, such as HBO or Sony, to try to get a decent distribution deal for their work.
Except in recent years, the old players have been usurped by tech upstarts with deep pockets and big ambitions. Their aim? To become the platform of choice for talented filmmakers looking to reach wider audiences.
Take Amazon Prime Video, for example. Prime has a “self-release” option that lets filmmakers upload their titles free of charge and get paid based on the number of streams they generate. “That is essentially giving a home to titles that would otherwise struggle to gain recognition, and stay stuck in a folder on a laptop,” says Richard Broughton, research director at Ampere Analysis.
Is Prime the new platform of choice for niche films that are given the cold shoulder by bigger studios? Yes and no. Michael Dominic is a documentary-maker currently working on Clean Hands, which will premiere at the Cinequest festival next March. Last year, he uploaded his previous film Sunshine Hotel to Prime – and the first months brought incredible results. “It did something close to $45,000 the first year,” he says. “That’s more than Sunshine had ever made.”
And then Prime changed the system to a tiered one, with royalties calculated on the basis of the number of hours that the film had been streamed the previous year. To earn similar amounts, about $0.15 per hour of stream, Dominic would have had to secure 500,000 hours of viewing in a year – something that is out of the reach of most small-budget films.
“I don’t hold a grudge with Amazon,” he says. “Business is business, after all. But if you don’t have a contract with them – and you don’t get one if you upload your film to Prime – you’re at their mercy. If they figure they want to pay smaller films less money, they can just change the terms.”
In Amazon’s defence, such contracts do – or did – exist. At Sundance in 2017, it launched Festival Stars, a scheme specifically designed for official selections at international film festivals that had not managed to sign a decent distribution deal. Amazon offered an upfront cash bonus of up to $100,000, as well as a preferential fixed rate of $0.30 per streaming hour once the film was on Prime; that is twice the normal rate for films that self-release on the platform.
Amazon made no mention of continuing its Festival Stars programme this year. Neither did it put it forward at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, where 100 titles had taken advantage of it the previous year.
Some Sundance attendees may worry that this shows a shift away from films with smaller budgets. But analysts like Broughton still say that streaming platforms come to festivals armed with big budgets – and that ultimately means more potential distribution deals for everyone.
“These platforms are not limited by shelf space or by the number of screens they can distribute on,” says Broughton. “They are only limited by their acquisition budgets, which are, at the moment, seemingly bottomless.”
This creates a huge opportunity for independent films, which can sell to streaming platforms a lot more easily than they can to traditional studios. And for much more money, too: in 2017, Icarus landed the biggest deal ever made at Sundance for a non-fiction film. Netflix paid $5 million to walk away with the rights for the documentary’s investigation into the Russian doping scandal.
Those examples are reassuring for filmmakers like William Boyd, whose film The Trespasser was just nominated for the London Short Film Festival last month. “We’re looking at a lot more exposure,” he says. The substantial budgets of Prime Video and Netflix, along with their equally substantial interest in selling them, dramatically increases the potential for an independently-produced film to be seen by a wider audience.
Award-winning director Adjani Salmon, whose series Dreaming Whilst Black was first released on YouTube, agrees. “When you’re a filmmaker, you just want to share your work with as many people as possible,” he says. “Netflix and Amazon have opened those opportunities up. It’s giving us more options.”
Those platforms have the power to invest in what he calls “nobodies’ films” – “did anybody know who the director of Bird Box was?” he asks – and titles that traditional broadcasters wouldn’t run, because they don’t fit with their target audience. On the contrary, streaming platforms have audiences around the world. Whatever the film (or almost), there will always be a Netflix subscriber, somewhere, who wants to watch it.
Tomisin Adepeju is currently working on his first feature film, after having presented his short The Right Choice at Sundance last year – a film on race and identity in the modern age. He is probably the type of filmmaker that the rise of Netflix and Amazon is the most relevant to, he explains, as he is shifting to longer formats and looking for ways to monetise his work.
“When Netflix released Lion Heart last year – a Nigerian film produced by a Nigerian woman – I got tremendously excited,” he says. “As a black man who makes films about black people, it gives me a new space to put my film. Netflix, Apple and Amazon don’t care if a film is unconventional. If it is good, they will advertise it on their platform for different audiences.”
If it lets his film be seen by a wider audience, then Adepeju is happy to accept the trade-offs that come with releasing his work on a streaming platform. In this case, it could mean giving up the ultimate filmmaker’s dream – that is, a prestigious theatrical release, complete with red carpets and lines of popcorn-stuffed viewers.
Platforms like Netflix, indeed, typically demand exclusive rights over distribution; in the case of Bird Box, for example, the film’s release in theatres was ruled out altogether.
Adepeju has always dreamed of having his films shown at the Prince Charles Cinema just off Leicester Square. “And that will never go away,” he says. “It’s difficult to think that my films may only ever be seen on TVs and laptops, but ultimately video on demand is the future. You have to be realistic.” What counts, he concludes, is that people watch what he’s making, and that streaming platforms are opening up new ways of making that happen.
So while Adepeju will keep dreaming of his Prince Charles Cinema release, he’ll also keep working on good pitches to sell his work to Netflix and Prime Video. Is it less glamorous? “Perhaps,” he says, “but I have to keep thinking about my future as a filmmaker. And that starts by getting your film seen.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
