The big news out of this year's Sundance Film Festival was, unquestionably, the sheer amount of money thrown around by
After a few notable pickups (Manchester by the Sea in 2016, The Big Sick in 2017), the company sat out the 2018 festival, and everyone presumed it would do the same this year. But then, under the new management of Jennifer Salke (a TV vet from NBC), Amazon went and made a bunch of high-profile grabs. It spent $46 million on this year's acquisitions, more than double what a major studio would usually spend on the event.
It picked up Nisha Ganatra's crowd-pleasing Late Night (a comedy about a female late-night talk show host starring Emma Thompson and written by co-star Mindy Kaling) for $13 million. It paid $14m for Scott Z. Burns' "post-9/11 torture scandal" drama The Report (starring Adam Driver and Annette Bening) and another $14m for Jillian Bell's comedy Brittany Runs a Marathon. Oh, and it bought Shia LaBeouf's semi-autobiographical Honey Boy for $5m.
It grabbed almost every high-profile flick, save for (among others) Joe Berlinger's Zac Efron-as-Ted-Bundy drama Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (which went to Netflix for $9 million) and Gurinder Chadha's coming-of-age drama Blinded by the Light (which went to New Line for a whopping $15m). It was a surprising turn of events at a festival where even one $10m+ pickup is considered a big deal.
As for Amazon's show of force, it was just that.
This was about declaring the company a home for acclaimed festival movies, which in this case were (more or less) the kind of old-school studio programmers that don't have a chance in hell in theaters anymore. It's worth noting that two of Amazon's big theatrical hits were the 2016 Sundance pick (Manchester by the Sea won a few Oscars and earned $79 million worldwide) and the 2017 Sundance pick (The Big Sick earned $56m worldwide). They earned $47m and $42m in North America, respectively, while no other Amazon Studios release has earned even $15m. Those two had help (Manchester was released via Roadside Attractions, and Big Sick was a Lionsgate release); Amazon going it alone has yielded mostly grim results (its biggest domestic grosser is Beautiful Boy, with just $7m).
To be fair, Sundance isn't necessarily where you go to snag big theatrical hits; you're far more likely to get the likes of Patti Cake, Assassination Nation, Happy Texas and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl than anything resembling Memento, Clerks, Little Miss Sunshine or The Blair Witch Project. Heck, Winter's Bone is considered a Sundance breakout, and that Best Picture nominee (which launched Jennifer Lawrence's film career) earned a whopping $7 million in the summer of 2010. That's quadruply true in today's theatrical environment, where adults barely see adult-oriented movies in theaters and almost never go to the movies just to go to the movies.
While I'm assuming that the likes of Late Night and The Report will play in theaters (and heck, Late Night may even be one of those rare $40 million+ Sundance flicks), this isn't necessarily about striking box office gold. At the risk of boiling this down to one simple reason, I would argue that this is a way to help make Amazon Prime (the streaming service, specifically) that much more of a must-have subscription as the streaming wars heat up.
With Disney+ about to launch and the likes of Warner Media and Universal/Comcast planning their own streaming services, we're about to find out if the copious streaming offerings can thrive (or even survive) alongside one another. Will folks who proudly "cut the cord" on traditional cable be willing to pay about as much for a half-dozen streaming options even when the combined monthly bill is about as much as a conventional DirecTV or Spectrum cable package? Consumers may willingly pay $100 per month for a bunch of streaming options instead of cable (since at least you don't have to fast-forward through commercials), or maybe we'll start seeing old-school bundles ("Subscribe to any six streaming services for just $50!"), or consumers will commit to only a few.
If it's "just a few," then it's just a question of which ones are considered essential. As of now, I would argue that the advantage goes to Netflix (because of its pop culture dominance), Disney+ (either because you have kids or because you want the new Star Wars and MCU shows) and Amazon (because you want that free two-day shipping anyway). But that's not a guarantee, and I would wager that Amazon's Sundance spending spree is about declaring itself a safe home for acclaimed festival darlings that would otherwise die badly in theaters.
Netflix is still dealing with the icky fact that most of its high-profile originals (save for relative rarities like Private Life, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Roma) just aren't very good. Every time I start to hope, they throw a Velvet Buzzsaw at me. Anyway, this is a way for Amazon to distinguish itself. Netflix may still rule the world of buzzy TV, but its movies (including a deluge of apocalypse dramas, some better than others, like Cargo, Bird Box and How It Ends) are still in the "fingers-crossed" zone.
Like Netflix, Amazon doesn't care that it's paying millions of dollars for the kind of movies that, in today's environment, would be lucky to crack $15 million in domestic earnings. This is a "because we can" power play, in terms of throwing ridiculous amounts of money out there to get noticed by the media and by those who would make the kind of films that might break out at Sundance. It's not great news for traditional studios, but then we're in the middle of an Oscar season when the one indie-ish breakout (The Favourite) is only now about to top $30m domestic.
The 10-to-15-year drive to concentrate on global tentpoles has conditioned multiple generations of moviegoers to consider only the biggest of the big movies to be theater-worthy. Extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, Fox Searchlight's record-breaking $17 million deal for Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation backfired when the movie was an Oscar no-show and earned just $15.8m in domestic grosses. Audiences don't see movies like The Report in theaters anymore. But they might watch them "for free" on Amazon Prime.
If Amazon becomes a place where consumers can expect high-quality adult-oriented movies, then that may make Amazon even more of a must-have service. When everyone has a streaming outlet, then merely having a streaming outlet is no longer special. So come what may, I will argue that Amazon spent $46 million at this year's Sundance in order to make the case that its "new movies" division qualifies as special, whether or not audiences choose to see them in theaters or wait for at-home consumption.
