Кино бүтээгчдийг театрын эзэдтэй шууд холбох Attend платформ албан ёсоор нээлтээ хийлээ

Way back in October 2024, The Fithian Group, led by former NATO chief John Fithian and founding partner Patrick Corcoran, announced plans for an ambitious new marketplace, one that would help connect filmmakers and their projects directly to theater owners looking to book their movies and effectively cut out the distribution middleman. Today, that vision is now a reality.

The Fithian Group on Wednesday at the American Film Market announced the formal launch of Attend Theatrical Marketplace, the group’s online platform and marketplace for filmmakers and exhibitors that is now live and ready for business.

Attend launches with today just a curated selection of four films, all of whose filmmakers will now be doing the legwork to connect with theaters and find venues at which to exhibit their work. But the platform is already loaded with exhibition partners who will be able to browse available films, with more to be added soon, and Attend will eventually be a fully open platform to any filmmaker who wishes to do outreach directly to theater owners.

IndieWire got an early demo of Attend and how it aims to simplify the work that distributors do every day in putting movies into theaters, as well as the work exhibitors have to do in booking movies, paying invoices, and more. And IndieWire will on Wednesday lead a panel discussion at AFM with Corcoran, Charles Beale of the site’s designer Titlepool, and filmmaker Lilian T. Mehrel, whose Tribeca award-winning film “Honeyjoon” will be one of the four inaugural films shopping for theaters.

Beyond “Honeyjoon,” the other three films available on Attend at launch are Kenny Riches’ crime drama “Mouse”; “Spoke,” which is a documentary about firefighters and the trauma they deal with after the fires; and “Censurada,” an LGBTQ+ drama from Marco Garza about forbidden love in 1969 Spain.

The vision of Attend was outlined to IndieWire over a year ago with an indie rom-com called “You, Me, and Her” serving as an early guinea pig for the idea. The thinking was, if you had a film that could demonstrate it already had an audience and you had a clear sense of where your audience was and how to target them, all you needed were the screens to showcase your movie and the means to get your movie into the hands of those theaters.

That was and remains the tricky part. Few people have the connections with theater owners to be able to reach them and get a film out in any meaningful capacity. This year has produced a number of examples in which enterprising filmmakers have done without distributors and found the audience they already knew was there to release their movies. YouTuber Markiplier went directly to theaters and made $50 million with his horror movie “Iron Lung.” The documentary “NAZA” skipped a distributor in order to get its story about the IDF out with urgency. Even an AI movie called “Gods Don’t Give Gifts” is next month releasing without the aid of a distributor.

Attend seeks to use technology to simplify that process, to get your film out to an even wider audience and a more targeted one. For filmmakers, the platform is designed to eliminate the guesswork of who you need to talk to, how you reach them, and what attributes a given exhibitor is looking for in a film. For exhibitors, it filters all your titles and screens into one place, and it makes the receiving of deliverables or the payment of invoices more automated than the often tedious work it is for most exhibitors today. It’s exciting to see the whole vision come into fruition.

On the filmmaker end, the way Attend works is you as an individual can upload details and assets about your film, from simple details like its runtime, logline, and genre, to much more granular details about the aspect ratio, the available formats, the awards it has won and festivals it has played, the social networking reach of talent, and many more data points. There may be assets you don’t realize will be significant to a given exhibitor but will jump out as they browse your profile. You can then identify themes that speak to the film’s target audience and narrow the demographics for which your film is intended.

From there, you can filter and browse theaters to identify which theaters would be the best fit for your movie. For instance, Attend has data that can show a theater is within walking distance of a firehouse or that the theater has ties to a local advocacy group that aligns with the themes of the film’s story, and Attend’s predictive AI engine can recommend those theaters that would be available and the best fit for your film. Then, instead of reaching out to each of those theaters individually, filmmakers can easily select all the relevant theaters they want to message and have the option to manually add or subtract more beyond the recommended targets. You can even modify proposed theatrical terms for individual theaters or personalize messages, and as theaters come in, Attend can dynamically estimate P&A spend for those locations.

When theater owners are contacted, they’ll receive push notifications about films that are available for them to review, and they can further browse any available films in the marketplace and do their own outreach. Exhibitors can create tabs and info on any number of their circuit’s screens or locations and can upload in spreadsheets specs like screen size, audio, and seat count that filmmakers can view themselves to better get a sense of which theaters are the best fit. Exhibitors can specify rental prices for individual screens, you can mark your theater as being willing to offer simple four-walling options or that it’s capable of hosting big premieres, whether you want to offer “split screens” or “clean screens,” or you can set terms for how long you’re able to hold a movie. And not only does it also itemize marketing costs, Attend clearly indicates what the share of a film’s box office would be if they were to accept it and program it.

This helps theater owners in a number of ways. It takes the busy work out of things like paying numerous individual vendors or distribution partners, and it lets you download and easily generate a W9 form based on that film’s booking, being able to do so across multiple locations. But for theater owners that generally don’t know what they’re playing until the Monday before, this gives theaters far more advanced leeway and awareness to then be able to do the necessary marketing, put tickets on sale, and actually get butts in seats. All that is especially important for the smaller indies that need that word of mouth.

For now, theaters haven’t linked their loyalty data or other point of sales or scheduling tools to Attend, but that could come with time, and as people actually begin to use the platform, the predictive functionality will improve in the long run.

Corcoran and Fithian see Attend being useful for smaller distributors themselves in the long run, not just individual filmmakers who want to cut out the middleman. Distributors can use it to plan the campaigns of multiple titles and use its automation features to save time and costs. And while today Attend just supports new releases, there’s no reason why older library titles couldn’t be marketed here to exhibitors as well.

Time will tell if filmmakers find Attend an effective form of reaching theaters or if exhibitors adopt the platform widely to make it a useful tool for all parties. But it’s an ambitious vision that if implemented properly could have enormous impacts for the independent film world. And after two years of effort and hype, that day could finally be here.