SME#25: Cannes Film Festival: Taking the Pulse of the Streamers & Movie Business Relationship
Streaming Made Easy #25
Welcome back to Streaming Made Easy. This week, we discuss how the Cannes Film Festival is a good indicator of the Streamers & Movie Business relationship.
Today at a glance:
Thought: Cannes Film Festival: Taking the Pulse of the Streamers-Movie Business Relationship
Streamer snapshot: 3 Cannes Festival Hubs to binge watch movies
Content recommendation: My top 5 “Palme d’Or” movies
💡Thought:
Tomorrow, the 76th Cannes Film Festival will come to an end. Bets are in as to who will win this year’s Palme d’Or which is the biggest reward you can get on the festival circuit.
I can’t place bets this year as I didn’t attend. One thing I can do though is discuss the relationship between streamers and Cannes and what it tells us about Streaming & Theatrical.
Beforehand a snapshot of the festival is in order to explain why this event is so important to the movie industry:
It’s not one festival but several in one. You have the main competition, the hors competition (movies are screened but do not compete), “Un certain regard”, “La Quinzaine”, “La Semaine de la Critique”, “Cannes Classics”, “Cannes Première”…
In total, 156 long-feature films are screened (out of 2000 films submitted).
It’s more than a festival, it’s also a major film market. Beyond the glamourous red carpets, you have execs (12.500 on average) running around to pitch a library of 4000 titles and make deals on the spot. Check out my friends at Le Dispatch for the latest market deals.
It’s a turism booster for Cannes. The city of Cannes has 72K inhabitants. During the Festival, the number goes up to 230K. 80K of them have accreditations including 4000 journalists from 90 countries.
Enough with the numbers, I think you got it: the Festival is big and global.
More importantly, the Festival is a fantastic launch ramp for new movies and as streamers invest increasingly in original movies, Cannes is a must stop for them.
Looking at their investment in Europe, it went from 2 titles in 2016 to 75 in 2022 (source: Observatoire européen de l’audiovisuel).
Streamers invest in original movies for three reasons:
Tap into the local creative community and tell local stories appealing to local subs.
Hope some of these local stories will perform globally.
French movie “AKA” is n°4 of this week’s Global Top 10 (for its 4th week) and the movie even made Nielsen’s Top 10: AKA is indeed the 2nd best start for a European movie.
Abide by the investment obligations imposed at country and European levels.
Streamers and Cannes weren’t always best friends though and for good reason: one side celebrates the big screen experience when the other releases straight-to-streaming titles.
Back in 2017, Netflix’s titles “Okja” and “The Meyerowitz Stories” were selected by the Festival. This caused turmoil at the time with distributors, producers and movie theatre owners claiming that straight-to-streaming movies had no place here and were a threat to their business.
A year after, the Festival introduced a new criteria : a movie can be selected only if it has a theatrical release planned.
It led Netflix to pull out of the event altogether. Everyone sticked to their guns leaving movies from major directors like Scorsese or Cuaron off the red carpet.
For a few years, it was Cannes vs streaming much like what we witnessed during the pandemic with theatrical vs streaming.
Fast forward to today, there is general consensus within the industry that straight-to-streaming doesn’t do much for streamers (see a great piece from The Entertainment Strategy Guy) and we’ve entered an era where theatrical and streaming seem to be working hand in hand.
Even Netflix now makes exceptions with short theatrical releases: “Knives out 2”, “May December” etc.
Now that the two patched things up, it was only natural to see key streamers on the Croisette:
→ The Film Market organised a two-day event called “Streamers’ Forum” where SkyShowtime, Netflix and Amazon shared what’s trending in the world of streamers, explain concretely how to work with them, present plans for upcoming releases, and share their vision for the future of streaming.
→ Scorsese “Killers of the flower moon” will get a global theatrical release before heading to Apple TV+, as will Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon”.
→ Netflix bought Todd Hayne’s movie “May December” for 11M$.
→ HBO Max premiered the 1st two episodes of its latest series “The idol”.
→ Zaslav was spotted on the red carpet for the world premiere of the documentary “100 years of Warner Bros”, and so did Iger for the screening of the 5th “Indiana Jones”.
Black and white strategies have no place in our industry. Some movies are a perfect fit for streaming only releases, others will live a longer life with a step-by-step release strategy. Every audience, every market will also have different expectations and habits when it comes to movie consumption.
Glad to see the two worlds finding some common (grey) grounds again.
📺 Streamer snapshot:
This week, I want to shed light on 3 Cannes Film Festival hubs created for the occasion:
one from a Public Service Broadcaster,
one from a Pay TV provider and,
one from a streamer.
Festivals are indeed a great opportunity to promote library titles which may be dormant the rest of the year.
France Télévisions: The official sponsor of the Festival naturally polished its hub with a mix of back catalogue (more than 18 movies from previous editions are available) plus all the live content created every day on the spot so that you can live Cannes as if you were there.
MyCanal: With Canal+ being the biggest financer of cinema in France (190M€ per year to fund French movies), it’s no surprise to see them lean heavily on the Festival.
It’s your go to hub to watch premium fresh movies from last year’s Festival: Triangle of sadness (Palme d’Or 2022), EO, Decision to leave, L’innocent, Top Gun Maverick.
MUBI: did a Cannes takeover with 100+ library titles. From Stranger than paradise, to Festen or In the mood for love, this is THE cinephile hub.
🎬 Content recommendation:
You know I love making Top 5 or Top 10s so here goes, in no particular order, my top 5 “Palme d’Or” movies:
The son’s room - Nanni Moretti - 2001
The conversation - Francis Ford Coppola - 1974
Pulp Fiction - Quentin Tarantino - 1994
The pianist - Roman Polanski - 2002
Parasite - Bong Joon Ho - 2019
Here’s the full list of Palme d’Or (well almost MUBI didn’t include the 2022 winner “Triangle of sadness”), pick your favourites and share with me below.
That’s it folks. Enjoy your weekend and see you next Friday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!
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