Cinetic Has 40 Completed Films, Hoping to Drive Up Price for Content-Starved Studios

Longtime indie film sales agent John Sloss, Cinetic Media’s CEO, is gambling that distributors will be so starved for quality content given the pandemic-fueled shutdown of film production that he will have the upper hand in sales negotiations with a host of completed films that are ready to fill the distribution pipeline. “I’ve got about 40 films that we have not taken to the market, and it was very intentional, and basically we did the mathematical or logical calculation that if Netflix has a content budget in 2020 of $19 billion and there are five or six platforms chasing them and then production seizes for a year, something would have to give,” Sloss told TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman on Wednesday at TheGrill media conference during a producers roundtable, presented by NFP and Lifetime. “It’s sad that the theatrical distributors are going through a hard time but if you put that aside and think about the content suppliers and the platforms, you would think that the leverage would shift and become a sellers market,” he explained on his strategy to give filmmakers (and their agents) additional leverage in negotiations with distributors. So far, though, his strategy hasn’t paid off. “In our experience,...

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