Below The Line

A Market Defined by Absence The American Film Market 2025 at the Fairmont Century Plaza felt different the moment you stepped into the lobby. Not “lighter” or “consolidated,” but genuinely quiet in a way that even those of us who survived the Loews era, the Le Méridien era (“year”), and yes — the strangely enthusiastic Vegas experiment of 2024 — couldn’t fully recognize. Entire buying blocs that once reliably filled hallways were reduced to a handful of familiar faces. Europe

There’s a “new” buyer in town called Radial Entertainment, and in this article I will indeed be covering what they’re buying, in what quantity, and MG ranges. But this new buyer isn’t exactly new – it’s the result of a handful of mergers and acquisitions.

Theaters Are Bouncing Back for [Some] Indies, But Teaching Lessons to the Studios. Not sure how many of you are paying attention, but the brief is this. Some studios have wins while others are still flopping at the box office, other distributors (*cough* A24) are climbing into new budgets and getting a spanking (I mean "learning lessons"), and yet and still, moviegoers are coming back to theaters and some indies are making money that's important for them [it just wouldn't get

Let me start by saying this wasn’t some buttoned-up industry panel. Tony Piantedosi — SVP of Acquisitions at Vertical Entertainment and a longtime friend of mine — and I cracked open drinks, hit record, and went [almost] straight into the raw questions filmmakers ask me every damn day. You want to know what gets your pitch deleted before it’s even read? Or why some films land a Pay 1 deal while others sink without a trace? Tony lays it out, unfiltered. And if you’ve ever thou

29 August 2025 - Filmmakers ask us all the time: why pick one distributor over another? And increasingly, some are bypassing...