There are two ways Neon cuts through the noise of a crowded distribution landscape and talent needs to be aligned in order to achieve success, senior executive Jeff Deutchman has told an industry audience.
“The key to maintaining our business in a way that can sustain is through a couple of different transformations,” the company’s head of acquisitions, production and development said. “One is cost sensitivity and the other is eventising everything that we do.”
Deutchman continued, “Movies probably can’t cost what they used to, especially if it’s important to us to take creative risks and have a robust theatrical release. And it’s important for talent, especially the highest-paid talent, to get on board with that.”
Speaking in his first trip to Brazil at the sixth Audiovisual Ideas Market, the business arm of the 50th São Paulo International Film Festival known as Mostra de São Paulo, Deutchman said there must still be a compelling reason for people to go to the cinema.
“That can be spectacle, quality, originality or representation,” he said. “But it has to be something.” He added, “If there’s a crisis, as I understand it, it would be that film is no longer the only dominant popular art form. We have to share eyeballs with many other media and art. But the good news is there is evidence that it’s only going to erode the film business by so much, because the actual movie-going is thriving right now.”
The allure of ‘The Secret Agent’
Deutchman used Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Oscar-nominated The Secret Agent (2025) to illustrate Neon’s interest in Brazilian storytelling. “I remember my first thoughts, especially through the first two-thirds of the film: I felt like I was watching the best American studio thriller since Michael Clayton [2007], despite not being an American studio film. It’s very Brazilian, but it feels still better than anything the studios have produced in a very long time.”
Because the film could be marketed as a thriller, Deutchman “knew’’ it would get great reviews and work well for a US audience. Out of the $22m-plus at the worldwide box office, $4.3m came from North America. The Secret Agent earned four Oscar nominations for best picture, international feature film, lead actor for Wagner Moura, and casting.
“Kleber understands the language of classic Hollywood cinema so well and uses it so expertly. But then he also pulls the rug out and upends a lot of the expectations”, added Deutchman. There had been speculation that Neon might acquire Brazil’s current Oscar submission, Allan Deberton’s Gugu’s World, however despite a meeting with the film team in São Paulo, it is understood there has been no deal.
In terms of Neon’s overall success, Deutchman attributes it “to having dexterity to handle all different-size movies”. The company’s track record includes seven consecutive Cannes Palme d’Or winners, most recently Fjord earlier this year.
“When you’re an independent film company, you can’t afford to be too specific,’’ Deutchman said, adding that flexibility has allowed Neon to be “more imaginative”. He added, “We might buy a film because it feels like a good arthouse title. But as we get closer to release, we might see that there’s an opportunity to do something bigger with it.”
What has not changed since the company was founded in 2017 is “the underdog mentality and the entrepreneurial spirit”. “When you limit the risks that you can take, you miss things. And audiences frequently want something new, such as Parasite [2019] or Longlegs [2024],” the executive added.
Neon set out to disprove the fallacy that there was a ceiling on how well international films could perform in the US. “The only way to do that was to take the risk of treating these films the same way we would treat any English-language film on our slate in terms of spending,” he said.
The first film where Neon adopted this strategy was Ali Abbasi’s Border in 2018. “But it didn’t work, despite being an amazing film. The second one we did it with was Parasite,” he recalled, referencing Bong Joon Ho’s $250m global box-office hit that became the first non-English language film to win best picture at the 2020 Oscars.
However he advised with a laugh that it was crucial not to draw the wrong conclusion from that film’s historic achievement. “When Parasite was a hit, we didn’t say to ourselves, ‘We have to go find a new Korean Hitchcockian thriller.’ That is the solution.”
Mostra de São Paulo closes on October 29.
No comments yet