 after its Venice premiere last fall but you’d be hard-pressed to find a showtime){kind=link}
Coup! Supposedly arrived in theatres last Friday (August 2nd) after its Venice premiere last fall but you’d be hard-pressed to find a showtime. With the Olympics and Deadpool & Wolverine dominating the cinemas when looking for showtimes in Los Angeles, the only one that came up was a single screening on Monday, August 12, in Ontario, California… which is in San Bernardino County, not Los Angeles. While this is definitely impacted by decisions to give screens to the Olympic Games, it highlights the struggles independent and arthouse films face at large when seeking distribution. When you are up against the big mechanisms it can be hard to market your film to your audience, even if you do manage to get the screens. And Coup! wasn’t the only indie film released on August 2nd) Kneecap was as well, a film which also has the distinction of being Ireland’s entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. So as Marie Zeniter noted in her interview with this journal, these films not only have to “compete with studios that have hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing budget, [they] also have to compete with small distributors too. And sometimes a movie simply doesn’t reach its audience.”
Ideally, in a perfect world, these films would still find their market, and as Marie noted in the article above there is a growing movement to protect arthouse theatres in hubs like New York and Los Angeles which are beckons for films like this and recently Toronto community members, and honorary local Guillermo del Toro,rallied to show their support for the Revue Cinema a historic theatre that’s second-run programming especially now with the shorter window between release dates and streaming is more indie-focused. Cinemas like these often give these films the chance to find audiences again and with their retro/throwback screenings, see the sell-out audiences they were denied.
Another factor often discussed when distributing films, all films, but particularly indie films, is star power. Does the film have any star power or is it a cast of unknowns? A known talent is someone who is a known entity that can add to the marketing of the film. It is why you see independent productions spending a lot of money on someone with name/brand recognition to join their project, called breakage. If they can get buzz, it’s worth it, for the payout. However, using star power, you have to be sure to deliver. Not an indie film (distributed by Universal Pictures) the film Yesterday featured a clip of Ana de Armas in the trailer only for her to not appear in the film, a couple of her fans dragged out a lawsuit for years, costing the studio over half a million dollars in legal fees before it was dropped. Ana de Armas’ inclusion in the trailer wasn’t for the studios even for her perceived star power but other casting decisions are whether pre-announced or cameos meant to spread via word of mouth. Coup!’s leads are recognizable in Peter Sarsgaard and Billy Magnussenas is Sarah Gadon to Canadians but despite having amazing resumes that show their talents they also haven’t really broken out. This is not a film that depended on the cast to sell the film other than by turning in good performances, which they all do in what is essentially a dark comedy with a theatrical nature due to its closed setting in a house during the 1918 flu pandemic.
The setting may actually be the biggest challenge Coup! will face in finding an audience because if you’ve watched movies and TV set in the present lately most like to pretend there never was a pandemic. The same thing happened after 1918, and so projects like Coup! that feature scenes with people wearing masks force people to acknowledge what has happened (and still is) and that isn’t something people seem to want to do.
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