Takeaways from the Cannes Film Festival

First of all, thanks for having me, Ilan, and it's nice to see everyone.

I would say from a deal-making perspective, really the whole world is open now, and you have to really think about foreign partners, not only for sales agents and distribution, but just even production, because the landscape has really opened up in terms of where you can sell, finding soft money, equity investors, and distribution.

So you really have to sync with a global lens now because there are so many, not only investment firms, but opportunities for production and distribution globally.

Whereas I think a lot of production and distribution was really led by the U.S. market, now you can find partners worldwide.

So really opening up the landscape of who you do business with, the whole world is open at this point.

Right.

Just to follow up on that.

Traditionally, a lot of the indie market has relied upon the presale model, and that has felt more depressed to me lately.

So a lot of folks are now looking for other partners, and that's coming in the form of private capital.

If it's a high net worth individual or maybe a smaller company that has other reasons for being in this space.

And those partners are coming from, as Viviana said, all around the world.

And with those type of folks, I think the biggest thing I'm seeing is that before there was the excitement of being a project, be able to support some artists or some content that they were really excited about.

But now their focus has shifted to also understanding what the distribution is going to look like for those projects.

And there's been a lot of issues with the distribution model.

So if you're trying to attract that capital, having a solid distribution marketing plan is the way to go.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would follow that.

I think what you're really seeing is the ripple effect of a lot of the platforms, TDM works and streaming services, tightening their belts and spending less money on new content.

And that is now rippling through.

So you're seeing less appetite from local distributors in different jurisdictions around the world.

And that means less pre-sales.

And that has an effect on producers trying to finance their films because there's less money in the system.

I

think that being there for the first time, the one thing I did observe is there's still the pursuit of the best story or the best script or the amazing content that all of us always continue to pursue and the incredible content ultimately that gets shared around the world.

I think that at the end of the day, it's all about content.