“With disruption comes great opportunity,” Mubi Chief Content Officer Jason Ropell told delegates at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on Tuesday. “It brings evolution and I think, right now, optimism in the business is warranted.”
Speaking at a rare onstage interview at KVIFF’s International Industry Insights section alongside indie stalwart and Killer Films co-founder Christine Vachon, Ropell broke down Mubi’s current business model whilst also touching on the company’s ambitions for growth in the independent and auteur space, which include theatrical distribution in addition to releasing titles on its own streaming platform.
“Mubi is a modern, globally-scaled studio and has all the components that a modern studio has from development through production to distribution – theatrical distribution to a platform, which we own – and sales thereafter, as well as foreign sales through The Match Factory,” said Ropell. (Mubi acquired international sales agent The Match Factory in 2022).
This structure, he said, gives Mubi “the entire ecosystem” and enables the company to have “multiple ways of saying yes to being involved in a project we are interested in.”
Earlier this week, Mubi announced it would be co-financing Mia Hansen-Løve’s next project If Love Should Die, with The Match Factory handling international sales. Last week Mubi picked up multiple key territories for Cannes Competition entry Grand Tour from Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes, which won the Best Director prize at the festival. During Cannes, Mubi also acquired Cannes Competition black and white drama The Girl With The Needle.
Ropell added that Mubi plans “to scale” its business to meet the growing demand across the world for independent and arthouse titles. “We need to have global theatrical distribution capabilities on top of the global streaming ability, which we have,” he said. “I think over time you’ll see us moving in that direction. I feel very, very strongly that the global aggregate audience for our type of film is actually quite large and the room for growth is high.”
Ropell stressed that the company “cared deeply” about the theatrical audience and acknowledged that often the best journey for a film to find its audience is through a theatrical release before launching on Mubi’s own streaming platform. “We have a lot of information both anecdotal and otherwise that shows that young people really, really care about film and love seeing films in theatres.”
He also added that while the business has changed rapidly in the last few years, it’s meant that a lot of the larger players that had been making investment in the auteur space “have abandoned it for the time being.”
“That open space is wide open for us,” he said. “We haven’t targeted it – that’s not been part of the strategy. It’s like the business has come to us and that open space has opened up in front of us.”
Christine Vachon talks at KVIFF International Industry Insights section
Both Ropell and Vachon, the latter of whom is also serving as a jury member for the main competition section at Karlovy Vary this year, reflected on the state of the independent film sector at large and the two veterans agreed that there are bright spots that should be acknowledged.
“As long as people want truly individual stories – and I think the business shows us that again and again – there will somehow be ways to keep making them,” said Vachon, whose Killer Films banner has been behind pivotal indie projects such as Far From Heaven, Carol and last year’s Past Lives.
“I think there is a lot of doomsaying because there is so much disruption,” she said, pointing to the impact last year’s strikes and the pandemic have both had on the business in recent years. “But then every year, every month, I see evidence of people flocking to those truly original stories and see people go to the theatres.”
Ropell added that the audience is still there for “great stories” but the challenge is finding “the right way to get that story to market, which is changing.”
“That’s why a company like ours is incredibly flexible,” he said. “We’re territory agnostic – it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from – we’re a global company and the idea is to bring great cinema across all of the different ways in which we operate, which is globally.”
When offering advice to local producers, Vachon noted that producers in the U.S. “don’t have the same system of subsidies that European filmmakers and producers have”, which has forced American producers to “think a lot more about our audiences.”
“I actually do feel that that makes for a stronger cinema,” she said. “I have spoken at institutions all over Europe and all over the world and I’m always a little surprised at filmmakers who don’t think that the audience matters. We are compelled to really interrogate who is going to see a film and who we are making it for and that forces us into a discussion that I think ultimately disciplines the films in a good way.”