Berlin Market Opens Indie Dealmaking Floodgates

With COVID lockdowns and shuttered cinemas and the dual wallop of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, it’s been a rough few years for independent movies. But the end of strike action last November has triggered a rebound in the indie market. After a strong showing in Sundance, buyers and sellers are looking to Berlin’s European Film Market to provide proof this recovery has legs.

Early signs are promising, with a flood of new projects across all budgets and genres. CAA Media Finance alone has half a dozen finished films on sale and around 20 big packages, including sci-fi actioner Afterburn with Dave Bautista and Samuel L. Jackson attached, selling together with Black Bear; the drama A Big Bold Beautiful Journey from After Yang and Pachinko director Kogonada, featuring Colin Farrell and a post-Barbie Margot Robbie, that 30West and Neon International are jointly handling, and the Michelle Yeoh action thriller The Mother alongside AGC International.

For the more specialty-minded buyer, FilmNation has Berlinale festival opener Small Things Like These, starring a post-Oppenheimer Cillian Murphy, Treasure with Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry (which Bleecker Street is releasing stateside), and the Pamela Adlon-directed comedy Babes starring Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, and Hasan Minhaj, a Neon release in the U.S. Family-friendly fare like Charades’ Hypergalatic, the new anime from the producers of One Piece Film: Red featuring the voice work of Adam Devine and Elsie Fisher; is selling alongside Mike Leigh’s new film, Hard Truths, starring his Secrets & Lies actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste, which Bleecker Street pre-bought for the U.S. and Cornerstone is shopping internationally; and WME Independent’s Normal, an offbeat actioner starring Bob Odenkirk from the pen of his Nobody screenwriter Derek Kolstad.

‘Hypergalactic’

©Toei-Animation

“There are a lot of projects out there,” says Christoph Daniel of German distributor DCM. “It feels like the end of the strike really opened things up and a lot of films that were blocked or delayed started moving again.”

“What’s great to see is you have a lot of these ‘studio-ish’-sized projects at Berlin, the more than $20 million, less than $100 million films that the international distributors really want and need,” a U.S. seller noted.

With fewer studio films expected this year —cost-cutting and post-strike production timelines have thinned out the release slate — bigger indie projects hope to fill the gap.

“We know there’s going to be a dip [in studio releases] and we want to be there with the films that can take advantage of that,” noted one European buyer.

Heading into Park City, both buyers and sellers were unsure of what to expect. The available films were smaller in scale and star power but most were pleasantly surprised by how the sales netted out.

While the price tags fell short of record-breaking deals of years past, there were stand-outs like Netflix’s $17 million deal for thriller It’s What’s Inside, My Old Ass’ $15 million deal to Amazon MGM, and Searchlight’s $10 million pick-up for A Real Pain. The market, the first post-strike, was seen as a return to a more sustainable style of dealmaking, with more reasonably priced deal spread out over a larger swatch of films. Focus, Sony Pictures Classics, Magnolia, IFC, and Neon all took at least one project, with the majority closing after festivalgoers left the mountain.

“Alongside the big studio and streamer deals you had the Verticals, the A24s, the Neons, the Bleecker Streets buying again which is a good sign,” notes one U.S. sales agent. “The smaller, the $2 million to $4 million deals are the ones that really keep this business going.”

The doc market also proved its staying power after a quieter 2022 and 2023, two years where many studio and streamers non-fiction arms saw reorganizations and staff reductions. There was a massive Netflix deal for Will & Harper, the road trip movie about Will Ferrell and his trans friend Harper Steele (multiple sources called it “record-breaking” though a number has yet to be reported). Elsewhere the Christopher Reeve doc landed at Warner Bros, which was vying for the film against streamers in a competitive situation, with the studio excited about Superman cross-over potential and a DC tie-in. (James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy is dated for 2025.)

Given the number, and quality, of projects in Berlin, the EFM should far outpace Park City in the number and size of deals done. After three years in which uncertainty and dread were the dominant emotions among indie film execs, Berlin promises a return to the sunnier cliche of “cautious optimism.”