Finally, specialty news that isn't entirely bleak

By Steven Zeitchik

That headline isn't a knock on Amy Israel, one of the sharper minds in the specialty business and an exec with the added virtue of being forged by the fires of the old Miramax.

But Lesher et al's decision to  nab a New Line exec, Guy Stodel -- as Gregg Goldstein and Jay Fernandez report in today's THR -- and swap him in for Israel suggests that the company is at least serious about continuing Vantage with a distinct identity from its parent, which in turns means that worries of the last few weeks that the marketing consolidation was prelude to a major shutdown were overblown.

That's the good news. The more lukewarm news is that putting Israel on waivers suggests that Vantage's current metamorphosis isn't just about scaling back the number of releases and consolidating some backoffice or overhead. It's about a more significant shift in direction.

Israel, after all, was more of a prestige exec; Stodel is more of a commercial one. Both, by all accounts, worthy at their jobs, and both capable of leading divsions with those respective missions forward. It's just a question of which way forward a division wants to go. For now, at least, the idea that the Vantage slate will be dominated by "There Will Be Blood"type pictures -- ie, lavish, serious movies that are talent- and award- magnets but don't as reliably show rosy P&L results -- is probably not that direction. Instead, the new Vantage is a little like the old New Line -- smart genre stuff, tightly-targeted comedies.

The retrenchment of Vantage comes at a time when there's actually more hope than it might seem on the specialty side, possibly because there's a little more breathing room. There are already a half dozen movies this year that could safely be called specialty releases which have earned at least $8 million, from six different companies. And we're still only in July.

We're afraid the news is less bright for ThinkFilm. Insiders say it's a matter of weeks before the company decides whether it can release its fall slate, which includes the Sundance sleeper "The Escapist." The company needs between $10-$20 million in cash to service those releases. If it comes up with it, game on, at least until he end of the year. if it doesn't, we could be looking at another casualty. The boilerplate sentence about distributor consolidation  ("It's been tough year for specialty divisions, as Picturehouse, WIP, Vantage...") may, unlike the specialty biz itself, still have room to grow.

Comments

[Martina]

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