Cinetic Gears Up to Distribute Arthouse Fare Online and On Demand
Filed under: Independent, Distribution, Home Entertainment
Movie blogging is cool and all, but I would argue that cinema's best use of the Internet is making rare fare available to the audience at large. That's slowly but surely starting to happen, and CRM (Cinetic Rights Management) is adding to the pile with a new arthouse deal. Teaming up with a bunch of arthouse film distributors, CRM will slip content online through their FilmBuff label, hitting desinations like iTunes and Hulu.The plan is to make "award-winning and critically acclaimed films" available, and they've listed four titles thus far. There's Ti West's Trigger Man (Scott called it a "watchable curiosity"), Olivier Assayas' Demonlover (Jeffrey M. Anderson called it a "hopped-up, arty cover for a standard issue Hollywood thriller"), Mike Akel's Chalk (Jette said it was "a great illustration of how a movie can truly blossom with the right crowd"), and Margaret Brown's doc The Order of Myths (which Jette said "gives us a good feel for the fun and exciting parts of Mobile's Mardi Gras as well as the undercurrent of "traditional" racial segregation that still exists today").
Having grown up in a town that had nothing more than a "Video World" stocked with only the crappiest of B fare and mainstream numbers (I remember driving to the closest city to rent Tromeo and Juliet), I'm always jazzed about more rare fare getting out there. But the best piece of pie will come when anyone, anywhere, can read up on a movie and be watching it in one or two clicks -- no matter how rare it is.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-04-2009 @ 12:43PM
Chet said...
This is a nice (if small) step, but the release date revolution cannot come soon enough. Arthouse flicks, if anything, should not be beholden to the theatrical release. You know how painful it is for movie people who don't live in NY or LA? We see buzz and trailers for really interesting films, but we know they're going to ride the festival train until they get the right distribution deal, and then wait months more for the right theatrical release date, which won't include any theater near us -- and God forbid it get a little bit of love in theaters, they'll open it in a few more theaters not near us and drag it out a few more months, before taking their sweet time to release it on DVD.
Newsflash: the real film-loving community is not at the anti-Starbucks coffee shop across from the rundown "arthouse" cinema with the busted seats and foul odors -- IT'S ONLINE. Of course, Cinematical knows this, but it'd be nice if the business would catch on eventually.
Then again, they probably make more money making all those prints and attracting the urban socialites in dribs and drabs than getting their product directly into the hands of budget-stretched rural and suburban movie lovers, most of whom will just Netflix it. Perhaps Cinetic (or Netflix online viewing) with a per-view revenue model in parallel with or instead of a theatrical release is what we need.
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9-21-2009 @ 4:32PM
Jacqueline Jehle said...
Can't come too soon!
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