THE DISTRIBUTORS 2018: SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
No distributor has had more a presence for as long as Sony Pictures Classics. SPC has been there the longest with the most for the history of TFF. The "recent" history includes 67 films in the last 15 years or about 4 and a half films per year on average:
2017: A Fantastic Woman, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, Foxtrot, Loveless, The Rider (5)
2016: The Eagle Huntress, Maudie, Norman, Toni Erdmann (4)
2015: Son of Saul (1)
2014: Foxcatcher, Leviathan, Red Army, Mr. Turner, Wild Tales, Salt of the Earth and Merchants of Doubt (7)
2013: The Invisible Woman, The Lunchbox, The Past, Tim's Vermeer and Jodorowsky's Dune (5)
2012: The Gatekeepers, At Any Price, Rust and Bone, No, Wadjda, Amour (6)
2011: A Dangerous Method, In Darkness, Footnote, A Separation (4)
2010: Incendies, Of Gods and Men, Tamara Drewe, Another Year, The Illusionist, Inside Job (6)
2009: The Last Station, The White Ribbon, Coco Before Chanel, A Prophet, An Education (5)
2008: Waltz with Bashir, I've Loved You So Long, O'Horten (3)
2007: Brick Lane, When Did You Last See Your Father, Persepolis, The Band's Visit, The Counterfeiters, Steep! (6)
2006: Jindabyne, The Lives of Others, Volver, The Italian (4)
2005: Breakfast on Pluto, Capote, Cache, The Child (4)
2004: Being Julia, House of Flying Daggers, Bad Education, Merchant of Venice, Up and Down, Yes (6)
2003: The Fog of War, My Life Without Me, The Triplets of Belleville, Young Adam (4)
And SPC has seen the coupling with TFF pay off with Oscar nominations for Best Picture: Amour, An Education, Capote.
Best Foreign Language Film (so many here): A Fantastic Woman, Loveless, Toni Erdmann among many others.
Best Documentary Feature: The Fog of War, Inside Job.
But this year looks like maybe 2015 when SPC only had Son of Saul in play at Telluride. As it stands now, the only film SPC that could make TFF #45 is Nadine Labaki's Capernaum. Capernaum picked up the Jury Prize at Cannes last month but suffered from middling critical response.
Deadline reported three weeks ago that SPC had picked up the rights to Denys Arcand The Fall of the American Empire but that isn't showing up on the IMDb page for either SPC or the film itself as yet.
Don't discount the possibility, though, SPC picking up some of the other Cannes players. Currently, for example, Lee Chang dong's critical darling, Burning still has no U.S. distributor, nor does Jafar Panahi's Three Faces, Sergei Dvortsevoy's Ayka, Matteo Garrone's Dogman, Messora and Saliviza's The Dead and The Others or Sergey Loznitsa's Donbass. So there is a large body of work out there that SPC could still acquire and submit for inclusion at TFF #45.
Last year when I did the SPC assessment it looked like this for the 2017 TFF lineup:
1) Loveless/Zvyagnistev. Chances: 80%.
2) A Fantastic Woman/Lelio. Chances: 75%.
3) The Rider/Zhao. Chances: 60%.
4) Happy End/Haneke. Chances: 55%.
5) Final Portrait/Tucci. Chances: 40%.
6) The Silent Man/Landesman. Chances: 25%
7) The Leisure Seeker/Virzi. Chances: 20%
8) Based on a True Story/Polanski. Chances: 5%.
Ultimately, the top three played TFF in addition to Foxtrot and Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool.
Bottom line is that I'd put Capernaum at 60% (mostly because of SPC's long connection to TFF) and The Fall of the American Empire at about 30%.
Tomorrow we'll look at Fox Searchlight.
HINTING AT THE OLD MAN
The Playlist, like a lot of outlets, featured the release of the trailer for The Old Man and the Gun last week. I didn't get to that article until late this weekend. Playlist head honcho Rodrigo Perez covers the familiar bases but adds near the end of the piece that the Sept. 28th release "should mean you'll see a festival bow before that and we'll assume Telluride, Venice, TIFF or all of the above."
That's the kind of assertion that makes me take note.
The Old Man and the Gun is under the Fox Searchlight umbrella and will be a part of Thursday's assessment of the films they have and their TFF #45 probability. The speculation from The Playlist gives The Old Man a bit of a boost going into that assessment.
The complete post from The Playlist is here.
AND ANOTHER ONE MOVES DOWN (AND ALMOST FF) THE LIST
I have mentioned Paolo Sorrentino's Loro (1 and 2) as a possible Telluride 2018 selection but that appears less likely in the wake of a story from Variety's Nick Vivarelli published last week.
The film which explores the life and career of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been screening in Italy in its two part incarnation. Vivarelli reports that Sorrentino now has a solo version that clocks in at just under two and a half hours. Vivarelli writes that the single film version "is likely to launch from the Toronto Film Fest in September."
Though the statement is not definitive, it feels solid so, at this point, I don't really expect we'll see Loro over Labor Day weekend.
The complete story from Variety is here.
That's the MTFB fix for this Tuesday. More to come on Thursday.
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