Open Road Films, for instance, launched the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film Sabotage at the end of March only for that film’s entire target demographic to get swept up in Captain America: The Winter Soldier one week later. Many of them, like FilmDistrict’s April 2012 title Lockdown, were cheapie films that would’ve gone to independent distributors even before the economic downturn.įor another, the new emphasis on rampant blockbusters made it tougher than ever for these smaller films to stand out at the multiplex. For one thing, their line-up of features wasn’t usually the $50-80 million mid-budget titles major studios had largely turned down. However, by and large, new studios had trouble standing out in the marketplace with their titles. To be sure, the biggest successes these studios experienced could be owed to pursuing productions other places weren’t making, like Relativity Media filling in the need for romantic dramas with its 2013 film Safe Haven. On paper, this would appear to have created a void that new studios like FilmDistrict or CBS Films could leap into. The focus was now shifting towards releasing fewer, bigger-budgeted movies in the marketplace, a drastic shift from the norm of even five years prior. In responding to this development, studios began to wean themselves off mid-budget movies and slim down their slates. The economic crash of 2008 had obliterated previously reliable financial models for the major studios (like Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, etc.). The key thing to remember here is that the emergence of these independent studios wasn’t the only big thing happening to the American film industry at the start of the 2010s. How did we get here? How did so many promising studios fall prey to dissolution?
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