Just before Cannes, festival director Thierry Frémaux said of this year’s line-up that “the trend is audience-friendly auteur films.” It was a genius turn of phrase that captures what’s “working” and not in the current marketplace. The phrase not only encapsulates the Cannes line-up (although some critics felt this year was not exactly audience-friendly), but what distributors have been moving towards in their quest for finding an audience for the past few years. Cannes has always been about auteurs and so have the acquisitions of the major arthouse distributors – which is why Neon’s picks have aligned so well with Cannes and what wins awards and works in the marketplace (and they did it again this year). 

In today’s marketplace, however, films need to be not just well-made, but also very user friendly. Something an audience can easily decide they will enjoy, and that it’s worth their money and time spent to go to the movie theater or pick it for tonight’s stream, without worrying that it might be too challenging or too dark, heavy or pondering. They need to be “big,” as well – easy to market (albeit by spending a lot of money), challenging enough to be interesting, but not too off-putting, and hopefully have recognizable names, even if they aren’t huge stars. That’s what we were seeing at Cannes, and that’s what gets picked up and goes to market. 

But this also points to a problem, this paradigm leaves out a lot of great movies that aren’t what anyone would call “audience-friendly,” which is one way to look at the biggest problem in film today. Everyone is chasing the same “big” films that will find the largest audience, and right now, a large audience of people want to spend their time with a certain type of film. Everyone is trying to fund and audience by focusing on the qualities of the film itself, but this allows them to not think about other mechanisms to find an audience beyond what’s in the movie. Now, having a great film is a good thing, and a good start, no quibbles with that, of course. But I’m not arguing we should distribute bad movies, just that we could do things to make a success out of non-sure-fire films. There’s a lot of those floating around with no distribution offers, because as distributors lost their pay-one deals, they can’t take the risks they used to take on smaller films. But that leaves a gap and an opportunity. 

Maybe we could market a film a different way and tap into a bigger audience that we’re missing. Maybe there’s a sizable niche that is not being served, and we could target that audience with our messaging and have a similar success. Maybe we could build a better algorithm that helps surface the non-audience-friendly films to a bigger audience. By focusing only on the qualities within a film, arthouse distributors are making a different version of the same mistake Hollywood is making by focusing on franchises and that doc strands at streamers are making by only buying true-crime and celebrity or sports driven documentary. Audience-friendly becomes a feedback loop that drives everything to be more of the same, just bigger, and this leaves aside entire swaths of other great movies that also have an audience, albeit one that takes more work to reach. In a way, it’s about where the money is spent – upfront, making and buying the biggest, most appealing films, or on the back end finding the audience, and everyone has chosen to front-load their spend. 

Audience Engagement Buzz

I started thinking about this while attending a meet-up of people attending Cannes who were interested in audience development, held at the Nordic House by Film I Vast, which is where I took the photo above of the Frémaux quote on their wall. Film I Vast are co-producing/financing films like FJORD, which won the Palm d’Or, as well as financing audience design workshops which bring together filmmakers with their distributors to think about audience development as early as the script stage, proving you can think about audience development and support pure auteur filmmaking at the same time. You can read one of their reports about audience development and design here, and I think they’re on the right path with mixing support for auteurs along with research, design work and funding for audience development, with a goal of expanding the audience for the films they support via mechanisms that largely take place off-screen (marketing, demand-building, knowing your audience, etc.) As one of the folks there told me – as film funds get cut, and it continues to be hard to reach an audience, everyone needs to focus on what we can do besides just funding great movies. 

What we need to understand is that the audience’s relationship to film is changing. It’s within the context of a crowded, attention-economy where one must stand out from the crowd. This can be done on-screen via audience-friendly stories, but it can also be done off-screen by thinking about how we find and engage audiences. Audiences are also more participatory now. Part of the reason they go to a film fest, for example, is just to get a feeling of interacting with the director and stars, and with other audience members. People showed up at Midnight for the 25^th anniversary screening of The Fast And Furious at Cannes not to see the film as much as it was to see Vin Diesel. That can be replicated in other ways, and it applies to smaller cinema as well. 

We’d do well to think a bit more about other approaches to being audience friendly.