The New York-based distributor Bleecker Street is ten years old – and affirmed its ongoing commitment to films for “grown-ups”.
At ten years old, and with more than 70 films under its belt, the American distributor Bleecker Street has backed a whole host of films that others may not have put the same heft and care behind.
In its first few years, it was involved with the likes of Eye In The Sky, Captain Fantastic, The Lost City Of Z and Beasts Of No Nation. And in more recent times, it’s brought films such as Mass, The Assistant and Breaking to the screen. On the surface, it’s looking tougher and tougher to get the films it’s backing to break through at the box office, but thankfully, that’s not stopping the Bleecker Street team from trying.
In a new interview at Variety, Kent Sanderson (president of the company), Andrew Karpen (co-founder and CEO) and Myles Bender (its head of marketing and creative advertising) have confirmed that the plan remains to keep putting films out into the world for “grown-ups”.
It’s an interesting article, and talks about how Bleecker Street has kept going while other indies have fallen. As Karpen told the outlet, “Bleecker has the luxury of being truly independent, and as such, enjoys all the creative freedom that entails …. but with that comes inherent risk, and the precariousness of not having a century-old studio and its massive library and infrastructure to help a label like ours navigate not only the ups, but the downs.”
As such, the company has limited resources to push its films and has to work a lot on gut instinct. “I can’t cut five trailers, pay five vendors to cut five trailers and hope that one of them works”, Myles Bender added.
Bleecker Street recently put money into Mike Leigh’s new film, Hard Truths, where others were reluctant to commit funds. And the company is refreshingly aiming to carry on doing what it’s doing.
It doesn’t distribute in the UK, but heck, we need more distributors looking where the others aren’t. You can read the full interview with Variety here.
And here’s to more films for grown-ups…
