Neon, the company that has distributed the past six Palme d’Or winners in addition to most recent Best Picture winner Anora, is perhaps at the top of its game.
With such enviable success, questions have bubbled over the years as to whether the Parasite outfit could be bought by a larger entity or a group of investors.
Neon CEO Tom Quinn was at the Zurich Summit yesterday to receive the event’s Game Changer Award. Following an on-stage Q&A with CAA Media Finance head Roeg Sutherland, Deadline asked Quinn that question.
“Sadly, we’re all for sale,” Quinn responded. “But it was never my aim or goal to create this business to achieve an exit. If there is an exit, it will appear but this is what I want to do. This is what I want to keep doing as long as I can. We get a ton of incoming, and that’s great validation for what we’re trying to accomplish. People are noticing. We are a real business. We have a lot of pedigree, mantra and vision for what we believe in but it has turned out to be a real business.”
He continued about the company’s journey to this point and his early career stops: “I’ll give credit to Samuel Goldwyn and Magnolia for teaching me a certain amount of discipline. We eat everything that we hunt. We received initial equity investment and a second equity investment from Dan Friedkin and 30West but we haven’t taken any additional investment since then. And it’s a testament to us nine years in that this is sustainable.”
In a wide-ranging conversation, Quinn discussed the company’s milestones and keys to success.
He noted that the eight-year-old company’s first big swing came when it paid $6M for 2017 Margot Robbie starrer I, Tonya. The film went on to score $30M domestic, three Oscar nominations and one win.
Sutherland, who Quinn credited for helping find the company’s first investor (“Jackie Chan’s manager, who invested $15M”), asked him what his assumptions were about the business at that time that proved wrong. Quinn said that he started out assuming that Neon would be competing regularly with A24 for movies but that he quickly realised that their biggest competitor was Netflix and that was the case for the first six years of the company’s life.
Quinn was asked what he looks for when he sits down to watch a movie at Cannes or another major festival. “I want to forget everything immediately,” he explained. “I want to be a pure audience member. I want to forget why we’re at Sundance, why we’re in Cannes, and just jump right into the movie.”
He admitted to having bought multiple films during a screening, however. More so in his earlier days in the business. “My favorite thing is is to buy the movie during the screening, sending an offer by email and and demanding that the film deal be closed by the end of the movie, which I did on some of my best acquisitions such as Let The Right One In [while at Magnet] and Cutie And The Boxer [while at Radius TWC].”
Sutherland asked Quinn about how P&A spends have evolved over the years and how the company competes against bigger studios that have traditionally been able to commit bigger minimum guarantees and marketing spends.
“Limitations are the mother of invention. We never had the ability or capacity to do it, so we had to learn and do something else. And so [for us it has been about] brand, social handles and using our own slate of films to collectively sell the next one. In theater trailer play is still the most important reason why people come to your movies, even in the digital age that we live in. But there are other things. You don’t do ego-based marketing. LA and New York are plastered with all sorts of out of home advertising. We just don’t do it. We’ll do maybe one billboard. We’ll do one billboard that is more impactful by virtue of how it’s perceived on social than how many eyeballs it gets on the street.”
He continued: “Creativity matters. I give our CMO Christian Parkes a lot of credit for this. We were the first indie to win the Clio Award for studio of the year last year. The campaign for Longlegs did that. We spent $10M opening that film. We could have spent 15, but we only spent 10 because we knew we didn’t need to. We could see day to day, the amount of interaction and validation that we were getting across our materials. The billboard for that film was simply a phone number. It didn’t say the name of the movie, the company, the opening date, it was just a phone number. In less than four days, there are 1.5 million calls to that phone number, listening to Nick Cage as Longlegs. The world-building for that film had all these rabbit holes. The marketing isn’t simply selling the film, it is additive and it is its own artefact. Shit like that is fun and and very effective.”
Quinn also talked about the need to empower good staff and how much of a kick he gets from seeing staff grow. He credited VP acquisitions and production Jason Wald for championing Longlegs and pushing Quinn to buy the director’s next three movies. In the space of two years Neon has boarded four films by Oz Perkins, including box office hit Longlegs, The Monkey, and upcoming horrors The Keeper and The Young People. The latter is the debut project in a first-look deal between the company and filmmaker, who is the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins.
To round out the conversation, Quinn was asked by a producer in the audience why he chose the name Neon. “I came up with the name and while doing some research, I came across the first neon sign that existed in the U.S. above a Packard auto dealership in 1923 Hollywood. That’s the same year that the Hollywood sign was erected. So in my mind, these seemingly different pieces were fraternal twins, the film industry and neon. The idea of 24 frames a second, something that is hard to grasp, but in this sequence, in this flow, becomes a seamless moving picture is juxtaposed with with this gas inside of this tube which becomes an eternal glow. That, in addition to movies I love like Blade Runner, Drive, the Bates Motel in Psycho, neon is always there as this thing you can’t ignore. Another thing which I think perfectly mirrors what we’re trying to do is that every major beautiful movie palace of old has that exceptional neon above it.”
Neon has another stacked awards slate this year with movies including Sentimental Value, It Was Just An Accident and No Other Choice.
The post Tom Quinn On Powering Neon To The Top, The Secrets Behind Marketing Wins & Whether The Company Could Be Sold: “We Get A Ton Of Incoming” — Zurich Summit appeared first on Deadline.
