As Cannes draws to a close, UK sellers have reported good business from buyers who generally responded positively to projects that were very clear propositions.
“If you’ve got the right actors, the right director, the right pitch and you’re clear what genre it is, and it doesn’t fall between the cracks, then there is a lot of activity,” said Protagonist Pictures senior vice president of sales and distribution, Sarah Lebutsch.
Spencer Pollard, Kaleidoscope CEO, reported robust activity on documentary Strange Journey: The Story Of Rocky Horror.
“It is firmly aimed at a particular audience and buyers and the public know, and in a lot cases, love the IP, so this was a title that attracted lots of interest,” he said.
Buyers from Germany and Eastern Europe were particularly active, but the US was still a challenge owing to the disappearance of its pay-1 deals. There was also a downturn in French buyers offering ambitious minimum guarantees amid uncertainty around the impact of the cut in investment from Canal+.
“Everybody around the world is hoping for pay-1 windows and buyers to open up more – and we have to believe that as the year goes on those opportunities will begin to avail again,” noted Pollard.
Horror is still a safe bet. “Genre movies can be made for a [reasonable] price, so there isn’t a huge burden on the cost,” said Zygi Kamasa, founder and CEO of UK distributor True Brit for whom horror has been a key target this year.
“We’ve been very active .We’ve picked up two British movies, Rapture and the reboot of Creep, The Creep. Horror is a great theatrical piece of business, people want to go to the cinema in groups to see horror still. British horror has been underserved recently. It’s great we’ve got quite a few British horrors on our slate.”
While horror remains a bedrock genre, an easing of the saturation seen in the last couple of major markets was apparent. “There was a lot of horror in the market, but buyers said that maybe as a percentage it was a little less than Berlin and AFM, that were so horror heavy,” said Protagonist’s Lebutsch. “There was still plenty to go around, but maybe a bit less of a focus overall.”
An overall slowness in the market was detected as a knock-on from the high prices being asked in negotiations for the likes of Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping and The Rider and The Drama for A24. As buyers sit tight to see what happens with the big-ticket projects, UK sellers were left waiting in the wings with their projects in the mid-budget range.
There were also signs Russia, previously an active territory for the UK’s sellers, was not as hungry for indie fare, as US-Russia relations ease under Donald Trump’s presidency, perhaps opening up opportunities for Hollywood films to be distributed in Russia officially for the first time since the breakout of the war on Ukraine in 2022.
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