Netflix, Apple Flex Fat Wallets With Big Deals In Chilly Sundance Market

Park City, Utah – The slow start to acquisitions at the first in-person Sundance Film Festival in three years picked up quickly with big deals from some of the deepest pockets in the streaming business.

But as Apple and Netflix flexed eight-figure deals for festival favorites, their legacy-media competitors have been far quieter, further growing the gap between the haves and have nots as smaller streamers run up against more straitened spending limits.

Apple won a bidding battle early Tuesday for director John Carney’s Flora and Son, beating out Amazon and others by agreeing to pay “near the $20 million” level that Netflix had paid Monday for rights to another Sundance darling, the corporate thriller Fair Play.

Apple also used Sundance to showcase two previously acquired documentaries, one about actor Michael J. Fox’s struggles with Parkinson’s disease, the other about former NBA MVP Steph Curry. Both were well received at the festival, and will debut on Apple TV+ over the next few months.

But many of the other deals in the first five-plus days at indie-focused Sundance were decidedly concentrated in two seemingly can’t-miss genres: horror and music documentaries.

Netflix kicked off the Park City, Utah festival last week by announcing that it had bought horror film Run Rabbit Run, starring Sara Snook (Succession). That announcement came the same day the streaming leader reported its best earnings in several quarters, including 7.7 million net new subscribers, and the transition to executive chairman by founder and Co-CEO Reed Hastings. So, a big week for Netflix.

Amazon Prime Video, whose corporate cousins Audible were running big marketing activations and events along Park City’s Main Street, also got in on the horror business, one of the few sectors that’s been reliably turning out theater goers since the pandemic hit. Amazon bought Filipino feature In My Mother’s Skin, which debuted in Sundance’s Midnight section.

Music docs have proven another reliably popular genre for streamers (the Beatles Get Back documentary and Hamilton for Disney Plus, Springsteen on Broadway for Netflix, Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free for Amazon, etc.). And the Elvis biopic by Baz Luhrmann also picked up a Best Picture Oscar nomination today.

With all that, the pricy purchase of Flora and Son was not a big surprise. It was one of the festival’s most buzzed-about features, and comes from Irish director Carney, who made his name with indie smash hit Once and followed it with other music-based dramedies such as Sing Street. No shock, Flora and Son is also about how music can, basically, change/save/redeem your life.

Magnolia, the indie film distributor owned by billionaire Mark Cuban and partner Todd Wagner, bought a terrific documentary about Little Richard, I Am Everything. And Onyx Collective, which provides programming exclusively for Hulu, bought two music-focused documentary projects, including one about Sly Stone.

So, there’s money to be spent at Sundance, though so far it seems the energy to actually spend it is largely limited to the tech giants.

The sale prices for Flora and for Fair Play were eye-popping compared to most sales at Sundance over its 42 years. Back in 2020, Hulu set a record by spending just over $17 million for time-loop comedy Palm Springs.

Then Apple reset the record, by a wide margin the following year, buying festival opener CODA for $25 million. Apple’s investment paid off handsomely when CODA became both a commercial and critical hit, and won three Oscars last March, including best picture.

The big payday pictures so far this year seem less likely to grab those kinds of kudos (though Carney’s Once did win an Oscar for its original song, Falling Slowly).

But how those projects do once they get beyond the hothouse hollering in festival premieres will be worth watching not just for their artistic merits but also for their success in boosting their purchasers’ streaming wars prospects.

Can these films attract new subscribers, convey a whiff of quality to the service’s broader slates for a better market position, or encourage subscribers to stick around instead of churning out?

Those are essential reasons to buy any show for a streaming service, ultimately, though it’s not exactly the sort of stuff that sings for an indie filmmaker finally getting their passion project sold after a big festival debut.

It’s become a much more complex question since last spring, when Netflix suffered its Great Correction, losing subscribers two quarters in a row, laying off hundreds of workers and contractors, launching an ad-supported tier, and (soon) cracking down on password freeloaders.

The influx of streaming money that plumped prices at Sundance and other big festivals the past few years seems to shrinking, as many services ponder what programming they want to buy, and what kind of audience they want to attract and keep.

The sudden chill comes at a bad time for the indie film business, whose original foothold in arthouse and specialty theaters across the country has been battered in the pandemic and lockdown.

Many of those smaller arthouse theaters shut down, and the entire theatrical exhibition business remains a third lower than its pre-pandemic heyday, despite a few megahits such as the sequels to Top Gun and Avatar (Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water also picked up Best Picture Oscar nominations this morning, and the Avatar sequel crossed the $2 billion box-office mark last week).

And with theaters struggling and streaming suddenly stiff, it could be an even more challenging time to get review-driven smaller films financed and made.

If the suddenly more conservative media companies want to stay in the game (or, as some suggested, stock up ahead of a possible writer’s strike later this year), Sundance has plenty of attractive, available projects, including:

• Eileen, a black comedic drama featuring Anne Hathaway, Thomasin McKenzie, and Marin Ireland.

• Nicole Holofcener’s latest upper-middle-class dramedy, You Hurt My Feelings, which premiered Sunday night. It stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld, Veep) and Tobias Menzies (The Crown).

• Magazine Dreams, whose star Jonathan Majors is getting widespread kudos for his breakout performance as an obsessive amateur body builder.

• Willie Nelson & Family, the first authorized documentary about the seven-decade career of the country icon. The sprawling five-part episodic series is nearly as long as Nelson’s career, but also seems custom-tuned for a streaming service wanting to reach Nelson’s devoted crossover audience.

• Shortcomings, the directorial debut of Randall Park (Fresh Off the Boat, Always Be My Maybe), based on a much-loved graphic novel from Adrian Tomine, who wrote the screenplay.

• Cat Person, based on the New Yorker’s most-downloaded short fiction piece ever. The thriller about the horrors of 21st-Century dating is directed by festival favorite Susanna Fogel, and features CODA star Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun (another Succession star filling up his time off).

So there are plenty of potential pickups, should the more penurious streamers scrounge some nickels from under their couch pillows and start buying.

That they haven’t done much yet suggests the gap continues to widen between the few haves such as Apple and Netflix, and streaming’s emerging second-class have nots. It’ll be fascinating to see whether the differences in purchasing power start to manifest with paying subscribers too.