Rarely was a non-English-language film nominated for the Oscar for best picture until Bong Joon Ho‘s Parasite won the top prize in 2020. This year, two are competing in the top category — Brazil’s The Secret Agent and Norway’s Sentimental Value. The trio — alongside last year’s surprise best picture victor, the English-language drama Anora — share a common bond: Neon, the indie distribution outfit run by Tom Quinn, whose keen taste and maverick style have led him to success both at the box office and the world’s most prestigious awards shows.
Neon heads into Sunday’s 98th Oscar ceremony on March 25 with 18 nominations, the second-most of any distributor behind the 30 bestowed Warner Bros., home of best picture frontrunners Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. (Warners’ count also includes Zach Cregger’s Weapons.)
The fact that a major Hollywood studio has two films up for best picture is a rare feat in moden times, and a testament to motion picture group co-heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, who have tried to push the boundaries in building a more varied slate (they also recently hired several top Neon execs). No one is sure, however, what the landscape will look like once David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance closes his deal to buy Warners. He says he’ll keep the two studios separate, but what that means in terms of the executive ranks remains unclear.
Quinn’s mantra when launching Neon in 2017 was to target younger moviegoers who would be more open-minded when it came to foreign-language films, elevated genre titles (look no further than Parasite, which grossed $262 million at the global box office), documentaries and edgy awards dramas, such as I, Tonya, one of the company’s earliest hits.
His razor-sharp instincts also resulted in Neon securing the domestic distribution rights to the last six films in a row that won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. They include Parasite and Anora, as well as Oscar best picture nominees A Triangle of Sadness (2022) and Anatomy of a Fall (2023).
Unlike a major studio, indie companies have used awards season as a marketing tool to goose box office grosses. Yet it’s become more difficult to keep a movie in theaters long enough to profit from such a bump as platform releases go by the wayside. Though that’s exactly what Neon distribution chief Elissa Federoff did with both Sentimental Value and Secret Agent, and it worked.
“The other thing that we’ve found with all of our awards-nominated films is that once they come on Premium VOD, it doesn’t hinder the theatrical at all,” Federoff says. “We put out at four foreign-language titles that have accumulated $20 million in box office revenue over the course of three months, which is a really impressive figure.”
Secret Agent, for example, got the biggest post-nomination bump of any film competing this year for best picture (it is nominated in three other categories, including bests actor for Wagner Moura). First opening in select theaters over Thanksgiving, the film had earned $2.6 million at the time of Oscar noms on Jan. 22. Over the March 6-8 weekend, it crossed the $4 million milestone on its way to a cume of $4.3 million through March 11, meaning 37 percent of its earnings came in the post-nomination corridor, according to Comscore.
Focus Features’ Hamnet is the only other best picture nominee to come close to matching that big of a bump domestically, or 36 percent. Hamnet is expected to jump the $100 million mark globally on Oscar Sunday, with more than $73 million coming from the international box office.
“The most important currency for Neon is not necessarily the sheer box office results for their movies, which have been impressive, but rather how their movies punch above their weight in terms of critical acclaim, awards consideration and most importantly the reputation that Neon has built both with filmmakers and audiences by methodically and systematically over the years delivering a dizzying array of very eclectic films across the genre spectrum,” says Comscore’s chief box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian.
Sentimental Value, receiving nine nominations, opened in early November in only a handful of cinemas. By Thanksgiving, it was playing in roughly 300 theaters, but Federeoff began pulling back to make sure the film could hold on to a few theaters throughout the busy Christmas corridor. By the time of Oscar nominations, it’s tally was hovering around $4.2 million. It crossed the $5 million mark over the Feb. 20-22 weekend, meaning a post-nomination bump of 17 percent.
When nominations were announced, one of the films that drew the most outrage for being shut out of the best picture race, not to mention any category, was a fifth foreign-language entry from Neon, Park Chan-wook’s dark thriller No Other Choice.
Neon’s response was provocative, to say the least. In a riff on the traditional “for your consideration” billboards that pepper Los Angeles during Oscar and Emmy seasons, Neon created a billboard for No Other Choice that began with the banner line, “a snub above the rest.” And in a another line, certain letters were crossed out of “for” so that it read “f your consideration.”
The snub may have been worth it. No Other Choice grossed a hefty $10 million since, one of the top-grossing foreign-langauge films at the U.S. box office in recent times, excluding anime franchises or films from India. It began its platform run over the year-end holidays in early January before leaving theaters in late February after being made available in the home on premium VOD.
Just as the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger reflects the major challenges facing the legacy studio business, so is the indie film business grappling with keeping investors satisfied and the books balanced. Neither Quinn nor reps for Neon have yet to comment on reports that it is getting a major new investor, Company M, but Neon is releasing Company M’s upcoming film The Christophers on April 10.
Neon may not be successful in pulling off another surprise best picture win like it did a year ago with Anora, but it still has plenty to celebrate, between its sheer number of Oscar noms or the fact that four of the five movies competing for best international feature were distributed in the U.S. by Neon; Sentimental Value, Secret Agent, It Was Just an Accident and Sirāt. And Boots Riley’s upcoming film I Love Boosters received rave reviews when opening SXSW on March 12 (Neon is handling the pic, whose early Rotten Tomatoes score from 19 reviews is 100 percent).
There’s also Federoff and Neon’s successful handling of Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. The pic recently opened to $3.25 million, the largest launch ever for an IMAX-exclusive music release before expanding nationwide for a 10-day domestic total of $9.4 million. It’s also the rare Neon title that has skewed to those 50 and older.
Dergarabedian says Neon’s ever-expanding range and proven track record is noteworthy and “made them a force to be reckoned in the highly competitive ecosystem of the indie film world.”
