The Hot Blog

« HAH!™ | Main | How Desperate Is WB? »

February 09, 2010

Defining Indie 2010: Dependents, Full Indies, Mid-Indies, Micro-Indies & House Indies

As I discussed in a previous post, the indie world is now defining itself, both in methods and semantics.

This morning, indieWIRE broke the news that Jose Lopez is reopening New Yorker Films, sans Dan Talbott. This is the hot model for 2010… the House Indie.

I am told that we will have at least one more House Indie announced this very week, also loaded up with high profile indiers.

The field has thinned enough, the options narrowed enough, that indie is now heading into what has been the internet model in news/information for a while now. The technology created access to entry that had never existed before. For those of us from the old days, web sites grew from single pages to deep catalogs, to blogs, which aren't just a name that sounds like someone vomiting but were a new point of entry that made web pages instant to create and easy to maintain. In the information universe, that still left Television, Radio, The Print Bigs, The Alt Weeklies, The Magazines, and The Print Locals.

Narrowing the discussion to the movie info business, aside from the very, very rare Broken News, involving actual reporting and investigation, we have seen the spread of information that chooses how to be released to a much wider selection of outlets. Each choice is made with a purpose. It's not that someone wants to release information, it is how they want that information to be released... what spin they want... how seriously it is meant to be taken... how it will spread out over the audience that the person/organization releasing the information is seeking to reach. Entertainment news is marketing, 98% of the time.

The Indie version of this is that we had Dependents, True Indies, and Micro-Indies as recently as 2 years ago. The emergence of VOD – which expands audience and reduces per-unit revenue - combined with the studios giving up on much of the Dependent business, changed the field. Former True Indies - IFC and Magnolia - moved themselves down a notch, not abandoning the theatrical business, but moving away from it with much of the product they pick up. They are now Mid-Indies. Meanwhile, new independent distributors, like Oscilloscope and Apparition, are still finding their feet, not quite fish and not quite fowl.

But the new event in all of this is that with IFC and Magnolia becoming the indie engines of the new VOD business, their limited theatrical meant that ambitious wannabe distributors could see that they could offer most of what those two well-established companies could offer. Set VOD and DVD deals... promise a small theatrical to prime the pump and to potentially hit an oil well... and market the movies well.

Equally important, if not most important, the price for which IFC, Magnolia, and sometimes Dependents as big as Sony Classics and on down, were/are buying movies that are not assumed to be instant home runs for so little money that the incentive for filmmakers of these films changed. (Yes, there will eventually be future Little Miss Sunshine 2s and Hamlet 3s... and they will be freaks, as they always were.) All of a sudden, the hard reality that there was not going to be nearly enough money upfront from a sale to cover production became an asset, in that the artists - and their funders - could start to consider who they really wanted to be in business with and not just who was buying that had some distribution channel.

Now... that doesn't mean that for the same $100k, Sony Classics does not still have a big advantage over many of the Mid-Indies and the new House Indies (explanation on the way). It does. The Sony Home Entertainment machine is huge. All kinds of opportunities lurk in the nooks and crannies of a company as big as Sony. And Bernard & Barker, for better or worse, are uniquely independent within that big structure, while also being very good at manipulating the internal politics to get what they want from Daddy when they feel it's important.

However... if you are at Sundance and you have a movie that has no offers better than $100k, you may well feel emboldened to feel that zero dollars (round it up a little) with the right company is more valuable to your film's future than $100k to be with the wrong company.

At Sundance this year, we saw 4 of the 10 sales so far to Oprah's cable net, a book publisher, a direct-to-DVD company trying to expand into theatrical, and Newmarket, which has been in a coma for a while.

And why not? Not being established does mean that releases are fraught with additional danger. But there is also no reason why, in an era when there will be 4-walled films that will outdo most of the indie field at the box office, these new entities, even without any film background, cannot compete when the bar is under $1 million in theatrical and under $2m in VOD.

And so, get ready for a wider wave of House Indies... like blogs, often built out of people's homes and apartments... founded on the relationships of the principals... funded, but not deep in cash... perfectly capable of pushing out a half-dozen films a year, post-theatrical solid and a cursory theatrical with the potential to go wider if things go uniquely well. These are not the $200 million start-ups that were so popular 3-5 years ago. These are $200,000 start-ups... $500,000 start-ups. And they can compete with serious, grown-up distributors who are post-theatrically focused right away.

The Micro-Indies are quality niche distributors that generate less than $3 million a year in theatrical, but release more than a film or two. They rely on post-theatrical to survive, but are still committed to theatrical on a narrow basis. I expect many of these companies to shift to other statuses in the years to come, whether narrowing to being House Indies or reaching to become Mid-Indies. The top examples of this group are Regent Releasing (gay), Yash Raj (Indian), Music Box (foreign), AdLabs (Indian), Zeitgeist, Screen Media, First Run (docs), Strand, and Cinema Guild. I would have previously put Vitagraph in this group, but they seem to be one that is leaning towards House Indie, with just 2 releases last year.

A company like Truly Indie, which was quite successful last year, is more of a distribution service business than being a distributor itself.

The Mid-Indies are the companies that lean heavily to post-theatrical, but are not shy about going wider. These would be IFC, Magnolia, Roadside, Oscilloscope (which straddles the border with being a great House Indie), Sam Goldwyn, and First Look (whatever's left of it).

The Full Indies are stand-alone companies that focus on theatrical first: Lionsgate, Summit, The Weinstein Co, Overture, Apparition, and Freestyle Releasing. Obviously, there is a wide range of histories and styles in this group. Apparition, for instance, has the kind of studio deal for films Sony doesn't want to release internally that Roadside and Sam Goldwyn used to have... and is still establishing how strong it will be with its own product. But it qualifies for this group because they are consistently doing 300+ screen releases. Freestyle has had more success with crap than with quality, but they are still trying to do both and while some of the films go small, they are capable and willing to chase a 1000+ screen release launch as well.

And the surviving Dependents are Fox Searchlight, Focus Features/kinda Rogue, and Sony Pictures Classics.

Why do we need 5 categories of Indie to understand the American independent world of the moment? Because it is that complicated. And in each group, the passionate people who establish, fight for, live and breathe these businesses deserve the respect of being seen in their own niches. Zeitgeist isn't Sony Classics... but they are offering a very different perspective on the films they release. Success must be measured differently. And it is not manipulative to do so.

My phone will ring and my inbox will churn with notes about how this company should be in this category or that I missed another. I am not trying to narrow the options for these companies here. They can all move up the ladder or down the ladder... and what is up and what is down can be debated.

What is the future for the indies? No one really knows. Will there be another film that breaks through, without being massively funded, and shows the way to big grossing opportunity? Probably. Will VOD be the destruction of indie theatrical? Not sure. It will probably narrow the opportunity for some, but create a vacuum that creates more opportunity for the few titles that do get a shot.

But we have all been struggling to get a handle on it for years now. And it always seems to me that the best way to start thinking clearly is to define terms. This is my modest attempt to start down that road.

Posted by dpoland at February 9, 2010 11:44 AM

Comments

Posted by: marychan at February 9, 2010 06:29 PM

Posted by: jennab at February 10, 2010 10:51 AM

Posted by: J. Sperling Reich at February 11, 2010 05:10 PM

Post a comment