With this year’s festival entering its dying days, market news remains unusually slight, a surprise given how strike-impacted buyers were reportedly foaming for schedule-fillers. Big sales so far haven’t been all that big – Jesse Eisenberg comedy A Real Pain at Searchlight, Steven Soderbergh ghost story Presence at Neon – and so there are questions that still need answering going into the last weekend.
But earlier this week, as others umm-ed and ahh-ed, Netflix made a bullish statement with a $17m purchase of low-budget mind-bender It’s What’s Inside, an unusually high number for a genre film without any stars attached. While it may well be trumped over the next week or so given how other, more commercial titles remain unsold, it’s currently stamped with this year’s biggest-of-fest tag. That comes with a mostly terrible, tortured history, huge expectation leading to little reward, festival fever cured by lower altitude. Because for every Coda, there’s a Hamlet 2 or a Late Night or a Happy, Texas or a Birth of a Nation. The domination of streamers (forking out the most in recent years for films like Fair Play, Flora and Son, and Palm Springs) might have moved the goalposts for what success really means right now but buzz remains easier to measure and a talked-about hit in the mountains is too often a miss on the ground.
