BoxOffice® Pro - May 2013

festival seating
the artist was the darling of
cannes in 2011. Jean Dujardin
and Bérénice Bejo chramed
france, the oscars, and
audiences worldwide
are often in competition at Cannes and have
strong drawing power on a global level. Inglourious
Basterds was his last film to be an official
selection and went on to gross more than $321
million worldwide.
AWARDS
The top prize at Cannes rarely goes to the
most marketable film in competition. Juries
across the years have continually rewarded
unconventional films from visionary directors.
This can make a Palme d’Or winner harder to
market on a theatrical release.
The best recent example of this is Apichatpong
Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who
Can Recall His Past Lives, distributed in North
America by Strand Releasing a year after
winning the Palme d’Or in 2010. Strand has
experience in getting the most out of tough-tomarket
niche releases, including other Cannes
competition films like Lucrecia Martel’s
pensive The Headless Woman, Carlos Reygadas’
experimental feature Post Tenebras Lux, and
Markus Schleinzer’s Michael, a film about a pedophile’s
relationship with the abducted child
he keeps in his basement. A slow, meditative
film with surrealist qualities, Uncle Boonmee
had little more than critical adulation and a
great poster to find a wide audience. The film
grossed
$184, 292 in North America.
Sony Pictures Classics has distributed
three of the last five Palme d’Or winners in
North America. Dylan Leiner, the company’s
executive vice-president of acquisitions and
production, emphasizes the award’s importance
for a film’s release:
“The awards in Cannes aren’t as valuable [in
North America] as in other parts of Western
Europe,” he admits. “But people here do
recognize the value of a Palme d’Or. It gives
the public an idea that it is an important film.
Prizes in Cannes can definitely help; they don’t
necessarily impact the box office directly, but
it creates a snowball effect of people hearing
about the film and wanting to discover it.”
Being part of that dialogue is especially
important for these films to pick up traction
heading to a North American release. Sony
Pictures Classics views its Cannes strategy as a
platform to launch and acquire projects.
“It has always been an important festival
for us in terms of launching and acquiring
movies. Last year we had Rust and Bone and
Amour going to the festival in the official selection
as high-profile titles that launched out of
Cannes,” explains Leiner.
“It’s also a great place for people to discover
movies. There are so many different voices
commenting on the films—programmers, critics,
audiences—making it a great environment
to acquire movies when you’re around that
much feedback.”
The two most recent SPC titles to win the
Palme d’Or have come from Austrian filmmaker
Michael Haneke. The White Ribbon won the
prize in 2009 and scored an Academy nomination
for best foreign film, leading to a North
American gross of $2.2 million. Last year’s
winner, Amour, was able to gain Academy
nominations for Best Picture, director, actress,
and original screenplay. It won the Oscar for
best foreign film and has grossed more than $6
million in North America as of press time.
The awards exposure has helped make
Amour the highest-grossing film of Haneke’s
career. This is the sort of dialogue that can help
propel a Palme d’Or-winning film to a strong
box office performance in the United States.
Malick’s The Tree of Life divided audiences
during its theatrical run but was buoyed by
its Palme d’Or and Academy nominations for
Best Picture, directing, and cinematography on
its way to grossing $13 million domestically.
The biggest Cinderella story for Cannes
competition films of the last five years occurred
in 2011, when the Weinstein Company
aggressively pursued the distribution rights for
a period-set silent French film. The Artist is one
of the most unlikely box office success stories
to ever come out of Cannes. Despite only
winning a best actor award at the festival, The
Artist quietly began picking up steam through
awards season, culminating with an Academy
Award for Best Picture. Audiences around the
world responded to the film, propelling it to a
$132 million global gross.
The box office success of a film like The
Artist is a reminder of the potential that
even the most hard-to-market titles from the
Cannes competition can break through at the
North American box office. There are no secret
formulas or magic strategies to tracking a film’s
financial possibilities. The specialty market
does, however, offer interesting chances to
overlap with more mainstream exhibitors in
offering audiences new and exciting art-house
films from around the world. All bets are open
to what this May will bring in terms of titles.
Perhaps the next success story is only months
away from being embraced by audiences.
78 BoxOffice ® Pro The Business of Movies may 2013