Myriad Pictures’ Kirk D’Amico on selling the company’s library and championing new films

People asked Kirk D’Amico if he was retiring when Myriad Pictures sold its 114-title library to Three Point Capital earlier this year. Far from it, says the founder and CEO, who arrives at AFM with a new sales slate feeling as energised as he did when the Los Angeles company launched 25 years ago.

“The timing was right. I wanted to focus on newer films,” D’Amico says of offloading a catalogue that featured some of the company’s biggest hits, such as Van Wilder, Margin Call and SXSW 2024 award winner Bob Trevino Likes It. “To properly manage and exploit a library takes time.”

Sales remains the focus at Myriad, although D’Amico also oversees a burgeoning co-production and US distribution business. Additionally, he and wife and business partner Zanne Devine are enjoying the fruits of Photon Films, the Canadian beachhead they own alongside partner and former eOne executive Mark Slone. “The films that we’re getting involved in are about something, whether that’s character or redemption or things that are wrong in the world,” D’Amico tells Screen International on the eve of AFM. “We want to be selling films we feel good about.”

The slate includes Miki Maga­siva’s inspirational New Zealand-set drama Tina, which opened this year and became the fifth highest-grossing local release ever in New Zealand on more than $3.7m through Madman; Sundance selection Last Days from Fast & Furious franchise director Justin Lin; Jeff Renfroe’s thriller The Pond starring Isabelle Fuhrman (Orphan horror series) and Douglas Smith, which Radial Entertainment holds for the US; and This Tempting Madness, a thriller starring Simone Ashley (Bridgerton).

D’Amico recently acquired international sales rights to a portion of Buffalo 8’s films, including thriller Atrabilious with Jeffrey Wright and Whoopi Goldberg; thriller The Reunion with Austin Amelio from Hit Man; and drama South Of Hope Street starring Tanna Frederick and Judd Nelson.

The Myriad team will kick off AFM with new EVP of distribution and acquisitions Nick Bennett, who joins a core team of VP of worldwide marketing and theatrical distribution Trish Vasquez and VP of business affairs Madina Kurmasheva. Reid Sullivan is CFO and Dennis Alfrey serves as VP servicing and post-production.

“We are doing more co-productions,” says D’Amico. He brings producers together and typically takes an executive producer credit as the company helps to close production financing, and manages back office and marketing and publicity.

D’Amico helped set up Uta Briesewitz’s SXSW thriller American Sweatshop starring Lili Reinhart, a co-production between Germany’s Elsany Film and MMC Studios and Austria’s Plaion Pictures that shot in Germany. Myriad will screen David Gleeson’s drama Once Upon A Time In A Cinema at AFM, an Ireland-Belgium co-production between Screen Ireland, Wide Eye Films and Belgium’s Umedia.

Keeping it separate

Co-productions in Canada often take shape in association with Photon, such as Tombs, Marie Clements’ upcoming Indigenous drama produced by Screen Siren in British Columbia and backed by Telefilm Canada. “Mark and his team in Toronto have done a terrific job,” D’Amico says of Photon, which will distribute in Canada recent Toronto selections Nouvelle Vague, ice-hockey remake Youngblood and crime drama Little Lorraine. Myriad does not necessarily sell international on films that Photon produces or distributes in Canada. “We’ve kept the two companies separate.”

Increasingly D’Amico is distributing in the US, where possible in tandem with Photon in Canada. This year Myriad released Las Tres Sisters starring Cristo Fernandez (Ted Lasso). “We brought in a booker and released on 170 screens. We sold it to Starz, organised the TVoD, and put it out on DVD through Kino Lorber,” says D’Amico. “It doesn’t make sense to sell a film to a US distributor for a nominal amount of money, and then that becomes part of their library and they decide what to do at every window. We generate more revenue for producers by organising the distribution.”

Coming in December is All The Names Of God directed by Daniel Calparsoro, plus Marcel Barrera’s joint Goya best picture winner The 47 in the first quarter of 2026. “We don’t want to be an aggregator,” notes D’Amico. “We want to be selective.”

Will he build a new library? “What’s best for each film? Sometimes having an ownership position makes more sense than taking something solely on a commission basis. If we keep doing what’s best for each film, it’s going to work to everybody’s benefit.” 

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