It’s as hard as it has ever been, if not more so, to be an independent cinema owner. With specialty films like “The Smashing Machine” and “Die My Love” struggling at the box office and audiences gravitating towards premium screens like Imax that indie cinemas don’t have the size or resources to provide, it can seem like the bottom is falling out of the industry.
But Max Friend, founder and CEO of indie ticketing site Filmbot, says he has seen a variety of indie theaters, from Nighthawk Cinemas in Brooklyn to Eagle Rock, Calif.’s Vidiots, find unique ways to thrive in the film industry’s tumultuous new normal. The common thread: they all found a way to become pillars in their communities.
“People are always going to want to gather around a campfire and hear a story, and independent cinemas play a vital role in that,” Friend told TheWrap. “There is an authenticity and a soul to these spaces because they are infused with a significant amount of care and often a degree of heritage that is irreplaceable.”
This weekend, Filmbot has partnered with A24, Neon, Gkids, IFC and Film Movement to present “Lost Films of COVID,” a retrospective series of seven critically acclaimed films that were released in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the process, never got the full theatrical release they deserved. When many of these films were released, Filmbot held a special program where arthouse lovers in quarantine could watch them at home and choose a local indie theater to receive a portion of the profits from their purchase.
As well-intentioned as that program was, even Friend acknowledges that it was not the same as seeing these films in an indie cinema. Some, like Michael Sarnoski’s “Pig” starring Nicolas Cage as a former world-class chef turned recluse who looks for his kidnapped pet pig, were released in the early months of the theatrical reopening process in 2021 before many arthouse moviegoers were ready to come back to auditoriums.
Others, like Cartoon Saloon’s Oscar-nominated animated masterpiece “Wolfwalkers,” were screened at a handful of drive-in theaters at the peak of the COVID infection wave in winter 2020 before going straight to streaming on Apple TV.
The series even got the attention of “Anora” Oscar winner Sean Baker, who with A24 has contributed his 2021 dramedy “Red Rocket” to the series.
“This is really a way to celebrate the resurgence of these independent cinemas and remind audiences that there is a diverse range of amazing films that came out during that time, and that independent cinemas are really the home for where these movies are meant to be experienced,” Friend said.
Beyond this series, Friend discussed with TheWrap how independent cinemas Filmbot has partnered with have adjusted to the radical changes brought to moviegoing over the last five years and why he is optimistic despite the headwinds. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us a little bit about Filmbot’s origins and how this series came about.
When we started Filmbot in 2013, we found that there were a lot of different services that were antiquated and being duct-taped together by cinemas, and we felt like there was an opportunity to provide a more seamless platform that would make it easier for theaters to manage and showcase what made them special in terms of their programming and their unique venues, as well as making it easier for audiences to discover all of the amazing programming being offered by those theaters and to buy tickets.
During the pandemic, we introduced an online viewing experience to be able to screen new movies online with distributors, where moviegoers could select the theater that they wanted to support, and a portion of their ticket purchase would go to the theater that they wanted to receive it as if they were buying the tickets in person. That was our way to help support the theaters during the pandemic.
Since there’s been a resurgence of theaters coming back online since that time, I was thinking about all of the amazing films that had their theatrical releases delayed, interrupted, disrupted due to COVID in 2020 and 2021, and these were a lot of amazing films that never got the theatrical spotlight they deserved and audiences never really got to enjoy in the way that they were meant to be seen.
Indie cinemas aren’t big enough to add an Imax or a 4DX theater to their auditoriums, so they need to find other ways to stand out from multiplexes. Has film curation been one of the most successful methods?
I feel like the untold story is how a new generation of independent cinemas are really winning new audiences by programming, by leading with creative curation of a diverse mix of new releases and repertory films from past decades, and where they are changing the movies that are screening on a daily basis. It’s so much more than just one-off screenings of specific films. You’re also seeing a lot of independent cinemas present films from local directors, and all of that creates a much more rich, textured experience that resonates with people.
For example, the Tomorrow Theater in Portland works with the Portland Museum of Art. They’ve introduced this concept of “Film-Plus” screenings, where every screening is accompanied by experimental performances, Q&As and other pre-show and post-show offerings that make it feel like a special event.
Then there’s Vidiots in L.A., where they hosted a screening I went to of a documentary called “Sisters With Transistors” that told the stories of pioneers in synth music over the decades. This was on a Thursday night. It was sold out. There was a pre-show documentary and Q&A with a DJ that had flown in from Australia to talk about her work, and it felt electric. There was excitement and applause throughout the screening, but that was a great example of a way that cinemas are creating special events that feel relevant to the culture at large, and that’s representative of independent cinemas. They’re not just relying on the next blockbuster, but take matters into their own hands as curators that are helping introduce their audiences to compelling films.
How does Filmbot help these theaters engage with those audiences?
We built a feature so that theaters could automatically send promotions to customers after their last visit to incentivize them to return more frequently. For example, theaters could send an email to attendees the day after a screening offering a two-for-one discount if they return in the next 30 days. We added that because we found that a large segment of the audience was only attending a screening at a given theater once or twice a year, and we conducted a study of over 3,000 moviegoers where we found that offering a discount to what we call lapsed customers significantly increased the likelihood that they would return and boosted ticketing and food and beverage revenue.
Another trend that we are actively supporting with our platform is selling monthly memberships in addition to annual memberships, because monthly memberships are a lot more affordable for especially younger audiences that are more cost sensitive. We feel like that trend will continue, and you may start seeing theaters that are offering very affordable monthly memberships for weekday matinee screenings and other off-peak times to help boost less attended showtimes.
The specialty box office is still a fraction of what it used to be, and the theatrical documentary space, which was thriving before COVID, is nearly nonexistent now. Yet the high demand for the Oscar-winning doc “No Other Land” in several arthouse theaters shows that there’s still an audience for politically and socially conscious docs. How can indie theaters help in that market’s revival?
There’s a few aspects there. I think the streaming platforms saw how theaters were presenting films that were resonating with their audiences, and often try to recreate those types of films to the point where there’s an over-saturation. There are always going to be ebbs and flows and new trends of storytelling and of filmmaking, but theaters are irreplaceable because of the social aspect of that experience.
People are always going to want to experience stories together, and they’re always going to lean on independent cinemas to help curate and surface the stories. “No Other Land” is a great example of leaning into subject matter that is incredibly relevant and timely, and independent cinemas are always demonstrating a type of boldness and creativity when it comes to curating by virtue of only having a certain amount of screens and show times,along with an impressive flexibility when it comes to programming a mix of new releases and repertory titles.
Watching these curated films in a communal setting is always going to have an impact that watching films recommended by a streaming algorithm is never going to match.
