European Theater Owners Look for Digital Lifeline Amid Virus Crisis

While the U.K.'s Curzon enjoys record views on its beefed-up Curzon Home Cinema streaming platform, other operators across Europe are turning to VOD to keep business flowing during the lockdown.

On the third weekend in March, Curzon Home Cinema — the streaming platform owned and operated by U.K. art house cinema chain Curzon — recorded its highest viewing figures since launching in 2010, up 89 percent from its previous best weekend. It also saw a 99 percent increase for the whole week compared with its previous best seven-day figure.

It wasn’t exactly a shock — just four days earlier Britain's biggest exhibitors had all, in quick succession, announced they were shutting their doors as fears over the novel coronavirus pandemic escalated. By the weekend, the number of screens still in operation in the U.K. could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Like much of the world, the U.K.’s exhibition industry had practically ground to a halt overnight, with operators big and small facing some tough existential questions. (It would be a week before the British government unveiled its COVID-19 job retention scheme, pulling many back — temporarily, at least — from the financial brink.)

But unlike the majors, such as Cineworld, Odeon or Vue, fellow art house-skewing chains like Picturehouse or Everyman, or any of the smaller indies, Curzon — which was acquired by U.S. billionaire Charles Cohen in December — had a long-established lockdown-friendly ace up its sleeve. Initially launched as Curzon On Demand before changing its name in 2013, Curzon Home Cinema was the first platform in the U.K. to show day-and-day releases, the majority from Curzon’s own Curzon Artificial Eye distribution arm.

When the crisis struck and the operator shut the doors on its physical sites — a decision with huge financial ramifications for a company that just weeks earlier had celebrated Parasite becoming the most successful non-English language release in U.K. history — Curzon was able to quickly pivot to its online service.

Indeed, the top film the first weekend following the closure was Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Venice-bowing The Truth, originally destined for a theatrical release March 20 but swiftly pushed to an early digital release. The film beat the previous best three-day figure on Curzon Home Cinema by 66 percent.

“It has primarily been a shift of focus for a number of our staff,” says Curzon CEO Philip Knatchbull, who two days after the cinemas closed said the company was able to avoid any layoffs for a minimum of three months, with staff taking a short-term pay cut. "We are already a fully integrated company, so most people have roles that span exhibition, distribution and streaming. It’s about people using their existing skills, knowledge and contacts in creative ways to adapt to the current climate."

The following weekend, which saw the release of acclaimed German drama System Crasher — also originally set for a theatrical bow first — Curzon Home Cinema smashed its record again.

As part of System Crasher’s digital release, Curzon hosted the first "Curzon Living Room" Q&A with writer-director Nora Fingscheidt from her home in Vancouver (where she was working on her latest project). The interview was live-streamed on Curzon Home Cinema, but also on its Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channels, with people invited to ask questions online.

"We've live-streamed Q&As to the service before, but previously they’ve always been events we were hosting at one of our venues," says Knatchbull. "So we’ve adapted that in light of the lockdown. We’ll be speaking to directors directly from their own isolation."

Since Fingscheidt, Curzon has hosted Curzon Living Room Q&A video calls almost twice weekly for a number of new releases, including Mark Jenkin (talking to noted Brit critic Mark Kermode) for Bait, Saudi director Haifaa al Mansour about The Perfect Candidate, and for Vivarium, Jesse Eisenberg, Imogen Poots and director Lorcan Finnegan (each speaking from separate locations). Upcoming events include Diego Maradona director Asif Kapadia, journalist John Pilger for the doc The Dirty War on the NHS and Joanna Hogg for The Souvenir.

“Live events are an increasing part of the business as they give people that sense of community, that’s more important now than ever," explains Knatchbull.

Rather than from Curzon’s own Curzon Artificial Eye distribution stable, System Crasher came from 606 Distribution, with A Perfect Candidate from Modern Films. And while Knatchbull claims the streamer has always worked with third-party distributors, he says it will be “ramping that up during the cinema closure.”

Curzon’s shift to VOD may be an enviable case study for worried exhibitors considering how to navigate today’s troubled waters. But across Europe, other operators — even some without their own streaming platforms — have been fast-tracking their move to digital, while distributors are getting in on the act as well. And with lockdown orders across the continent keeping theaters shuttered and forcing film fans inside, demand has skyrocketed.

Viewing figures at Dutch platform Picl, a transactional VOD service that shares revenues with the independent theaters that make up its membership, are up 10-fold since before the crisis hit. Picl co-founder Noortje van de Sande told THR she has signed on an additional 10 cinemas since the COVID-19 shutdown, expanding her network's reach to nearly 90 percent of all Dutch independent exhibitors. Online hits have included Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the Oscar-nominated documentary For Sama and Norwegian period drama Out Stealing Horses, starring Stellan Skarsgard.

Draken, a Swedish VOD service run by the Göteborg Film Festival, has more than doubled its (admittedly small) subscriber base since March 17, when it joined forces with indie distributors Nonstop Entertainment, Folkets Bio and Smorgasbord Picture House to offer VOD releases of such current theatrical titles as Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Hlynur Palmason's Icelandic drama A White White Day. In a move of solidarity with hard-hit cinemas, Draken has agreed to split its new subscriber revenue 50-50 with Swedish art house theaters that join its network. Some 80 have signed on to date, and Olle Agebro, head of acquisitions for Draken, tells THR the service has dolled out more than $30,000 (SEK 300,000) so far.

In Spain, FilmIn, a day-and-date VOD platform that has been in operation since 2008, has seen traffic spike 50 percent since March 13 when the country was put into lockdown mode. Subscriptions have also jumped more than 10 percent, says FilmIn co-founder Jaume Ripoll.

FilmIn, which counts Spain's leading indie distributors, including Golem, Avalon and Wanda among its shareholders, has had little problem securing new VOD-only releases during the shutdown. Avalon's online-first release of Xavier Dolan's Matthias & Maxime on March 27 was a surprise hit, with more than 7,000 streams, marking the best-ever "opening weekend" for a Dolan film in Spain. It helped that the social-media savvy director promoted the release directly to his Spanish fan base.

"I hope the experience of VOD during this crisis will convince people in the industry it isn't a threat, that it doesn't cannibalize theatrical revenue," Ripoll tells THR. "The VOD and theatrical release reach different audiences.”

He points to the pre-crisis VOD release of Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, which went out on FilmIn in Spain on Feb. 10, the day it won the Oscar for best picture. "It had made 3 million euros ($3.3 million) in theaters in Spain before that," he says. "After, when it was available online and in theaters, it earned another 4 million euros ($4.4 million) at the box office."

"We've tracked this very carefully since we started in 2017, and there is no evidence of cannibalization for these kinds of movies, art house films," says Picl's van de Sande. "Eighty to 90 percent of the art house audience prefers to see these movies in theaters. The main reasons they don't are either the film isn't screening in theaters at a time that's convenient for them, or the film has already left theaters and they missed it, or they don't live in a big city with an art house cinema that shows these kinds of films."

"The metaphor I like to use is pizza delivery," says Philipp Hoffmann, whose German Kino-on-Demand art house VOD service has seen a surge in demand since lockdown orders a month ago. "Just because I can get a pizza delivered to my home doesn't mean I don't want to eat out anymore."

But Draken's Agebro thinks art house VOD platforms could remain in high demand even after theaters reopen after the virus crisis. "There are so many big studio films being pushed back that after the crisis it will be incredibly difficult for independent titles to get a slot on the schedule," he says, adding that streaming models that let theaters participate in the revenue could be the answer.