In a turn of events that recalls an infamous Sundance story of yore, Harvey Weinstein is insisting that The Weinstein Co. locked down rights to Push (not that one, the Sundance one) before Lionsgate made its deal. Fortunately for everyone in Park City, this fight waited until after the film festival ended and ol’ Harv was nowhere near making a scene in a restaurant. Instead, the rights tug-of-war is going to the courts (on both coasts), making everyone think this is the indie version of the Watchmen battle and giving the blogs something more interesting than actors’ rants and masquerades to comment on:
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Variety reports that Lionsgate has signed a deal to acquire Sundance Grand Jury and Audience Award winner Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, directed by Lee Daniel and featuring a tour de force supporting performance from Mo’Nique. According to the bare-bones news blurb, “Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry will support Lionsgate’s distribution through their respective motion picture companies.”

This news brings two thoughts immediately to mind: 1) the old conception of Lionsgate as a slash-horror factory is even more out of date this afternoon than it was this morning; and 2) Being that Lionsgate were rumored to be zeroing in on Push at least hours if not days before it won multiple awards on the final night of Sundance, if they were waiting for Oprah and Perry to pledge assistance before making the deal final and/or public, then maybe there’s something to the whispers (largely drowned out by media coverage of those awards, but still prevalent on the ground in Park City) that just because rich white people (ie: critics, Sundance audiences and jury members) take an interest in an art film about poor black people, that doesn’t guarantee an easy path to selling the film to actual black people.

The fine details of racial demographics may or may not be the major factor here,  but it’s certain that this is a time for safe bets, and it doesn’t get much safer than aligning an unknown quantity indie with name brands.

In any case, check out our Sundance review and interview with Mo’Nique.

UPDATE: indieWIRE is pegging the value of the deal at $5.5 million, making it the biggest of Sundance 2009.

It could mean, in short, that New Moon will be a little bit bloodier than anticipated. Or certainly the Twlight film after that. Is there any filmmaking/distribution outfit with a more pronounced reputation for being deeply in love with arterial gushings? That’s Lionsgate in a nutshell.

So declares Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere, in response to Sharon Waxman’s report (for which “executives at Lionsgate and Summit declined to comment”) that Lionsgate (home of the Saw, Hostel and Tyler Perry franchises) may be buying Summit Entertainment, including the company’s library and slate, which includes teenage necrophilia phenom franchise Twilight.

But of course, Wells’ “nutshell” definition of Lionsgate is out of date. It’s an open secret that Lionsgate is so desperate to distance itself from its bloody past that the distributor has spent the past year engineering the failure of its remaining genre stock — dumping Midnight Meat Train in rural dollar theaters; taking the ultra-cinematic The Burrowers off its theatrical release schedule entirely; killing Cabin Fever as a theatrical franchise by releasing its Ti West-directed sequel straight to DVD. If anything, in Lionsgate’s hands, the Twilight sequels are likely to go even more tame.

Critics had every reason to object when Billy Bob Thornton remade The Bad News Bears a few years back. After all, Walter Matthau had already defined the role of foul-mouthed Coach Buttermaker, a cranky alcoholic who oversees a team of misfit little leaguers, in the perfectly serviceable 1976 original. Now we get yet another variation on the formula, this time starring Sam Rockwell as the last man you’d want coaching a varsity girls basketball team, in The Winning Season.

Strange that this second film from Grace Is Gone writer-director James C. Strouse could be so different from his debut (in which John Cusack played an emasculated widower who refuses to cope with the death of his wife in Iraq), and yet so similar to an entire subcategory of the underdog sports comedy. Some would argue that the girls basketball angle sets The Winning Season apart, but what little originality the film has going for it is the element it shares with the largely unseen (and widely unloved) Grace Is Gone –– namely, its observant yet underplayed attention to a fragile father figure.

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Following Monday’s drama involving Fox Searchlight’s bid for An Education, Sony Pictures Classics was able to bring the price down and pick up North American and select Latin American rights to the coming-of-age drama for a reported $3-4 million. It’s the distributor’s first acquisition during this year’s festival, having already bought some titles pre-fest. Also making its first buy of the year, Lionsgate acquired US and UK rights to James C. Strouse’s basketball comedy The Winning Season.

Check out our Sundance Deals chart for the full scoop on these two deals and the rest of the acquisitions as of this morning.

Here’s our running tally of each of the distribution deals announced just before, throughout the course of, and just after the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. We will update this post whenever new information comes in, so bookmark it and keep checking back for the newest latest.

I recently submitted a ballot for indieWIRE’s annual Critics’ Poll, which offers respondents a chance to create two separate lists of the best films of the year: one comprised of films which received theatrical distribution (which is described as, at minimum, a one week run in a commercial theater in New York City, essentially the same type of release required for Oscar consideration); and a list of the best films which weren’t distributed commercially in 2008––ie: those which screened only at festivals, and/or in other non-commercial venues, and/or outside of New York. Because I see so many films at festivals, I had a far greater pool of candidates for the latter list than the former. My “true” top ten list would combine films which were made readily available to audiences via studio subsidiaries (such as Synecdoche, NY and Rachel Getting Married), with films that I fell in love with at a festival and may never get a chance to see again, and with films which had the bare minimum New York release, but nevertheless were probably still seen by fewer people than the average distributor-less festival hit (such as Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness). That said, I understand the purpose of making the distinction––even if there was no other benefit to it, there’s always the hope that some smaller theatrical and straight-to-DVD distributors will look to the annual Best Undistributed list as a reference to films they might have missed. After all, 2007’s “winner,” Hong Sang Soo’s Woman on the Beach, was purchased and ended up in theaters barely a week into the new year.

In fact, I think singling out films which are still on the market, and in a perfect world wouldn’t be, is so worth doing, that not only am I revealing here the ten titles I included in the poll, but I’m adding a few bonus films. The following list is presented alphabetically and should be considered unranked, with the exception of the first title mentioned — they all deserve to be seen by wider audiences, but the reception thus far bestowed on the work of one French master in particular is actually a travesty.

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On Monday night, The Hollywood Reporter published a story questioning Focus Features’ marketing plan for Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic on the country’s first openly gay elected official who was famously assassinated by a colleague in the late 70s. The story suggested that by “keeping its awards contender out of fall fests and heavily restricting media screenings,” the studio is deliberately trying to avoid any kind of partisan publicity (positive or negative) that could damage the film from reaching a mainstream audience.

Focus chief James Schamus was, apparently, pretty upset by the story, particularly considering that it was timed to hit the web just under 24 hours before Milk’s premiere, a benefit screening at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. He’s written a letter to the editor of THR, which Eugene Hernandez posted on his blog last night before the Milk screening. The gist: Milk wasn’t ready in time for fall festivals, they don’t have enough prints yet to do widespread screening but they will, the entire internet has been going batshit crazy for the trailer (”probably the most inspiring piece of movie marketing about genuine (as well as out) politics ever created”) for over a month, and not only has Focus not avoided political attention but they’ve bought tons of ad space on The Huffington Post and NPR.

If the issue was whether or not Focus is actively trying to create “noise” around Milk, then Schamus’ defense seems solid enough to lead to the conclusion that THR got that part of the story wrong. But the issue might not be the quantity of noise, but the brand of noise.

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It would be an exaggeration to suggest that JT Petty’s The Burrowers goes miles deeper than the hastily-dug graves that play a central role in its plot, but it’s nonetheless one of the more pleasant surprises of Fantastic Fest thus far. Beautifully shot and tightly scripted, it’s the rare Hollywood genre film (bought and paid for by Lionsgate) that’s more concerned with human relationships and behavior than the mysterious supernatural forces that sets the action in motion. Though its narrative definitely turns on the actions of creatures from the unknown, said creatures turn out to be relatively easy to extinguish compared to prejudice and moral decay in the hearts of ordinary men. It plays less like a horror film than a Terrence Malick film, with a mythological MacGuffin designed to reveal dark truths about the men forced to deal with it.

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• Though Pineapple Express had a better per-screen average and walked away from its first five days with a more than adequate $40 million, it couldn’t block The Dark Knight from nabbing its fourth consecutive weekend box office title. Currently at $441 million, the Batman sequel is expected to overcome Star Wars as the number 2 domestic grosser of all time.
• Entourage star Adrien Grenier is making a documentary about the 14 year-old paparazzo (unnamed in this Hollywood Reporter report) with whom he’s developed a friendship. Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg, Eva Longoria, and Rosie O’Donnell will make appearances in the film, which is said to “interweave the relationship portrait with philosophical interviews in the style of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life.”
• The drift away from R-rated horror is already starting to pay off for Lionsgate. Thanks to a combination of factors––home video successes like Rambo, theatrical moneymakers like The Forbidden Kingdom, the surge in hotness of TV titles Mad Men and Weeds––their total revenue was up 50% in the first fiscal quarter.

Nikki Finke made an interesting Freudian gaffe in this story on Midnight Meat Train’s dismal opening weekend. She quoted Lionsgate’s recent credit infusion as amounting to $340, about $339 million less than the actual number, but just $27 more than what Meat Train averaged on each of its 100 screens. As Finke notes, one of the reasons for the embarrassing take (besides, you know, a complete lack of advertising or reviews) is the fact that Lionsgate booked the film in dollar theaters and second-run houses. They also skirted major markets––in fact, the film opened nowhere near New York City. So not only was this film with a built-in audience (thanks to Clive Barker’s genre credibility) made nearly impossible for fans to find, but stuffing the deck with cut-rate houses Lionsgate made sure that even if the movie filled houses (which it didn’t). it would be a statistic impossibility for it to make any real money.

In her headline, FInke asks the question, “Why Did Lionsgate Dump Clive Barker Pic Into Dollar And Second Run Theaters?” She ultimately drops the vague suggestion that “the answer may well be studio politics,” but declines to offer new insight or information, beyond citing Joe Drake’s much-reported desire to migrate “away from this genre of films in favor of more mainstream fare like Tyler Perry.”

What’s implied in Finke’s write-up and others, but never spelled out, is that in order to complete Lionsgate’s transformation from a profitable house of ill-repute into a well-funded maker of wholly inoffensive middlebrow entertainments, the total failure of vestiges of the previous regime like Meat Train is so necessary that the studio couldn’t take chances on the whims of the ticket-buying public––this is a bombing that had to be engineered.

Today Lionsgate releases Midnight Meat Train –– by all indications a cousin to the studio’s, um, classic fare like Saw and Hostel, but actually starring some name actors –– in just a hundred-something theaters, with no reviews. According to Grady Hendrix, it’s part of the studio’s effort to essentially slap the R-rated horror fans responsible for a decade’s worth of success in the face.

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That improbable release date quoted in the Entertainment Weekly story about W? Variety has confirmed it. Apparently, Lionsgate is all set to release Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush movie on October 17…even though it’s not even going to begin shooting until May 12. I’m sure it’s technically possible to finish casting, shoot, edit and promote an ensemble cast biopic about the president of the United States in five months (actually, I’m not sure, but I’ll give Stone the benefit of the doubt). I’m just not sure such a total rush job is really the best breeding ground for a great work of political criticism. Hope I’m wrong!

• Twenty days after Lionsgate was rumored to be working out a deal with the WGA, the studio has finally reached one. And Marvel Studios has too! Comic book fans everywhere rejoice as Lionsgate’s Punisher: War Zone and Iron Fist and Marvel’s Captain America, Thor, Ant-Man, The Avengers and others are free to continue being written and/or re-written.
• But hey, if the strike doesn’t end soon — the WGA and moguls meet informally again today — Hollywood can just release 3D versions of old movies in 2010. That’s what Disney has planned so far (even if not directly because of the strike) with at least Toy Story and Toy Story 2. I’m fine with it; I love digital 3D, and I think The Incredibles should be next.
• With Sundance just about done, we can look back and say the star-studded films weren’t all that appealing to buyers. Or even well-received by the critics. Now, aren’t you glad you check out the star-less foreign films like I told you to?
• Meanwhile, as part of the trend of buying less-hyped titles, Slamdance has been selling some movies too.