Latest news with #Cakarel
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Mubi CEO on Pushing Into Production and That Huge Cannes Haul
Arthouse streamer and distributor Mubi is planning to work on not more than 12 movies annually but is already up to 15 movies this year after a hot streak picking up a slew of Cannes Film Festival buzz titles – and the Venice Film Festival has not even started yet, CEO and founder Efe Cakarel told SXSW London on Friday in an energetic appearance that had the crowd engaged late in a busy week. Cakarel shared his love of the cinema-going experience early in his appearance, saying, 'I really focus on theatrical,' and 'I am very committed to these films getting as wide a release in cinemas as possible.' More from The Hollywood Reporter Canal+ to Distribute Netflix in Francophone Africa in Landmark Pact Enzo Staiola, Child Star in Vittorio De Sica's 'Bicycle Thieves,' Dies at 85 Wes Anderson Shares How Indian Cinema Legend Satyajit Ray Shaped His Aesthetic Last year, Mubi released The Substance globally, he highlighted. 'It turns out distribution is not rocket science,' Cakarel concluded, adding that the firm is launching theatrical in Italy next. Mubi was on a streak at Cannes, picking up rights in select markets to competition titles The Secret Agent from writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho, Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier's latest feature, Mascha Schilinski's Sound of Falling (In Die Sonne Schauen), and Lynne Ramsay's Jennifer Lawrence-Robert Pattinson starrer Die My Love. The latter deal came with a $24 million price tag, the biggest known and announced during the festival. He joked that his team is 'freaking out' after Mubi's strong Cannes run – in a good way. Production is also a big new area for the company after Mubi debuted its first production at Cannes, namely Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind. 'We want to produce more' great films and series, he shared. Mubi is, for example, a co-producer on the new Jim Jarmusch movie, Father Mother Sister Brother, which stars Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Tom Waits, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore, and Luka Sabbat. Cakarel mentioned on Friday that it is set to screen at Venice. Cakarel also shared on Friday that Mubi was 'profitable' by 2020. With 60 percent first-quarter 2020 subscriber growth amid the COVID pandemic, the company experienced strong cash flow growth, which allowed Mubi to invest and grow further. The company's headcount has also grown to 400 people in 15 countries, he explained. The company has increasingly picked up movies not only for streaming but also for theatrical distribution. Mubi chief content officer Jason Ropell highlighted the role of streaming in the indie film space last year, saying: 'The streaming component of the ecosystem has actually broadened the audience for multiple kinds of film, including independent film. There's a generation of viewers, of customers, of cinephiles that have been exposed to films, which they would not have but for that technology, for the access to streaming.'Last year, Mubi acquired The Substance at Cannes, prepping the title for what would go on to be an Oscar run for Coralie Fargeat's body horror thriller. SXSW London runs through June 7. Penske Media, the parent company of The Hollywood Reporter, is the majority stakeholder of SXSW. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Mubi Deep Dive: Founder Efe Cakarel & Content Boss Jason Ropell Lift The Lid On Rapid Growth & Next Steps…But What Does The Industry Think?
This is Mubi's time. With studio specialty divisions almost a relic of the past and international and independent cinema soaring on the awards stage, the arthouse mini-studio founded by Efe Cakarel is cutting a growing swathe across the film landscape. Mubi is back on the Cannes Croisette with three films in Competition and another in Un Certain Regard. Director Luca Guadagnino, a previous collaborator, is one of the company's many fans in high places: 'Mubi is a great and passionate company,' he says. 'They will grow a lot as a business.' More from Deadline Maya Hawke & Rhys Ifans Set For Aisling Walsh's Lucia Joyce Biopic As The Veterans Boards Sales - Cannes Fred Cavayé Talks 'The Fugitive'-Style 'Les Misérables' Adaptation As Studiocanal Launches Sales - Cannes Market AfroCannes 2025 To Explore Afro-Futurism & African Innovation In Film Eye-catching growth has certainly been a hallmark of the company's last few years. Former investment banker and MIT graduate Cakarel founded the London-based company — then known as The Auteurs — back in 2007. These days, the headcount stands at more than 400 globally across 14 offices. And Cakarel believes that Mubi can become 'many times its current size' in coming years. 'We're confident that our growth potential remains vast because the global audience for specialty films is both substantial and underserved,' he says. 'Unlike mass-market platforms, we don't need to spend billions annually on mainstream content.' The theatrical and SVOD company, which now has direct distribution operations in North America, the U.K., Latin America, Germany and Benelux, scored its first Oscar nominations this year with breakout hit The Substance and Danish drama The Girl with the Needle. The former garnered the company's first Academy win. After making a splashy eight-figure acquisition of Coralie Fargeat's body horror, acquiring it from Universal ahead of last year's Cannes Film Festival, the movie has gone on to rake in a company record $84 million at the global box office. 'The unique element of our model is the global scale and capabilities that we've built in a market that has traditionally been serviced by boutique components of major studios or regional players,' explains Jason Ropell, the former Amazon film chief who has been Mubi's chief content officer since 2020. Mubi's mission has remained unabashedly arthouse and some have doubted the company's long-term commercial viability given that core value. But investment keeps rolling in — we understand that between 2021-2024, private equity backing comfortably exceeded $100 million. There have been reports in recent days of further big investment to come. Ambitions are sky-high at the company, which aims to be a regular in the Best Picture conversation. The audacious play for The Substance wasn't the first time the voracious festival buyer had bid eight-figures for a movie, and it likely won't be the last. 'There will be some big swings coming up,' confirms Ropell. Significant recent deals include North American rights for Paul Mescal Cannes Competition pic The History of Sound, multiple markets on Cannes movies Sentimental Value and My Father's Shadow, worldwide rights to Paolo Sorrentino's next film La Grazia, about the final days of a fictional Italian Presidency, and multiple markets on Joe Wright's Mussolini: Son of the Century. It also has inked a three-year co-production, financing and distribution pact with Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli's Our Films. Previous high-profile multi-territory buys include Queer, Perfect Days, Fallen Leaves, Decision to Leave, Aftersun, The Worst Person in the World and Priscilla. After acquiring German blue-chip sales firm The Match Factory in 2022 and Benelux distributor Cineart in 2024, Mubi has also begun producing its own movies. Michael Weber's connections as longtime boss at The Match Factory have helped paved the way. Among these, are Kelly Reichardt's Cannes entry The Mastermind, its first full-finance picture, and co-pros including Jim Jarmusch's Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, starring Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett, and Karim Aïnouz's Rosebush Pruning. The company is also investing in bricks and mortar. Mubi's first cinema is being built in Mexico, and there are rumors of a planned cinema in LA. There is also a publishing arm, cinema-going app and three podcasts. Mubi is fiercely guarded about its subscriber numbers, but internal sources say that gross margins are 'a lot higher' than those of bigger streamers. The company reportedly has 16 million registered users. Cakarel says data dumps aren't on the horizon, however. Chinese billionaire Zhang Xin recently joined the board of directors after her outfit Closer Media made a 'significant' investment in the company. Previous investors have included Silver Lake Management executives, Working Title co-chief Eric Fellner and a host of city and venture capital firms. Italy, France and Brazil are among the countries being eyed for the next wave of growth for theatrical distribution, organically or through corporate acquisition. The company has also explored, and continues to explore, large corporate acquisitions in U.S. (deals we hear that would dwarf the Match Factory acquisition). So, what does the industry make of Mubi? One French sales executive said: 'Mubi provides much-needed oxygen in the theatrical arthouse space, especially in the Anglo-Saxon territories.' Another European seller told us: 'They are a serious option for international arthouse today and Arianna's arrival [longtime IFC exec Arianna Bocco has joined as SVP of Global Distribution] seems to indicate that they have a clear ambition to be a global leader in the space.' One German vet commented: 'I'm mixed on Mubi. It's important that a platform like them exists even if most people in the street still wouldn't know them. I can't figure out how they make money because the movies don't often make a lot at the box office. But it's great that they invest in arthouse, which is crying out for support.' A packaging agent added: 'The industry needs this company. They're good people. They aren't overspending, but they are shrewd and taking advantage of the moment.' Their ambition and speed of growth remains a source of speculation, with one industry vet noting, 'The only danger is how much they've accelerated. Is there too much on their plate? Can it be sustained?' But Cakarel counters with this: 'We understand the economics of specialty film intimately and have built our business model to sustainably support ambitious projects. Our biggest challenge, and simultaneously our greatest opportunity, is scaling sustainably without compromising our distinct identity.' Part of that identity has been backing first and second-time filmmakers. Will that sustain as the company's ambitions grow? 'We want to continue to invest in that sector, but at rational and sustainable amounts,' says Ropell. 'There's a fear from our early partners that they that they'll be abandoned at some point. But that's not happening. There's no evidence to suggest that we're going to abandon the space that helped us build this company. The DNA remains the same. It's more that we're adding things. The addition of The Substance and other films of that size does not diminish commitment to the films that are not of that size.' Will they be able to provide the marketing support each film needs given the burgeoning size of the slate? 'It's a promise we want to fulfil,' says Ropell. 'We're scaling our workforce, and scaling the level of capital which we have access to, to ensure that we do that. But despite best efforts, it's not entirely up to us. Our goal is to try to give every film the best possible opportunity to find an audience, but the marketplace is changing, particularly the theatrical marketplace, and sometimes the reception that a film gets is not directly related to the amount of effort that goes into finding an audience.' Another frequent question from the industry is whether Mubi itself could be sold after so much fattening. Ropell dismisses the notion of a sale on the horizon. 'Efe and myself have a desire to continue to run this company for a good amount of time. Investors look for return on their investment, and that may entail a liquidity event at some point in the future, but it's certainly not part of our short to medium term thinking. This is a passion project that we intend to continue. It's not a cynical commercial enterprise. We couldn't garner the type of investment we've had thus far if it were only from vanity or philanthropic investors.' Best of Deadline Everything We Know About 'Nobody Wants This' Season 2 So Far List Of Hollywood & Media Layoffs From Paramount To Warner Bros Discovery To CNN & More A Full Timeline Of Blake Lively & Justin Baldoni's 'It Ends With Us' Feud In Court, Online & In The Media Sign in to access your portfolio
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How ‘The Substance' Helped Mubi Break Through
Early on in 'The Substance,' the body horror film starring Demi Moore that has been nominated for five Academy Awards, Dennis Quaid grotesquely consumes an endless amount of peel-and-eat shrimp while firing Ms. Moore's character for the crime of turning 50. Shells fly and sweat collects on his upper lip while he gesticulates wildly with a crustacean wobbling in his fingertips. It was this scene that convinced Efe Cakarel, the chief executive of the niche streaming service Mubi, that he had to buy the audacious horror film. The movie had been left for dead by Universal Pictures after the director, Coralie Fargeat, refused to recut it to executives' tastes. 'This was something incredibly unique,' Mr. Cakarel said. 'This was going to be our first global acquisition. I had never been this sure about anything.' What followed was a $12 million purchase for the global rights to the film, and a rare success story in the middle of the doom-and-gloom times of the Hollywood film business. 'The Substance' has now earned over $82 million worldwide and is up for best picture and best director, and Ms. Moore is the heavy favorite to win best actress at this weekend's Academy Awards. And it has catapulted Mubi, once a company lost in the morass of innocuous four-letter word streaming services, into a real Hollywood player for the first time. The company has made the leap with an unusual business model. Subscribers to the service, which starts at $14.99, get a curated selection of independent films, from classics to new releases. Subscribers to a higher tier, the $19.99 Mubi Go, also get a weekly ticket to a theater in the United States, Britain or Germany. The company, which is based in London and has 400 employees worldwide, declined to reveal how many people pay for the service but said 16 million people had registered on the site. 'Somehow they have managed to pull off the impossible,' Eric Fellner, producer of 'The Substance,' said about Mubi. The company, he said, was able to get 'a big audience globally to come out and watch it — which is no small feat these days — and still end up with a premium piece of work for their members.' For Mr. Cakarel, a 48-year-old Turkish entrepreneur with an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from Stanford, this was the plan all along. He founded the company in 2007 — the same year that Netflix started streaming movies and television shows — as a service for movie lovers. The goal was to support the theatrical moviegoing experience and curate high-end films on its service. Originally called the Auteurs, the service began by offering subscribers a new film a day, with each movie staying on the service for 30 days. But Mr. Cakarel didn't want just any film. He was interested in only the best films from the most acclaimed filmmakers. 'Mubi, from Day 1, has always been really opinionated about cinema,' he said. It took years to get any of the Hollywood studios to buy into his idea. 'I would go to a major studio, and I would say, 'These are the 32 titles that I would like to get,'' Mr. Cakarel said. 'They would say: 'No, this is not how this business works. If you're getting those titles, you need to also get these titles.'' 'They would literally throw me out of their offices,' he added. Then in 2015, both Sony and Paramount agreed to give Mubi films for its subscribers in Britain. In 2017, the company signed its first multiyear, multiterritory streaming deal with Universal Pictures, giving Mubi access internationally to films in its library like 'A Serious Man,' by Joel and Ethan Coen; 'Being John Malkovich,' by Spike Jonze; 'Double Indemnity' from Billy Wilder; and a handful of films from Alfred Hitchcock. In 2016, the company started distributing movies in theaters in select markets, ramping up in 2022 with films including Charlotte Wells's 'Aftersun,' which it released in Britain, Latin America and Germany, and Sofia Coppola's 'Priscilla,' which it released in the same territories. In 2022, Mr. Cakarel said he spent an 'irrational amount' to acquire the U.S. and British theatrical rights to Park Chan-Wook's 'Decision to Leave,' which became the Korean filmmaker's highest grossing movie in the United States. Its feature 'The Girl With the Needle' is a nominee in the academy's best international film category. 'It's been about steady incremental growth over time,' said Jason Ropell, Mubi's chief content officer. 'Hiring the right people. Raising money. All of that has happened incrementally. We were ready when this opportunity arose.' The opportunity to jump on 'The Substance' arose after Universal Pictures told Ms. Fargeat that it would not release the film in its current form, which had been in the works for nearly five years, but she was allowed to shop it elsewhere. 'No one was taking my calls anymore,' she said at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this month. 'Everyone thought my movie was dead.' But she entered the movie in the Cannes Film Festival, which accepted it into its 2024 competition. Mr. Cakarel had been tracking Ms. Fargeat's work after her 2017 film, 'Revenge,' performed well with Mubi audiences. While vacationing in Vietnam, he saw the announcement of the Cannes lineup; reached out to Working Title, the producers behind the film; and days later was sitting in a screening room in London watching the movie. 'I left the screening room and was punching walls from excitement,' he said. 'I hadn't seen anything like this in a long time.' Mr. Cakarel outbid the fellow indie distributor Neon and bought the worldwide rights to 'The Substance' ahead of its Cannes debut. The film has since reached heights that perhaps only Ms. Fargeat thought possible. When Ms. Moore won the best actress award at the Screen Actors Guild awards on Sunday, she thanked Mr. Cakarel. 'I think as a result of the reception of this film, other bold original films will be made,' Mr. Cakarel said. This year, the company bought the U.S. rights to the Hollywood satire 'Lurker,' one of the few acquisitions at this winter's Sundance Film Festival. And it recently announced the acquisition of the North American rights to 'The History of Sound,' a gay romance film starring Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal. 'The platform itself is a fan favorite with filmmakers,' said the WME Independent agent Will Maxfield, who sold Ira Sachs's 'Passages' to the company in 2023 and negotiated the 'Lurker' deal with Mubi at Sundance. 'And they have been building their brand as a filmmaker-friendly distributor.' The streamer is venturing into original productions for the first time this year with three films, Kelly Reichardt's 'The Mastermind,' a nearly $20 million heist film starring Mr. O'Connor; Jim Jarmusch's 'Father, Mother, Sister, Brother,' starring Cate Blanchett and Adam Driver; and 'Rosebush Pruning,' with Riley Keough and Elle Fanning. Mubi is still tiny compared with other streaming services, but it intends to release some 20 films this year theatrically — a welcome addition to the independent film space that has been struggling to connect with moviegoers. 'The past 18 years have been really good,' Mr. Cakarel said. 'The next 18 years are going to be incredible. I feel like it's Day 1. Everything is coming together.'
