When the lights came on after Jordan Firstman’s Cannes premiere Kid Clubthe writer-director held his 14-year-old star, Reggie Absolom, in his arms and started a chant in his honor. He knew he had a winner.
After a few days and nights of bidding war, he was proven right. A24 has set eight figures for worldwide rights to the first film of Firstman, beating Focus Features, Searchlight, Netflix and Mubi to this year’s Cannes success story. For a market that was screaming for a real breakthrough, the $17 million global deal was the adrenaline shot everyone needed.
Kid Clubwhich premiered in a special look, stars Firstman as a drug-addicted gay party promoter who spent a decade on dance floors and in dark rooms with no particular plan for the future — until the son he never knew showed up on his doorstep. Warm, funny and genuinely moving, but with plenty of action, the film sparked the kind of competitive feeding frenzy that used to be a regular feature of the Marché. This year, it was the exception.
The other notable deal came thanks to Amazon, which signed the largest sale deal in the market and obtained most of the international rights to Black pumpinga new psychological thriller from fresh Directed by Mimi Cave, it is set in the world of competitive bike racing and stars Jonathan Bailey and Natalie Portman. Two eight-figure deals to close the Cannes Film Market. On paper, a solid finish. In practice, there were a pair of bright lights in a very dark room.
There was business going on in Cannes. The corridors of the Palais des Festivals were crowded enough and there were plenty of offers on offer – although most of them were announced late, making buyers worry that they didn’t have enough time to read the scripts, let alone place offers. A lot of the real deals will happen after Cannes, after international buyers return home and crunch the numbers. Which is another way of saying that the market didn’t really close, it was just postponed.
This indicates something deeper. The independent film industry is going through a transition, and no one has figured out where it’s going.
The old model – one that has maintained an independent ecosystem for decades – is clearly eroding. At its center was the pay-TV window: a lucrative, predictable revenue stream that allowed distributors to take risks in pre-sale, backing films before the frame was shot based on talent and promising exposure. Streaming platforms, which negotiate their own deals on their own terms, have largely destroyed that window. What independent distributors are left with is a landscape stripped of the financial cushions that once made the risk viable.
“Buyers are very specific about what they want and how much risk they are willing to take,” says Matt Broadley of Upgrade Productions. Deals for projects that exceed a certain budget level, or that do not have a clear, clear path to commercial success, take much longer to close.
For producers, says David Garrett of Smith Entertainment, who has been navigating these markets for decades, this means “relying more on equity financing and soft money to finance films.” The result is a buyer’s market without enough buyers — or at least without buyers willing to commit large sums of money up front. Films that would previously have elicited competitive bidding are screened to attract polite attention and non-binding follow-up meetings.
But that’s the thing about a void: there’s always something to fill it. And this year at Cannes, you can see the outlines of what this thing could be – not one model, but several.
One, increasingly compelling, answer to the challenge of independent film distribution is community. Watermelon Pictures, a Chicago-based company co-founded by brothers Badie and Hamza Ali, focuses primarily on films about the Palestinian and Arab experience, and has built its entire operation around the idea that a deeply engaged and underserved audience is a more reliable foundation than any pre-sales agreement. The distributor deploys WhatsApp groups, community leaders, and social media influencers to attract audiences to cinemas, which has produced notable results: three of its Palestinian-focused films – Palestine 36, All that’s left of youand Hind Rajib’s voicewas shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Film, with Hind Rajib’s voice Nomination registration.
A religious alternative to the same logic has produced even more dramatic results. Faith Distributor Angel Studios (King of kings, Voice of freedom) is expanding rapidly throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia. The chosen onea multi-season drama about the life of Jesus, funded entirely by the Christian non-profit Come and See, has grossed more than $120 million worldwide through theatrical releases of its episodes.
“We are truly a fan-driven production company,” says Mark Surian, president of production at 5&2 Studios, which produces. The chosen one. “In the 21st century, if you are not in direct contact with your audience, if you let your film ‘speak for itself,’ you will lose control of the conversation.” 5&2 Studios was in Cannes to promote its first independent film, Chosen One: Steelwhich will be released by Amazon MGM next spring.
This lesson of going directly to fans is one that has been internalized by a generation of online content creators who are now turning to features with their audiences already in sync. like Kid ClubFrontman (who started on Instagram) and horror filmmaker Mark Edward Fischbach (aka Markiplier), a YouTube influencer who self-distributes his videos Iron lung It has grossed over $50 million worldwide, and has featured both. Firstman’s fluency with social media was not incidental to A24’s interest in it Kid ClubIt was part of the package.
Then there’s the reissue model, less flashy but quietly significant. Warner Bros. The new Clockwork label has introduced a restored version Devils At Cannes Classics and Cineverse showed the new 20th anniversary, 4K version of Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s maze Before the theatrical releases of the films this fall. Del Toro himself put it simply: “The future of theater is a mix of re-released films and new films. You put it Road warrior On the big screen, I’m there. I put it Devils“I’m there.”
None of these models are a clean replacement for what the independent industry has lost. But taken together, these findings suggest that independent film audiences haven’t gone anywhere. It’s just waiting to be accessed in new ways – whether that’s via your church network, a WhatsApp group, or a YouTube comments section. The deal-making machinery at Cannes may be broken. People ready to reinvent it are already here.
