I think that people are looking at Che not as a film, but as a indie miniseries. It’s four hours long, in two parts, and is all in Spanish. They overlook the fact that it had a very successful screening run, despite it’s massive runtime, and look at it only as a VOD property, or as some sort of artistic folly.

And maybe it is a folly. A more awards friendly strategy would have been to put out only part one in 2008 and part two (if you produced it at all) in 2009. An arthouse Lord of the Rings.

…[But] the new art house is your house and the sooner the business realities of film reflect this, the better off we’ll all be.

Web video pioneer Kent Nichols, who with partner Douglas Sarine is currently writing/directing the remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, blogs a refrain that’s been floating around in somewhat less concrete form for awhile: that the Academy’s total snubbing of Che, particularly its failure to nominate Benicio Del Toro for Best Actor, is a sign of bias against (if not a deliberate effort to punish IFC and Soderbergh for) the film’s non-traditional, quick-to-VOD release strategy.

This is one of a number of pieces I read over the weekend which essentially make the point that audiences are moving in one direction, and the Academy is moving in another. The biggest evidence of this trend is the fact that a number of Oscar-nominated films recently pushed into platform release by their indie arm distributors have failed to see the expected post-nomination box office bump, whilst “snubbed” films like Revolutionary Road are doing kind of okay.

• A few films were sold in the past 24 hours, but Lone Sherfig’s An Education was not one of them. Reportedly, Fox Searchlight offered around $1 million for the Nick Hornby-scripted coming-of-age drama, yet the film’s co-reps CAA and Endeavor are asking closer to $10 million. As if any title could seriously expect that high an amount during the “subdued” Sundance of ‘09.
• Oh, by the way, here’s another possible reason for slow sales this year that we missed yesterday: too many co-repped films make for confusing negotiations.
• IFC Films held a press conference yesterday to reveal that, for the first time, the distributor will release a film to VOD day-and-date with its world premiere at this Spring’s SXSW. The film will be Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last, and it’s one of a bunch of new titles, including the latest from both Phillipe Garrel and Denys Arcand, slated for IFC’s Festival Direct VOD channel. Steven Soderbergh says that these days filmmakers’ have to “let go of the fantasy” of receiving conventional theatrical releases for their work.
• Also from the IFC press conference: Karina asks about whether on demand data will ever be released a la box office figures; Swanberg tells festival directors that its up to them whether or not VOD kills festival runs; Soderbergh calls BluRay “the worst launch of a new format in the history of formats.”
• And in other IFC VOD news, the NY Times got it wrong last week when it reported that IFC’s hoped-for 250,000 VOD viewers for Soderbergh’s Che would be the equivalent of an $18 million box office take. The figure, corrected during a Sundance panel discussion, would be more like $1.8 million.

• Twilight star Kristen Stewart is heating up and gaining lots of cool points by being cast as rocker Joan Jett in Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways, about the all-girl band featuring a young Jett and Lita Ford. Stewart may not look like the best choice for the role (I’d have said Rachel Bilson), but I guess all she really needs is a proper wig. And it probably won’t be too difficult for her to do her own singing in the part.
• It may not be a new film version of The Divine Comedy, as I recently called for, but it’s still interesting to see Hollywood making a movie about Dante Alighieri’s classic literary work by adapting Nick Tosches’ novel In the Hand of Dante. It’s also unfortunate that producer Johnny Depp may be playing Tosches rather than Dante, since everyone prefers Depp in period dress.
• Speaking of Depp in old-time costume, he’d be perfect for the new Phillip Noyce-directed remake of Captain Blood that Warner Bros. is producing. Too bad his slate is very full, and anyway it’s probably fair to give another actor the chance to play a pirate.
• Warner Bros.’ The Dark Knight has become the best-selling movie on iTunes this year, and it’s not even available for download yet. I find this interesting less because of all the advance sales, more because of all the people who will be potentially view this IMAX-appropriate film on their iPod.
• More Dark Knight home-viewing madness: the blockbuster will be released to video-on-demand in South Korea two weeks before its DVD release there.

Our friend Kevin Kelly was at that Mark Cuban panel at the TCA featured in the vague WIRED post mentioned earlier, and he sent along some further context––and quotes!

Apparently, the panel’s essential purpose was to promote Humboldt County, a SXSW vet and now a Magnolia release which will debut on VOD three weeks before hitting theaters in September. Also on the panel was Humboldt co-star Peter Bogdanovich, and talk about an odd pairing. On the one hand, you’ve got mogul Cuban making his cocky techno-evangelist pitch about how business travelers held captive in hotels are dying to charge their corporate cards $12 for the chance to see films like Flawless and Finding Amanda.

Then there’s old Pete, still an active theatrical patron himself (“Sex in the City was amazing because it was all women. I was the only guy in the theater, and the women loved it, and I loved that the women loved it”), but conscious that it’s an experience that’s diminishing for a reason (in part because trailers are “unbelievably violent, fast, crazy, noisy garbage.”) And he acknowledges that even if, for him,  nothing’s going “to replace the experience of seeing a movie on the big screen with an audience,” alternate philosophies of distribution “seems to be working in terms of getting people to see the films.”

I wish I had been there. Excerpts from Kevin’s transcription of the even follow after the jump.

…Read more

Consider this WIRED story more than loosely related to yesterday’s back-and-forth on theatrical distribution, and maybe sort of possibly related to today’s rampant speculation on Che. At the Television Critics Association conference yesterday, vertically integrated movie mogul Mark Cuban announced that he’s going to start selling Magnolia’s theatrical releases on HDNET’s On Demand cable service––BEFORE they debut in theaters.

I *think* the news nugget here is that this reverse day-and-date roll out wil now apply to ALL Magnolia releases, because otherwise, it’s not really news at all––Cuban’s companies have experimented with this tactic before, and box office grosses would suggest that it didn’t work so well for Redacted. Unless it’s the Cuban-as-cowboy quotes––such as “Landmark is the only national theater chain that will support HDNet’s Ultra Sneak Previews” and “I don’t care what the MPAA does.” But then, that’s not really news, either.

IFCFirstTake has posted the new, theatrical trailer for Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs on YouTube, and for your viewing pleasure, I’ve embedded it above. I think it does a bang-up job of sculpting Hannah’s rangy charms into something perfectly palatable for mass consumption.

If you’ve been living under a rock (and/or haven’t read this, this, this or this, or watched this or listened to this), Hannah (and Swanberg, and his crew of fabulously young, talented, beautiful collaborators) were the toast of SXSW 2007. The movie’s theatrical debut on August 22 will kick off the The New Talkies: Generation DIY, the two-week festival of new American indies at the IFC Center here in New York. After playing at IFC for a week, Hannah will be available on video-on-demand via IFC’s InTheaters program, and on August 28, Swanberg’s second film, LOL, will be released on DVD by Benten Films.

This whole chain of events is incredible exciting to those of us who have been watching people like Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski and Aaron Katz carve out their own niche over the past few years. I’m only going to be in town for the first week of The New Talkies (Telluride beckons), but mark your calendars, because I’m nevertheless planning heaps of coverage.