SECRETS OF AMC NETWORKS FILM GROUP with SCOTT SHOOMAN

Welcome to the Movie Business Podcast, picking up where Movie Business Book left off. I'm Jason Squire hosting a wide range of industry talent and executives to answer fundamental questions about the business today. Here we go. And the Secrets of AMC Networks Film Group is our subject today with Scott Schumann head of AMC Networks Film Group, where he leads acquisitions, development, production and theatrical distribution for IFC Films, RLGE Films, and the shutter streamer. He previously was Senior Vice President of Acquisitions and Production for IFC Films, acquiring some 30 movies a year. Earlier, he held Senior Executive Positions at Endeavor Content, CBS Films, Sony Pictures Screen Gems, and Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisition Group. Career highlights include The Squid and the Whale, Insidious, Hell or Highwater, and Skincare. Welcome Scott. Good to be here, thank you for having me. Well, I'm so glad you're here on the Movie Business Podcast and let's jump right in. You'll oversee some 30 films a year, give or take, one of the Secrets. I wish I had it in a sentence or two that I could tell you, but I would say the Secrets are quality, quality, having an understanding of what historically works, what works in the moment, trends, and just really having tastes, doing acquisitions is something that I think everyone thinks in concept they can do, but when it comes down to it, there's very few people who have consistency and it's a very job where your success is obvious or your failure is obvious, and there's usually a box office number or some metric that people could look at to see how successful the movies you've acquired have been throughout your career, which is one of the reasons why the same two people have been doing it for a long time. Well, that does make sense. I mean, it comes down to instinct, experience and intuition and this really can't be taught. It really is a matter of putting in the time and you recognize among your colleagues and they recognize in you a special ability, which is fascinating because it's a kind of unique quality in the creative part of movies and streaming. Yeah, I have probably seen more movies than I choose to talk about, but I started off in the video store days where I took a job at Benmore Wage in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, working on the corner video store because I could watch three movies and get paid for it. And that was I think the start of the skill set, which is being able to sit there and just watch movies all day, which is something that we have to do a few times a year at a festival. But having a base knowledge of just the history that comes before you and the things that work, the extractable qualities in a film, whether it's the first act is too long or whether it's, you know, a dance number at the end tends to leave people on a high note or whether it's this piece of cast is on the rise in pop culture as I can as much as I can see. And it feels like it's time for them to get that shot in a film that we can get behind. There's a lot of factors that you weigh in every weekend, your five movies behind unless you watched five movies. So you really kind of have to just stay ahead of it and watch everything. I really do try to watch every single film that I possibly can still to this day and really just keep learning. I was lucky and I had the luxury of going to a couple good film schools, one of which I had some amazing professors yourself included, but I thought I was going to be a writer director and when I learned that you could watch movies for a career instead of making them that sounded even better than writing and directing them to me. So it's going back to your original question, what is the secret of the film group? I think it's to find people who are passionate about films who have good understanding because we work on a wide variety of films. So people who have understanding of those subgenres and encourage people to understand their taste and layer that on top of what they understand to be the taste of others and how people want of you movies, where they want of you movies, what type of movies they want of you and try and build that into a business. And over time you have a vast experience and longevity with a range of companies and you have gone through the shift to streaming, what was that like, are there real different parameters? Of course, there must be between theatrical acquisition and streaming acquisition. I think where and how people consume movies has evolved over the years and has continued to evolve and will continue to evolve. When you look at over time, people didn't use to have a start time when they would show up to the movie theater and they would just show up and hop in whenever they hopped in and just start watching and wait for it to loop and everyone just showed up to the town square and walked into the local Nickelodeon and just dropped in on what was playing. And there are changes that happen, whether it's in the space of color and sound or computers or digital projection or multiplexes or streaming that just change the availability of movies. So, the pie, when you look at how a movie is monetized, the size of the pieces always shift. There's different amounts of revenue from this slice and this slice and this slice. COVID was a big accelerant. I don't think anything changed in COVID that wasn't going to naturally occur over a period of time. But I think COVID really sped up those changes. So, when it comes to streaming, I think during COVID, certain people who may have resisted it or just didn't care to have numerous services suddenly had to figure it out because they were spending a lot more time at home and not wanting to share an arm rest with a stranger in a public place. So, for us, streaming is one piece of the pie. It's an important piece of the pie. I oversee shutter and shutter is the most prolific and popular horror streaming service in the United States. And there's certain things that we premier direct to shutter. Shutter does about 30 films a year. But since I took this seat about a year and a half ago, one of the things that I've really focused on is finding certain shutter movies that unnecessarily deserve a theatrical but can benefit from a theatrical. And it's not to take away from something that premieres on shutter because there's phenomenal movies premiering on shutter. But things that we think can connect and benefit from a theatrical release before they go to streaming is something we look at. I still believe that the best advertising campaign for the lifespan of a film is a theatrical release. It's an investment in the future of that film. Whatever windows and modernization happens downstream. So that's the way I look at streaming. There's certain films that we see at a festival that we fall in love with and say this feels like a streaming movie. And that maybe just the nature of how the viewing experience has evolved and changed. But there's a certain type of quality to certain films that we say this is something that feels like it needs that theatrical release. And this one can do great just going straight to a streamer. So yeah. Let's shift gears and talk about the product out there. How do you track available product? There's so much. There must be an internal process. And an external one seems to be pretty complex to me. You know, when I started in this business, I'd say it was probably slightly more complex than it is now. When we started, it was relationships with scores of producers who you had to know them to get the material to bring it in. The agencies over the past decade, decade and a half have really consolidated their hold on the independently produced marketplace. So a large portion of the available product that is out there rolls through the agencies, whether it's C-A-U-T-A-W-M-E or whether it's places like anonymous content or verve or range, which are other like sales agencies that are also in this business. When I started the independent division of an agency was really there just to service their clients. It was for when their clients said, you know what, I got three months off this summer and I want to go make a piece of art. That's what they focused on. And nowadays, those divisions really service money and investors and financiers in a way that they were client and they are a money source for these agencies. So how do we track them? We have databases and spreadsheets, but a lot of the stuff that we need is really in the fingertips of a few core places. And that's where we rely on. Because there's so many movies out there, we rely on all external filtering processes possible to help us do our job better. Because we still get submitted probably close to, I don't know, it could even be a thousand movies a year across all the divisions I work across. But for us, it's relying on a festival to do the filtering, relying on the screeners that a sudden dancer can or Toronto to sift through all the movies that are available and out there. And they are the first kind of like cheesecloth that we poured through to see what flows through. And they really help us in seeing and focusing on what we kind of know will be some of the more iconic indies to come through the process. What's your favorite festival? My favorite, you know, it's a hard question. I have a favorite festival for different things. I think Telluride is a great festival from a concentration of film fans, like just film junkies where you get to all come together in a beautiful setting and watch the academy films that are largely going to be the contenders in, you know, year end. I think Toronto is like an amazing city. And it's just I just got back a couple days ago and and feel like Toronto is just always a festival. You get to see lots of movies in a very as a festival. It's very easy to navigate. I think Sundance has some of the highest quality films. It's very difficult to navigate in its current capacity. And can is kind of the Cadillac where you may not love everything, but you're going to fall in love with at least two or three that are going to be in your end of year best picture contenders. What should filmmakers know before approaching the company? I would say for all the reasons I just laid out for those filters, it's very difficult for us just on a practical basis to engage with individual filmmakers if we don't already have a relationship with them. It's just impossible to do so. And if I could post on social media to say do not send me your script on LinkedIn, I would because I don't want a sound rude. It's just there's just too much. It's impossible to deal with. And I have a whole staff that filters for me what I read and look at. And it has to really go up the ladder. So I would say my advice is to find a good agent. I still to the stay after working in the business for 25 years have no idea how someone gets an agent, but they still are the gatekeepers. And while I don't have the time to talk to, you know, the 30 filmmakers who are randomly sending me material a week, I have time to talk to the agent who's going to say in five minutes in a very kind of like refined shorthand. These are the three things I'm going to send in this week. Again, it comes out to filters and being very careful about what filtering goes on. Let me then turn to a hypothetical acquisition from discovery to a deal. Can we go over the key deal points in a typical acquisition deal? Sure. So the thing that most people on both sides are most invested in is the monetary compensation. That's the amount of money that is changing hands to buy something. The next most important thing is probably the style of release, whether it's theatrical, whether it's going to go direct to a platform, the size of the theatrical, the pace of the rollout. And then there's other things that go into the deal, whether it's approvals over marketing materials or whether the international can have the sales materials for free or whether we can change the title. There's a lot of nuance to a deal that some matter, some doesn't, you know, the first hurdle is always the money, but that's really from when we see something, the things we start talking about. And oftentimes one of the things I'm trying to govern is who's actually making the decision on the film side. And this is something that filmmakers and producers and financeers should all talk about before they take a film to a festival is what's important to them. Because very often times I sit in a room when I'm trying to buy a film and I say to the director, what's important to you? And they say, oh, it's the release and the most amount of eyeballs possible to see the film. And I say to the producer, what's the most important to you? And they say, finding a distributor who understands the film for what it is. And then I say to the financier, what's the most important thing to you? And they say, we make lots of money. Now these three things in the Venn diagram, don't always overlap. So it's really trying to figure out when we're negotiating for something, how we are making everyone happen, including ourselves and feeling good about it and doing so in a manner where we can't force a financier and director to get along, but we can at least hopefully fulfill enough of the requests on the filmmaker side that people feel good about being in business with us. So I gather you've been in your share of late night acquisition debates and stressful deadlines and competition at film festivals. Yes. And I think the overnight bidding war is less common now. And one of the reasons is because there's essentially two sets of buyers. There are the streaming buyers and I put in that bucket, the Netflix and Apple and Amazon and Max. And then there's the independent theatrical distributors. Now in between, there's a few people who kind of look after their parent company's streaming services and like a searchlight that kind of threads the needle between a Disney plus slash who knew and the theatrical distributor. But what has slowed down the speed and pace of these film festivals is that the streamers move at the speed they want to move. So if Netflix wants to take two weeks to look at something, they are one of the people who spend a lot more money than that other group of buyers. So people tend to wait for those streaming buyers to pass before they're going to engage at a different level. Part of that is because the number is substantially larger from a streaming entity. And they just want to make sure that before they go and take a deal with someone who may get the movie and understand it and pay them as much as that company sees fit due to their numbers in modeling. Streamers don't have the same type of modeling. They're not sitting there. When they look at that revenue pie, their revenue pie is one thing. Like when I look at the revenue pie, their revenue pie is eight things. So their business is just they want it and they think it helps with subscribers. Because the sales agents tend to wait for these entities now, it just slows down the process a little bit. So I also wanted to pause just for some definitions to clarify that AMC is not AMC theaters, okay? Correct. For the listener. AMC networks. AMC is named after American movie classics, the cable channel, which then condensed its name. And IFC comes from another cable channel name independent film channel. And these are separate from AMC theaters, which is American multi cinema. And that's the that's the heritage part of our conversation. Correct. And I will say that the IFC films, the theatrical distributor has there like we work very closely with various entities at the network, but our movies do not err on IFC, the independent film channel. The independent film channel has evolved to something very different. Our films now go to first our AMC networks has a streaming entity called AMC Plus. They also have some niche services, whether it's Acorn or Shutter being one, high-dive being an anime one. So they had these niche verticals for streaming that we play our movies after the theatrical and transactional release. We play them on our proprietary streaming entities. So they do not play on the IFC channel anymore. What's going to be happening? Where are we heading? You know, I think at the beginning of summer a lot of the prognesticators were taking the position that the sky is falling and the box office is down and look at all this horrible outlook for the film business. I tend to feel much more optimistic and think the business, you know, as I said earlier, it's changing and always has changed and how it will change. We try to look at and respond to. The end of summer ended up being very positive for the studios, but I think when you look at how the studios have evolved, they're doing fewer films. They're really kind of examining their budgets. They're doing belt tightening. What the independent marketplace has always had, I think, a pretty astute understanding is the financials of what they do. How much they should buy a movie for, how much it costs to release a movie. Can they sustain with a business plan that makes sense? And I think in the independent space, we have seen a lot of transition both from a creative standpoint, but also from a financial standpoint, where you see at ISC had our largest opening weekend in our history this year. A-24 had their largest opening weekend in their history this year. neon had their largest opening weekend in their history this year. Magnolia was a film called Thelma. I don't believe had their largest opening weekend, but had a terrific result out of film that was their biggest in years. So I think the independence as the studios tend to pull back and we see some white space in the marketplace, people are really hungry for original storytelling and original content and films. And that's an opportunity for the independence in the space. So while it's very easy for me to say we'll make your movie for less and very hard for a producer to go and do it, those who understand how to make a movie on an efficient intelligent budget stand to reap rewards on the sales side, but also in the releasing side when they find great distributors to partner with them on those films. So we're very optimistic about the business. We think we have begun to and continue to carve out a very kind of defined space, understanding what ISC was built on, which was autolors and quality and really parlay that into a variety of genres, whether it's a film like the taste of things that we did earlier this year or horror film like late night with the devil or a film called Ghost Light, which we saw at Sundance, or we did an action sci-fi thriller called Arcadia in this year that did very well for us. So for us, it's taking that ethos of how the like the things that the company was built on and really transitioning that to how the tastes are evolving from the consumer and how the older audience has figured out other areas to other ways and types of content to consume. They're not going to the feeder or the local art house as much as they used to. For us, it's saying how our audience is evolving, changing what are those tastes and financially being responsible is the end of these tend to be and looking for that white space and finding great content to put out. Well, that's great. You know, this is a wonderfully optimistic note to conclude our time together. I thank you so much, Scott Schumann, for being a guest on the Movie Business Podcast. Thank you, Scott. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.