Crowded Indie Market Ratchets Up Competition For An Uncertain Audience – Specialty Preview
deadline.comIndie distributors are fretting about the current marketplace, specifically a glut of films vying for precious theater space and hard-to-snare audiences who, with exceptions of course, still seems mostly willing to come out for big ticket films.
While there are fewer wide studio releases than pre-Covid, theaters are giving them more space, up to 60%-70% of their real estate, a few indies execs said.
Meanwhile, it’s become cheaper to distribute films, which may be why new firms keep popping up to test the waters and in some cases open their movies on hundreds of screens, perhaps without a commensurate marketing effort. “There is a lot of stuff being released, but nothing is performing,” says one indie distribution executive.
Films like Deadpool or Beetlejuice Beetlejuice work, “but everything else is a crapshoot. “Whether consumers are going to movies other that the big ones has been the question, and still is.” “The new normal is so many movies being released every week a lot wider,” notes another exec, speculating that the glut of moderate releases may be a delayed effect of the end of most virtual print fees (VPF).
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