We are living in an era of superabundance, where my attention is more valuable than my money, and while this is great for audiences, it’s a disaster for arthouse and indie films seeking any revenue. There’s a small silver-lining for niche and social impact documentaries that want eyeballs more than dollars, but overall, the sector is imploding and no one is talking about it publicly, though its dominating the “off the record” conversations I’ve been having.

At the start of Covid-19, nearly every distributor and film festival moved to a virtual model. Distributors developed virtual cinema programs, pairing with theaters in an effort to make some money, keep a relationship with audiences and maybe save theatrical. At first, things looked pretty good – KinoLorber was reporting numbers that weren’t very dissimilar from their 2019 theatrical numbers, and they touted them in IndieWire and elsewhere. But you’re not seeing those stories in the press anymore, and I suspect that it’s because they’ve dropped down into the abyss, as many are reporting to me behind the scenes (I have not asked KinoLorber and don’t know how they’re doing, but know it’s not being reported anymore).

One distributor told me that their virtual box office dropped from 5-6 figures per title down to under $10,000 for a month-long run. Theaters have reported to me that they’ve played ten or more titles from some distributors over the past few months, and not only have they seen revenue decline to the few hundred dollars per title, but that they’ve not received reports or payments from many well-known arthouse distributors at all – but their patrons are getting inundated with spam emails for more titles. Theaters at first saw this as a way to stay relevant to patrons, but are increasingly getting desperate. A few have been able to open drive-ins, but these seem to be working mainly for repertory fare and bigger genre titles, mainly horror – but they’ll take the revenue.

This past week saw the launch of the NYT’s new documentary, Father, Soldier, Son on Netflix. It is a feature documentary, but the NYT is also supporting it with advertising; an introductory article about the history of the piece; a robust interactive feature story, that is also duplicated in print via a 72 page special  section of the newspaper that was delivered over the weekend; plugs in their What’s On TV section; through a movie review by critic Jessica Kiang (with an embedded Netflix trailer/ad, and direct links to tickets for which they get an affiliate fee, which they do with most films); a Times Insider piece, which in print sits just inside the front page, and which also promotes the genesis of the project; and of course through their social media pages, including Facebook during the #stophateforprofit campaign, also with Netflix Originals logos. In other words, the full court press.

As I posted on LinkedIn last week, let’s be clear – This is Branded Content. The Brand is the NYT and they are promoting their brand via their journalism and their film criticism and every other resource simultaneously. It is also simultaneously brilliant, well-executed branded entertainment that others should emulate, an ethical conundrum to consider for the future of journalism, and possible the most meta-media occurrence of late (which Noah Cowan pointed out on my post). So what are we to make of the NYT as publisher and brand?
 

Monday we collectively crossed the rubicon. My emails, zooms, conversations took a darker turn. The USA has changed its name to DumpsterFire. Trump trademarked the name, but it’s been a crowdsourced effort. As the US started locking down again, and even Hong Kong started to re-close theaters, the film world seems to have collectively woken up to the reality that this shit is real and nothing is getting better anytime soon. So what do we do to survive?
 
Small businesses are giving up. Cases are climbing. Schools are in turmoil. Cities, Counties, States and entire Countries that were doing better are not looking good for the future (but I’m mainly writing about the US here). Behind the scenes, I’ve had conversations I can’t detail with experts I can’t name (but anyone who knows me personally can gather that I have some good sources) that public health experts are a) not feeling we’re ready to open as much as we’ve done, and b) are headed towards surges that no one is publicly discussing. And what little we’ve done to prepare, is publicly known to not be enough.
 
Promising developments are starting to fail. I’ve argued about flaws in some of the models, but it has been great to see festivals, distributors, individual filmmakers, and in other arts, things like theater and dance, and even art auctions switching to online offerings, drive-ins and distanced screening ideas. But even here, reports remain the same as elsewhere – because of no centralized leadership, and a forced reliance on ad hoc, entrepreneurial decisions (partly a good thing) – we have a cacophony of shouts for solutions, but no coordination and thus declining attendance, impressions, sales and a lessening in any metric you might measure. The emails between potential collaborators have moved from positive outcomes to private confessions that we’ve been building solutions for a quicker recovery than will ever be possible and far too few of us can weather another 6-12 months or longer in this Sisyphean slog.
 

The big news this week was that Britain is Investing £1.57 billion in the Arts (about $2-B USD), showing that even a dysfunctional government can figure out a way to save culture (wouldn’t that be nice here?…). Boris Johnson announced major grants and loans (predominantly grants) “to protect Britain’s world-class cultural, arts and heritage institutions.” Read about it from the UK gov’s website here.
 
But as the NYT reports, Germany is giving 1 Billion Euros, France is giving 5 Billion and even smaller countries like the Netherlands have given 600 million. Looking at this can make a US citizen cry because we’ll never see something like this here. But here’s the thing – Britain’s investment came after a concerted effort, and was never a sure thing. From the NYT: “The British package was met with surprise by the country’s theater industry, which had been running a coordinated, celebrity-led campaign for weeks in a bid for support as theaters announced major layoffs.”
 
Over here in the US? We get Gal Gadot’s disastrous video of Imagine. Where’s our movement to save the arts? Pretty much nowhere to be found. Jesse Green, again at the NYT, wrote a scathing piece about the lack of activism by the American Theater world, saying its leaders have been clueless and absent, adding: “But the American theater’s biggest failure is the one that renders it helpless in an existential crisis like this. In allowing itself to be cast as just another industry — a role it does not even play very well — it has disowned its true identity as a public entitlement.” But he should be calling out the entire field of the arts. In America, there hasn’t been any real/concerted effort to galvanize the public to support the arts. In fact, most arts leaders gave up, before even trying.

This week’s newsletter is coming a day late, because today’s article ran first in IndieWire (slightly edited). Check it our there or below:

For the past few weeks, practically every business involved in the film industry – from Studios to Platforms to Agencies to Filmmakers – has been signaling their support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and for waking up to the need to support more BIPOC filmmakers, films, artists, talent and causes. This is a great thing, especially if it leads to action as opposed to just talk.

But when it comes to a closely related cause – the #StopHateForProfit boycott of Facebook, the industry thus far has been pretty silent. This needs to change; the film industry needs to follow Magnolia Picture’s lead and join the #StopHateForProfit campaign, and fast. The campaign starts July 1, and as of this writing, it looks like the only film companies on the official list of companies boycotting Facebook in July are: Magnolia, the Coolidge Corner Theater, and somewhat tangentially, Verizon. More may add their names soon, but that’s a pretty low count. Where are the other indie distributors? The film festivals? The studios, broadcasters and platforms (especially)? Where are the nonprofits who support filmmakers, and run the Award shows? Where are we in the mix?