The health of the pre-sales market, AI cost savings and the need to embrace risk were the major topics of discussion at the Zurich Film Festival’s annual Summit last weekend.
Screen highlights six talking points from the conference, held at the city’s Dolder Grand hotel.
AI concerns
Artificial intelligence came up in nearly all of the sessions. “I embrace pushback [against AI], because there is a lot of fear that when we’re talking to LLMs [large language models], it’s expecting us to engage in cognitive surrender,” said Vania Schlogel, founder and managing partner at LA-based private equity firm Atwater Capital, which invested in AI tool Magnific in 2020.
“The pushback is great because we can move more towards offloading rather than surrender. What are the workflows that could be better in terms of efficiency and offloading to supplement creativity?
Rights issues remain, noted Schlogel. “It’s impossible to ignore that most of these models were built with the work of others, without credit, compensation, and consent. My hope, as an Angeleno who has invested extensively and worked in the Hollywood system, is that AI is additive and expansionary. I hope we can get in front of it and embrace it, then help dictate the path by which it goes.”
For Zack London, director of AI-generated sci-fi feature Gods Don’t Give Gifts, it’s about “trying to figure out where on the spectrum we sit where we can leverage AI to improve the narrative.
“It’s about storytelling,” said London. “For the visuals, which would have cost us 10s, if not 100s, of millions of dollars, we use AI. But behind that is a dozen voice actors, four musicians to compose it, two writers, a foley artist, a full post-production crew. AI is a visual front end to achieve what would be impossible otherwise.”
Mubi’s Efe Cakarel took a different view. “We are going to stay as far away from AI as possible when it comes to films,” said the founder and CEO in his keynote address, while acknowledging that the company uses it for operational processes. “Twenty years from now, the most radical thing a film company may be able to say is ‘This was made by people’.”
Social gathering
Social media is increasingly necessary for creating a hit film, according to Hasmik Matinyan, publisher manager entertainment for German-speaking territories at TikTok. Matinyan cited that last year, 15 of Europe’s top 20 theatrical releases were also viral hits on the short-form app, with an average of 14m views; and that one of the most searched-for terms on the app is “movie to watch”.
YouTube, comparatively long in the tooth in the digital world, “is not here to replace cinema, but to amplify it and hone creators”, according to Andreas Briese, managing director for YouTube Germany and regional director for Central and Northern Europe. “Think of it as a twin engine. It’s a distribution engine, but also a marketing machine.”
Others warned against straining too hard for viral attention. “Studios try to create these moments,” said Oliver Berben, CEO of Germany’s Constantin Film. “These success stories are not created by the studio; they’re created by creators out there, by fans. The impulse is to try to create a wave like that; but I don’t think that’s how it works.”
Protections around social media were another discussion point. “America is really worried about China’s influence on TikTok, the algorithm and propaganda,” said Kevin Mayer, co-founder and co-CEO at Candle Media. “But what they’re doing in China is the reverse. They’re making sure Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, has more educational, enriching content on it, and limiting the amount of time kids can spend on it. That is an enormous positive step; it’s weird that China took it first, and the free world has deployed it readily.”
Debate
The most notable head-to-head of the day came between Zurich Film Festival president Martin Moszkowicz and Roeg Sutherland, co-head of CAA Media Finance.
“The traditional model of pre-sales, tax credits, subsidies is pretty much done; it doesn’t exist anymore,” said Moszkowicz. “We have to bring private equity into the mix. There’s no international movie you can do outside of the studio system without private equity.”
“I still think there’s space to do pre-sales on the right package with the right director, even if it’s a more challenging subject,” responded Sutherland. “Europeans are now faced with what we’ve been dealing with all our lives [in the US]. You can’t just get a movie financed from government subsidies, you need equity. The good news is there’s more money out there than there ever was.”
“The pre-sales market opportunity, with good storytelling in different genres, is still reliable,” said Alex Walton, former co-lead and partner at WME Independent and now leading financing, production and sales firm AW Film. “Foreign buyers are hungry for new supply chains,” he suggested, citing recent features Nuremberg and Pressure. “Good storytelling is bringing audiences in.”
Merger
The Paramount-WBD merger, seemingly in its final stages, was a key topic on the Moguls and Media Entrepreneurship talk. Candle Media’s Kevin Mayer is especially well-positioned for that discussion, having negotiated Disney’s acquisition of Fox, completed in 2019.
“If you’re going to be honest about this question [of what the merger will do to the industry], you have to also ask yourself what would happen if the merger didn’t happen,” said Mayer. “The industry is in a secular decline phase, and there are fewer financial outcomes that are great. If you keep the status quo, you’re going to have a larger number of weak companies unable to do much in the future.”
“Consolidation is going to be a necessity,” added John Sloss, founder and CEO at Cinetic Media. “I’ve made the assumption that the Ellisons are more optimising-oriented than ideologues; I guess we’ll see in a couple of years.”
Mayer said he expected Ellison will keep the promises he made to get the deal done around the number of releases; but that job cuts are coming. “When you hear promises of $6bn in synergies, that’s a euphemism for a lot of layoffs,” said Mayer. “For five years there’ll be a relatively good safety net in terms of product being released. After that, who knows?”
Oscars changes
Academy CEO Bill Kramer addressed a major change for the 2029 awards show, which will be broadcast live for free on YouTube. “It almost feels risky not to do it,” said Kramer, “because we’re looking at the future, and with each month, a larger percentage of the TV-watching audience is on YouTube. We’re already in deep discussion with [YouTube CEO] Neal Mohan and his team. You’ll see a different-looking Oscars that allows you to engage with the show in more interactive and deep ways than we can do right now.”
Kramer acknowledged it was financially “a very good deal. We are a nonprofit, so this allows us to sustain our great work.”
He took part in a talk with Mattel Studios president and CCO Robbie Brenner, Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker, and Kane Parsons, director of 2026 hit Backrooms.
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“People are looking for that newness, a detachment from more cyclical cultural icons that keep eating themselves,” said Parsons of the film’s breakout success. He also championed the communal theatrical experience, saying that addiction to algorithmically selected short-form content “is not something most people enjoy about their own wiring. They don’t love that their attention spans are being sucked into the spiral of mostly consuming stuff that is short.”
Risky business
The day ended with a conversation between Conclave director Edward Berger and FilmNation Entertainment founder and CEO Glen Basner. Basner also received the festival’s Game Changer award.
He identified the state of packaging films as “my biggest frustration with where we are at as a business community.
“Distribution has got so professional that they’re asking us to package films in a way that may be great for home entertainment, but doesn’t necessarily work best for what is exciting audiences theatrically in the marketplace,” said Basner. “Sometimes we have to take a risk on an unknown actor because they’re the best person for that role, to make the best version of the movie.”
However, Basner said that while “the business is still challenging”, this year “we think we understand it” for the first time since 2019.
“There wasn’t a macroeconomic curveball being thrown at us. This year we will make four films and a TV series. Next year we already have four films in pre-production and hope to make another three. It’s about maintaining the same high quality standards, but taking more risks than we would have some years ago.”
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