Think the market for adult-focused specialty films is dead? Peter Kujawski, chairman of Focus Features, explains why you’re wrong on the latest episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business.”
As the film biz gathers in Las Vegas this week for CinemaCon, Kujawski, an industry veteran who has headed NBCUniversal’s Focus Features unit since 2016, discusses the state of moviemaking and exhibition and he walks through the key lessons learned from the strike-challenged 2023 box office. Takeaway No. 1 — originality sells.
“The big cultural story of the movies last year was the Barbenheimer effect. Both of those things in their way are unexpected, right? They’re wholly original in terms of conception and execution,” Kujawski says of last year’s summer juggernauts, Warner Bros.’ “Barbie” and Universal’s “Oppenheimer.” “And they were not only embraced but literally devoured by an audience, right? I truly believe — and I realize that it may sound self-serving given the chair I sit in — that we might be coming into the very beginning stages of a golden age of movies that are filmmaker driven, with original visions and original voices being the thing that defines the biggest movies of our era.”
The kind of movies that Focus is best known for making — specialty titles with mid-range budgets aimed squarely at adults — are seen as an endangered species as far as theatrical releases are concerned. Kujawski believes that a hard look at box office data tells a different story.
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“We have seen data that shows that true habitual moviegoers — the people who go to movies 12 times a year — they actually rate specialty films as a category among the very highest of the movies on the scale of things that they like. These are people who then also go to all the other movies as well,” Kujawski says. “So there’s something about the fact that the most white-hot core of theatrical moviegoers actually are largely the cinephiles who are primarily driven by movies that are completely unique.”
As studio insiders huddle with exhibition leaders this week in Sin City, Kujawski argues that the industry itself needs to do a better job about trumpeting the value and the uniqueness of seeing a film on a big screen with state of the art audio. The communal experience of watching a movie with a crowd is very different than watching at home — and that’s something exhibition and studios should embrace as a selling point to consumers.
“What I don’t think we talk enough is the experience of digesting a story as part of a communal response to that story, rather than as an individual response to that story,” Kujawski says. To buttress his point, he notes the contrast between the first time he saw “The Holdovers” at a small buyers’ screening at the Toronto Film Festival with the film’s first test screening for an audience in Pasadena.
“When you’re part of the feedback loop of digesting that film, part of it is the recognition that others are doing it with you. And it becomes a different movie than that same series of images and sounds played at home,” Kujawski says. “We’re not on some pathway for that to decay. Because it’s fundamental to how we’re meant to digest stories.”
“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.
