Indie film industry hunting for next Longlegs hit at AFM

After 44 years on the Santa Monica beachfront, the American Film Market has upped its stakes and is heading to Vegas. The Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA) has found new Nevada lodgings for their annual film bazaar, which will set up shop at the Palms Resort Casino from Nov. 5 to 10.

The move is the second in as many years for the AFM, which was forced to leave its old home in the Loews in 2023 for a less-than-ideal location up the hill at the Le Meridien Delfina.

The shift to Vegas comes at a critical time for the indie film industry. Producers, distributors and financiers are struggling to find business models to match a new world where costs are up — thanks to inflation, but also due to hard-fought concessions won by the guilds in last year’s writers and actors strikes — but revenues are flat or down. Theatrical releases, in particular, have become a crap shoot. For every indie breakout hit — Neon’s Longlegs, Magnolia’s Thelma, Cineverse’s Terrifier 3 — there is a long list of big-budget flops, see Lionsgate’s bow of Borderlands and Megalopolis, and critically acclaimed underperformers, including Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, released by Briarcliff Entertainment and Mubi, respectively.

The AFM is also facing new challenges. Next year the Toronto Film Festival, backed by a healthy eight-figure sum from the Canadian government, will launch its own fall film market. Industry veterans will remember, back in 2004, how the AFM took on, and vanquished, the more established MIFED market in Italy when it moved its dates from February to November. Now TIFF could be coming for AFM’s crown.

For five days in Vegas, IFTA president and CEO Jean Prewitt will try and convince the indie industry to keep betting on the AFM. She made her pitch to The Hollywood Reporter on the eve of this year’s market.

Why Vegas?

Well, there are a couple of practical reasons, but the real reason we picked this venue in Vegas was that there had been very strong messaging, particularly from the buyers over the last couple of years, that they were frustrated by the extent to which AFM was becoming more spread out and dispersed. This is a market mainly driven by meetings scheduled every 15 minutes or half hour and if you throw in a 15 to 20-minute commute to get in an Uber to go across Santa Monica to get to a screening or to head out to Lionsgate or whatever, it’s really frustrating. People wanted a more efficient market. We looked at eight cities and fairly rapidly we landed on the Palms. It’s literally the only place, in any city, including Los Angeles, where everything could happen on the same premises. Our conferences are there. There’s the Brendan Theaters with a 14-screen multiplex. We’re able to accommodate everyone that participates in the AFM in the same building. Vegas ticks all the boxes.

But this is a big change. What have buyers and sellers been anxious about and what are you doing to alleviate their fears?

It’s shifted over time. The initial reaction from a lot of people was: I don’t know Vegas. That was particularly true of people from Europe, which surprised us, because in the U.S., Vegas is such a destination for conventions and conferences. It took a period of time for people to learn enough about the city to feel that it was workable. There were things like: ‘Will I be able to get an Uber? Where am I going to park?’ Well, no one has ever complained about not getting an Uber in Las Vegas. And parking in Vegas is free. Companies that were paying $60 a day for every member of their staff to park in Santa Monica can park for free now. But this is the first time people in L.A. have had to travel for the AFM. Instead of going home at night, they have to transport people, put them up in hotel rooms, etc. We’ve tried to keep costs under control. Despite inflation, we’ve decided this year was not the year to raise our prices.

The response has been great. Our exhibitor space is sold out and has been for a while. Every big independent film company will be inside the building, from Lionsgate to A24 to Neon. All under one roof.

Is this a permanent move or will AFM be returning to L.A., or the Loews, any time soon?

The Loews, as far as I know, will never be appropriate for the AFM again, because it’s become a Regent hotel. They’ve followed the template from the Carlton Hotel [in Canne], cutting the number of rooms by 50 percent and tripling the cost per night. We’ll be in Vegas as long as the marketplace wants us in Vegas, if it works for them, which we absolutely hope it will, we will be there indefinitely. Right now we are 100 percent focused on making this market the best market it can be for this year.

Talking to AFM attendees, what’s your take on the state of the indie film market?

It’s really tough out there for the independents. You have all the issues that the studios talk about plus the non-stop struggle to attach talent and, if you get the talent, to sort out financing rapidly so that you don’t lose them other offers. Even the struggle to just get through production. We had the strikes here in the U.S. but other countries are dealing with the same types of negotiations. Canada is in negotiations. The U.K. is in negotiations. Germany is coming up with new codes of conduct for production. Industry circumstances are changing rapidly. That’s part of what’s affecting people as they try to lock down packages. It really started back in Cannes, this feeling that it’s back to business. Maybe not the business of five years ago, but buyers are coming to market because they need product. They need to buy. Most companies are bringing fewer projects to any given market than would have been true five years ago, but they now have a stronger sense of what’s sellable. It would be too strong to say people are hopeful, but they feel there are deals to be done.

Where do you see the most disruption of indie business models?

There’s a clear disruption in the theatrical piece. If being able to place your long-form film theatrically is a key piece of your financing package, there’s trouble out there. But, for the independents, that’s been true now for four years. The theatrical sector has been dysfunctional at different levels and in different places. But this is an astoundingly inventive sector. If producers can’t get a certain percentage of their budget from theatrical, they have shifted to focus on TV or streaming and produce for that. A lot of companies that had previously been very concentrated on theatrical sales have become experts in selling to the streamers. Now some issues, like the local content requirements on Netflix in a number of European countries, are pushing out non-local production, and what falls out at the bottom is always us independents. The big theater event movies get their slots. The European movies made under the existing subsidized conditions have their place, and that leaves the U.S. independents to figure out where they fit in.

Is there still a place for independently-made theatrical movies?

What people are talking about is how, if you really want to make money theatrically, you have to create an event. The box office is not being driven by the big marketing headlines but by people calling up 10 friends and saying: ‘Why don’t we all go see this?’ Word of mouth is so pervasive on social media and that’s become instrumental in the marketing. That’s where people are putting a lot of their energy into: How do we incentivize people to tell their friends to watch our movie? It’s using skills they already have but trying to figure out how they can be used to drive other forms of distribution to achieve a profit. However, we all know the real way to get the marketing right is to make a good film.