On Monday, Amazon Prime launched a streaming version of the SXSW Film Festival, partnering with the Austin-based event to deliver a handful of movies free until May 6. In theory, it’s a brilliant s…
Film Festival, partnering with the Austin-based event to deliver a handful of movies free until May 6.
Trouble is, in practice, this approach isn’t so great. Check out the SXSW package on Amazon, and you’ll find a bunch of shorts, a few indie TV pilots and just seven of the 120-plus features that were originally scheduled to play the festival in March. If you don’t live in Austin but have long heard of this mythic utopia where Mumblecore began and Judd Apatow movies premiere, you could be forgiven for thinking, “I don’t get it.
If sharing their films were the only goal, then virtual festivals would be perfect. They stand to reach more people than they ever would in Austin. That’s the justification Alex Lee Moyer gave for including her feature debut, the controversial incel portrait “,” which is all about isolation, loneliness and the social distancing that was already happening to our culture before the COVID-19 outbreak. But doing so meant disrupting the the industry’s business model.
To understand what’s working against any film going this route, consider that the most valuable thing festival movies have is their premiere status. A “world premiere” is a movie that’s showing for the very first time, and everyone — be it Cannes, Sundance or SXSW — wants those. If a festival lines up enough world premieres of a certain level, it has no trouble attracting press and industry to attend. Buyers come looking for new movies, and thus a market is born.
Now, if you’re following my logic so far, you may have concluded that only “the dregs” of the selection would go that route. That’s not entirely fair. Judging by the films available to stream to press and industry via SXSW’s and Tribeca’s private extranet services , the sparkly titles opt out, and we’re left with those with more need for coverage or a deal.
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