Leaning Into Genre, Big Stars for Dramas and Shooting Abroad a La ‘The Brutalist’: What American Execs Believe Will Help Make Industry Sustainable

Is the film business currently sustainable in the United States? The answer, according to American industry leads, is a conditional yes. 

This year’s Creative Investors’ Conference at the San Sebastián Film Festival kicked things off with a panel taking the temperature of the U.S. market. 

“Anything that feels like a communal experience is working right now in the US,” said Scott Shooman, head of film at AMC Networks, a portfolio that encompasses IFC Films, RLJE Films and the streaming service Shudder. “The specialty market is much more genre-friendly. Things you could not release in a specialty way before, you now can, as audiences are more receptive and have gotten younger.”

Shooman highlighted how, while major studios are currently grasping at straws and declaring that “the business is dying,” several independent distributors are experiencing their best weekends of all time in 2024 like A24, Neon, and Magnolia Pictures. “This is largely due to genre film and why our business has gravitated towards that type of product lately.”

This genre boom, Shooman believes, has ushered the US into a shift similar to what occurred in the ‘70s and was chronicled in Peter Biskind’s seminal book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.” “Filmmakers are using different genres and films to be culturally relevant and push the societal threshold. We are seeing a big transition in the voices of storytellers in the States right now and the types of stories they want to tell.”

While Shooman focuses on acquiring content that will work for American audiences, Jonathan Kier, co-president of Upgrade Productions, said his current target is “the handful of markets that are particularly active,” like Germany, Japan and Latin America. 

“We are looking to see what is going to work in those places because they are territories that trigger financing. The U.S. is a tricky market because there are a lot of distribution platforms and alternatives. The U.S. piece of [the business] is less important than it used to be because there isn’t an expectation that [films] will sell. You can’t necessarily count on it.”

“The not-executed-to-perfection film has a tougher time theatrically,” Shooman added when speaking about what currently sells in the US. “Where we are seeing the threshold of quality being more relevant is in dramas.” 

And, opposite to genre films, dramas are where casting matters the most, says producer Jennifer Fox. “Just to get the ball rolling, you need a level of talent. Sometimes the requirements for household names that will get things going may not be the casting decision that will make your film shine.” 

“I worked on ‘Michael Clayton’ when Tilda Swinton was not the star she is now. The studio wanted us to cast a big name and because we had George [Clooney] we were able to cast Tilda. Had you put a movie star in that role, it would not have been the film it became. What will work in the long-term is not necessarily what you need to jumpstart the process.”

Fox went on to concur that it is a tricky time for filmmakers in the U.S. emphasising that her biggest challenge — as with many of her fellow producers at the moment — is to keep getting budgets lower and lower. “Locations are hard in America, there are rules we need to follow to meet the requirements of unions… It makes it incredibly challenging to make American independent movies.” 

These difficulties in producing domestically, the execs agree, have helped usher a wave of American films being made abroad, especially in European countries like Hungary, where Brady Corbet shot period epic “The Brutalist.” 

Christine Vachon, one of the film’s producers, was in the audience for the conference and weighed in on the measures that made it possible for Corbet to finally get his dream project off the ground: “It was a combination of deciding where to shoot with extraordinary subsidies in Budapest, getting a cast that truly believed in the movies and agreed to work for a price and being extraordinarily inventive on how [the film] worked across period. Ultimately, this is why various entities decided to put their money into the film.” 

“What the movie did have, because of the subsidies, was a good deal. It was extraordinarily discounted. But it was brutal. I saw what Brady went through to get it made. He is pretty open about how vicious it was. In some ways, the name of this panel should be: ‘Is it f*cking sustainable?’” 

To Shooman, the film business may be difficult, but it can be sustainable. “It’s always hard on the independent side. I’m optimistic. There is always going to be opportunity in the marketplace. There are going to be certain countries we lean into very hard to sustain parts of our business but film has always changed. There is always something shifting in our business. There might be ups and downs, but we will continue.”