Quiet Berlin Market Wraps With Few Big Deals But Some Optimism
Berlin’s European Film Market wraps up Wednesday with a handful of deals and a touch of optimism over the future of the international industry.
The biggest title of the market, the Lena Dunham-directed rom-com Good Sex, set to star Natalie Portman, kicked off a studio bidding war, with Amazon, Warner Bros., Netflix and Apple all vying for the project, which sees Portman play a 40-year-old relationship therapist who finds herself back on the market after the exit of her long-term partner. Worldwide offers are reportedly in the $45 million-plus range, but there’s no news yet of a final deal.
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Most of the deals reported were smaller domestic pickups of international art house features, with Sony Pictures Classics taking North American and Latin American rights to Rebecca Zlotowski’s French-language murder mystery Vie Privée, starring Jodie Foster as a psychiatrist investigating a patient’s death. Goodfellas has also sold the project across Europe, to distributors including Altitude (U.K.), Caramel Films (Spain) and Plaion Pictures (Germany).
Other North American deals include ones for Lucile Had?ihalilovi?’s dark fairy tale The Ice Tower, a Berlinale competition title starring Marion Cotillard, which went to Yellow Veil Pictures; the New Zealand coming-of-age drama We Were Dangerous, a SXSW award winner about Maori teenagers rebelling against a girls’ reform school in 1954, which boutique distributor The Forge acquired; and a pair of domestic buys for fast-growing art house streamer/distributor Mubi, which snatched up North American rights to Oliver Hermanus’ gay romance The History of Sound, starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor (Focus Features is handling international distribution), as well as rights in North America and much of the rest of the world for Eddie Huang’s documentary Vice Is Broke about the fall of the much-hyped media brand.
Mubi is riding high on Coralie Fargeat’s body horror hit The Substance, which the company released in the U.S. and multiple international territories and has grossed more than $77 million to date. The Substance‘s outsize success is driving a new boom in high-minded (and less high-minded) horror at the EFM.
Range Select and LD landed a U.S. buyer for Sean Byrne’s shark and serial killer thriller Dangerous Animals, with IFC Films and Shudder jointly acquiring the feature starring Jai Courtney as a shark-obsessed serial killer and Hassie Harrison as his captive. TrustNordisk did monster business in Europe for Pal Oie’s upcoming Norwegian creature feature Kraken, with deals in Germany (Splendid Film), France (Mediawan Rights) and Spain (Youplanet), among others.
Hyped festival films doing strong international business at the EFM included Kateryna Gornostai’s Timestamp, a documentary that focuses on a Ukrainian school during the ongoing war, which Best Friend Forever sold to France (Dulac Distribution) and Belgium (Cherry Pickers) ahead of its Berlin competition premiere; and Petra Volpe’s Berlinale Special title Late Shift, starring September 5 actress Leonie Benesch as an overworked nurse in an understaffed Swiss hospital, which TrustNordisk sold to Bim Distribuzione for Italy, adding to previous deals with Wild Bunch (France) and Karma Films (Spain).
But even without headline-making megadeals, industry attendees were upbeat, or at least content, with the state of the market. CAA’s Media Finance co-head Roeg Sutherland, whose company brought some 20 projects to Berlin this year, pointed to the recent success of low-budget dramas such as The Brutalist and Anora as a sign that indie filmmakers are budgeting their movies for the market.
“The Brutalist was made for $9 million and Anora, six or seven; that’s fiscally responsible,” said Sutherland, speaking at an EFM masterclass on film financing and packaging. “It means you can take risks. There’s less pressure.”
On the international sales front, Sutherland noted that while the volume of deals might not match those seen pre-COVID, buyers are still willing to bet big on projects they believe in. “Foreign sales are doing really well,” he said. “Movies that sell are selling at pre-pandemic prices, and that’s not just the U.S. deal.”
Box office figures released by the European Audiovisual Observatory during EFM put a damper on exuberant optimism, however. The group’s early estimates point to a 2 percent drop in theater admissions across Europe in 2024, at 841 million compared to 858 million in 2023, and a revenue flatline, with receipts virtually unchanged year-on-year at 6.6 billion euros ($6.9 billion).
“Cinema attendance appears to have settled at around 24 percent below pre-pandemic levels,” the EAO wrote in its report, “suggesting that the post-pandemic rebound has run its course and that the market may have reached a new equilibrium.”
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