FEATURE
“We just had a good run with The Woman In Black [which Alliance co-financed with Cross Creek Pic- tures and Exclusive Media]. We’re working on a follow-up.” Marchand and his colleagues are continuing to
explore new partnerships. The company’s reach as a pure distributor is already extensive. First- look deals with leading Quebecois producers have led to French-Canadian hits including Cinémagi- naire’s comedy cop thriller Father And Guns (De Pere En Flic), which grossed $10.8m in Quebec alone. The association with See-Saw has brought huge box-office success with The King’s Speech. And the output deal with Lionsgate has given The Hunger Games franchise to Alliance Films in Can- ada. The first instalment has grossed more than $35m and is projected to finish around $38m, making it one of the biggest international territo- ries for the film. The distribution pipeline is enlivened by fur-
ther output deals with Relativity Media in Canada and the UK, Summit in Spain and Focus Features, Lionsgate, The Weinstein Company, CBS Films and Miramax in Canada. On top of this are ongo- ing relationships with FilmNation, Exclusive Media, IM Global, Lionsgate International, Wild Bunch, Constantin Films, EuropaCorp and Nu Image in all three Alliance territories. While the recent merger between Lionsgate
and Summit has created uncertainty with regard to the Summit output deal in Spain — Loewy believes that for the next 18 months or so all films in production and pre-production on the Summit slate will stay with Alliance, though they may eventually go out under the Lionsgate name — these distribution relationships provide a vital advantage in Alliance’s three, often challenging, territories. “The pure licensing game is very competitive,”
Marchand says of the UK market. “You will be in the situation where you want a film but you have to pass on it because the competition is too fierce. So that’s why we’re looking more at the hybrid model. “It’s been like that since I joined Momentum in 2004. It’s been really competitive because you
have Lionsgate, Entertainment One, StudioCanal and us.” In Canada, Loewy is dismayed by consolidation
in Canada’s TV market, most recently Bell Canada’s acquisition of leading private network CTV and Astral. “The market [has become] much less com- petitive,” he says. “It reduces the number of film buyers. Canada is a very monopolistic territory.” The success of Netflix in Canada and the “really
‘The pure licensing game is very competitive in the UK. That’s why we’re looking at the
hybrid model’ Xavier Marchand, Alliance
good relationship” Alliance has forged with it has been crucial to exploit titles digitally. “Canadian cable companies are dinosaurs and
have no clue how to market product,” says Loewy. “We don’t see the kind of marketing that we see from BSkyB [in the UK], who have billboards everywhere and TV slots.” Indeed Loewy points out BSkyB has long posed
a challenge for UK independents, but he believes there is hope. “The big game-changer in the UK was the arrival of Netflix and LoveFilm,” Loewy suggests. “That has had a very positive impact on the business because it really gave us a pay-TV outlet that we didn’t have before, because BSkyB wasn’t buying from independents. [It] more than offsets the loss of business from DVD.”
“In Spain there’s bad news and good news,”
says Loewy on a territory long plagued by piracy. “High unemployment is the bad news and we have seen a dramatic downward shift [of 20%- 25%] in admissions, which is across the board. [But] we have many of the big films in Spain including Twilight… and also on the plus side there will be players in the market like Netflix and Amazon and that will impact very positively.” From the Cannes festival line-up, in addition to
Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Alliance is releasing Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, Walter Salles’ On The Road, John Hillcoat’s Law- less and Brandon Cronenberg’s Un Certain Regard entry Antiviral in Canada. Momentum has the last two for the UK. Senior vice-president of worldwide acquisi-
tions Robert Walak met with sales agents in Los Angeles two weeks before the festival, and at time of writing Marchand had read “four or five” decent scripts and was steeling himself for the deluge. “The weekend before Cannes last year I had
about 15 scripts to read,” he says. “So I’m always dreading that.” n
s
Welcome To The Punch
Shame
Antiviral n 38 Screen International at Cannes May 16, 2012
The Babymakers
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