View from a new vantage

By Steven Zeitchik

So is or isn't the Vantage downsizing bad news for an already-battered specialty film biz? It depends on one's, well, you-know-what point.

On the one hand, you could say it's not that bad, and the fold-in is in fact kind of logical. Vantage had already functioned more like a studio than many specialty divisions -- an identity that manifested with the promotion of John Lesher, who basically birthed the unit, to the studio a few months ago. What this latest move does is keep Vantage's production muscles flexing (assuming the development and production of Vantage-esque movies -- the Babels and No Countrys of the world -- continue apace) but give it a little more marketing centralization and perhaps even leverage. And the company does it all without losing, and in fact promoting, gurus like Megan Colligan who knew how to retail those films.

On the other hand, if the scope of its original-production efforts are scaled down, that could prove one more blow to the already-dinged market for studio-affiliated prestige pics. And that's to say nothing of the marketing and distribution side; if the assumption was that Vantage existed because certain pictures needed dedicated departments to care and feed for them, will some of those movies now get lost when handled by a folded-in department?

One thing we haven't seen in coverage much is the effect on the finished-film side. Like many divisions, Vantage has been quiet this year at festivals. (Its one big buy was the excellent and eminently marketable "American Teen," which is bought at Sundance for mid-high six figures.) But even with its relative quiet, the company has still been a presence at festivals, in the mix as movies screened and bids came in. The consolidation of a unit like this at the very least won't be perceived as good news among the sellers already hurting from an absence of Picturehouse and WIP.

Whatever the specific form Par and Par Vantage take, it's clear that one more company has decided that dedicated marketing and distribution for specialty pics is so....2005. So basically what we've had over the last decade is studios, after years of being in the awards and prestige business, creating specialty divisions to handle the more modest commercial fare. Then they said they should grow those divisions and handle bigger movies. Then the movies got big enough that they said, 'Why we don't just handle these at the studio.' And so it became that what was old was new again. And isn't that, well, a specialty of the film business.

Comments

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[ProgGrrl]

At first I was worried about this...but now I think these studio consolidations will be the best thing ever for "real" indie films: it might make room for a few more "real" indie small businesses to get into the mix.

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