Those invested in the commercial viability of adult, complex, ambitious filmmaking tend to experience post-COVID box-office reports like a rollercoaster. Every year, some of the most heavily marketed, spectacularly reviewed awards contenders simply fail to take off with audiences. Cate Blanchett’s Tár brought in a fraction of the ticket sales it likely would’ve managed pre-COVID; ditto Steven Spielberg’s back-to-back best picture nominees West Side Story and The Fabelmans. As this fall season launched, highlighted by a bunch of promising titles, headlines indicated that the theatrical climate was not improving.
Allow me to play optimist for a moment here, though. The most creatively successful movies to come out of the year’s major film festivals, from Cannes to Telluride to Toronto, are by and large finding an audience. They’re building on the momentum of last year’s gains, which saw small and/or challenging titles ranging from Past Lives to The Zone of Interest to Poor Things gross north of $40 million globally—apiece.
Neon has been steadily rolling out its Palme d’Or winner, Anora, over the past few weeks to striking results. In its second weekend in theaters, the Sean Baker critical darling surged to no. 8 overall at the domestic box-office, despite screening in only 34 theaters; its opening frame elicited the second-best per-theater dollar average gross since COVID, and one that also would have been impressive in any year pre-2020, given its brazen originality and lack of marquee talent. Baker himself has been making movies for decades, and will easily set a box-office record for himself with Anora.
It’s the kind of traditional, gradual platform rollout that many consider to be dying, in an era where indies need to gobble up as much cash as quickly as possible. “There are some old tools that I think are still absolutely the way to bring films into market—launching at top-tier festivals, working your way into fall and setting yourself up for multiple windows,” Neon’s CEO Tom Quinn tells me. “The only thing I would say is, you can’t be a pretender. For those films that merit that kind of release, I think you can be handsomely rewarded.”
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Quinn knows a thing or two about this. Neon’s historic streak of backing five Palme d’Or winners in a row includes the phenomenon of Parasite and last year’s international juggernaut, Anatomy of a Fall. “Anatomy of a Fall was a $5 million grossing film, but on home [entertainment] it did the same number—which is off the charts. That’s 10 times what it should do on home-ent,” Quinn says. “When we tested Anatomy of a Fall, the number one reason why people came to see the film was that it won the Palme d’Or.”
