Last year I wrote an editorial about how the Sundance Film Festival doesn’t have the punch it used to have. What was the center of film coolness in the 1990s and led to the explosion of film festivals nationwide has lost some of its luster in recent years. After all, in the last ten years only six films from the annual Sundance Film Festivals went on to become big low-budget hits (i.e. grossing $40 million or more at the U.S. box office), and the most recent was 2009’s Precious. A vast majority of the Sundance Film Festival lineups 2010 and 2011 were busts once they were released in theaters, and I expected more of the same for the box office fate of the 2012 lineup .
I’m not claiming to be any sort of genius, but I was right: the story of the Sundance 2012 slate is in a lot of ways a repeat of the Sundance 2011 and 2010 slate: there are only two Sundance 2012 films that grossed more than $10 million in theaters, Beasts of the Southern Wild ($11.25 million) and The Words ($11.49 million), which is the same amount of Sundance 2011 films that grossed more than $10 million each (2010 only had one – The Kids Are All Right). Another dozen and a half 2012 films grossed about $50,000 to $5 million each, though most of them closer to the former figure than the latter. They’ll garner awards buzz as we get deeper in awards season and likely that will draw interest to the movies on VOD or DVD, but we’re still not seeing runaway hits coming out of Sundance like we did in the 1990s and early 2000s, and it doesn’t seem like we will again now that the “uniqueness” of Sundance has worn off with so many film festivals. But many of those film festivals cater more to studios than independent filmmakers, so it’s not really a surprise that many independent filmmakers have decided to use the low-cost benefits of social media to promote their work as opposed to expensive film festivals in which their work will likely be lost in the shuffle.
However, there is also good news, because where Sundance 2012 films made a bigger splash than 2011 is on video-on-demand. Two other Sundance 2012 films, Arbitrage ($7,816,443 domestic gross) and Bachelorette ($447,954 domestic gross), might not have had huge theatrical grosses but were among the top VOD titles of 2012, and horror film V/H/S might have only grossed $100,345 from 19 theaters in the U.S., but it has been a big enough hit with VOD audiences that a sequel, S-VHS, was fast-tracked to premiere at the 2013 festival. Film festivals have proved to be a wonderful farm system for VOD success, and as a huge supporter of VOD I’m happy to see this development.
A significant number of Sundance 2012 films were acquired for limited theatrical distribution and VOD releases, such as Liberal Arts, Sleepwalk With Me, How to Survive a Plague, Save the Date, Price Check, and Young & Wild… and that is just from IFC Films, one of the premiere VOD distributors. While those films aren’t likely to do Arbitrage or Bachelorette numbers, the multi-platform release strategy is clearly catching on and helping these small films break even or (gasp!) make money. Most importantly, when these movies inevitably make it to Netflix they’ll be seen by audiences in numbers that would have been unheard of even five years ago — and at the end of that day, that’s what’s important, right?
Nevertheless, there are some Sundance 2013 films that could potentially hit the $10 million+ benchmark at the domestic box office, and perhaps even pass that rarely-crossed $40 million+ benchmark. Both Kill Your Darlings and Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s Don Jon’s Addiction have familiar casts, and the Steve Jobs biopic jOBS could interest audiences who can’t get enough of their Apple products. Others, like Mud, which stars Matthew McConaughey and was directed by Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) and Dave Grohl‘s documentary Sound City, could also do very well. There are likely others that will do well that aren’t even on the radar yet, and that’s perhaps the only way Sundance could stay true to its original purpose, when unknowns like Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, Ed Burns, and Kevin Smith became overnight sensations that launched long, successful careers.
As a result, I think the 2013 lineup has the strongest potential for box office success in years — I’d say since 2004, which featured The Butterfly Effect (eventually grossing $57.5 million), Saw ($55 million), Napoleon Dynamite ($44.5 million) and other favorites like Garden State, The Motorcycle Diaries, Super Size Me and Maria Full of Grace. But with the last three years being relative disappointments, it’s impossible to say what will end up hits with audiences. After all, did anyone think Napoleon Dynamite would become the cult classic that it ended up being when they read the description of it in the 2004 Sundance program? The fact remains that acquiring films at Sundance has always been a gamble for distributors, though the stakes change from year-to-year. There haven’t been any big winners recently, and I think Sundance is overdue for one in 2013.
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