“This is not going to be your typical ‘How do you finance movies?’ panel,” IndieWire Editor-in-Chief Dana Harris-Bridson said in her opening remarks at the New Models of Financing panel, presented by United for Business. “These people all finance storytelling, but they all represent very different businesses.”
The Future of Filmmaking event, held at The American Pavilion at Cannes, convened three experts on the increasingly complex field of film financing: IPR.VC Co-Founder and Partner Tanu-Matti Tuominen, 5&2 Studios President of Production Mark Sourian, and Oval 5 owner Chrystine Zhang. The conversation focused on the new reality of financing: rather than evaluating individual films on their artistic merits, investors now need to see a preexisting relationship with an audience. And that shift has turned studios into I.P.
“The studios we want to work with, like A24 or mk2 or MUBI, are tastemakers. They have the relationship with the audience. They develop the content because they know who is their fan and who the story is made for,” said Tuominen, whose company is a major investor in independent studio slates. “And then our role is to help the studios to keep the ownership of the content.”
But chaos breeds opportunity, and the panelists also stressed that the new reality can make it easier to maneuver around traditional gatekeepers, provided you’re able to bring your own audience to the table.
“Ten years ago, in order to get any film or television series made, you needed a mainstream network or studio to finance and distribute it,” Sourian said. “And I think over the last ten years with technological advances, whether it be YouTube, the internet, et cetera, you don’t need these big monolithic companies.”
Watch the complete panel in the video above.
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