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WHO’S THE GENIUS?
I ran into a colleague on the street a few hours ago who caught me up on some depresing industry buzz that had been circulating in Berlin: that Genius, the parent company of theatrical distributor Wellspring which is majority-owned by the Weinstein Company, is effectively shuttering the classy specialty distributor that has released so many great foreign and independent films. And now, Eugene Hernandez has the details in Indiewire. Going forward, the Wellspring name will become a home-video brand, and the Weinstein Company says they’ll release Wellspring’s upcoming theatrical titles. About ten people in Wellspring’s theatrical division will lose their jobs, and cineastes will wonder if future films of the quality of The Beat My Heart Skipped, Kings and Queens, Palindromes, and Notre Musique will find a release without Wellspring in the theatrical distribution arena. In his piece, Hernandez identifies the irony here: that the Weinstein brothers’ Miramax made its early name on the kind of pictures Wellspring distributed, and there’s little indication that these sorts of films have a place on their new company’s release slate.
