The Orchard
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Raiders of the Lost Screens
When investment firm 1091 Media bought The Orchard’s film operation earlier this year, few in the biz seemed as alarmed as I was. Variety initially reported the sale in January and surmised that the new outfit would be “on the prowl” for titles at Sundance. They bought one title in Park City and then waited several months to buy a couple more that had been passed over by everyone else. By the time their acquisition team bought a creationism doc at Cannes, 1091 had nuked The Orchard’s theatrical arm, laying off 25% of its staff and downsizing its theatrical output […]
by Alejandro Adams on Sep 4, 2019 -
Hits & Misses: The Theatrical Performance of the Sundance Class of ’16
How do you measure success these days? When more than two million people vote for you over the other guy and you still lose? When you receive no endorsements from a single major newspaper, your party’s leadership practically ignores you, and you still win? Or, perhaps, when your heralded Sundance acquisition earns a whopping $15.8 million at the box office, but you spend more than twice that in acquisition fees and prints and advertising costs to release it? (i.e., The Birth of a Nation). How about if your film isn’t released in theaters at all, but Netflix paid $5 million […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 18, 2017 -
The Orchard Releases Detailed Distribution Revenue Figures for Cartel Land, Launches New Film Analytics Dashboard
Distributor The Orchard launched today what they are calling “the industry’s first fully-transparent dashboard for film analytics.” Using figures for their recent release, the Oscar-nominated doc Cartel Land, the dashboard provides hard figures for film revenues across both different platforms and then tracks and projects them over time. Simply put, this is extraordinary. The lack of digital reporting figures has been cited repeatedly in Filmmaker and elsewhere as an impediment to filmmakers seeking to create business plans for their films. The Cartel Land example posted today provides significantly more granular detail than is typically reported in the trades, and dynamic […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
The Digital Lowdown
Is online distribution a boon to independent filmmakers or a boatload of false promises? Given that streaming/downloading is the primary way that many audiences are now consuming content, this may be the most pressing and important question for today’s business-savvy independent filmmakers. But it’s difficult to discern the answer. For one reason, the digital distribution revolution is always evolving, and what was standard procedure three years ago is no longer the norm. A few years ago, everyone was talking about multiplatform day-and-date hits Margin Call, Arbitrage and Bachelorette — starry films that received huge grosses through simultaneous theatrical and digital […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jul 25, 2016 -
The Orchard Ripens
One of the busier buyers at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, The Orchard — per its website, a “21st-century distribution company with a global presence and a local feel” — has only recently made a name for itself as an arthouse distributor. Founded in 1997, they’ve been known as a leading distribution label for independent music; to date, digital music sales, streams and transactions from titles The Orchard oversees have accounted for 20 to 30 percent of all digital music revenue. But recently, The Orchard garnered media attention for its newly created film division, a division that applies the lessons […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 20, 2016 -
Theatrical 2.0
Releasing movies in U.S. theaters isn’t going away anytime soon. But indie film distribution is experiencing a significant tipping of the scales. While theatrical distribution has always been an advertisement for foreign sales and ancillary platforms, like VHS and then DVD, a new wave of film companies are shifting the balance even further, where theatrical distribution is a means to a digital end. As Vincent Scordino, senior vice president of marketing at rising distributor Alchemy says, “Ancillary platforms have always been important to a film’s profitability, but now we’re talking about them more with the rise of iTunes and the […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jul 23, 2015
