Back when theaters first shut down in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most studios delayed their films far off into the future. Not IFC Films. This studio proceeded to release a slew of titles to drive-in theaters, including genre movies through the IFC Midnight label. This included the horror title The Wretched, which turned into a tidy little hit for the studio. Its $1.8 million domestic total was above the North American grosses of all but one of IFC's 2019 theatrical releases. At the time, this looked like an amusing little box office quirk. IFC Films titles rarely made much noise at the box office, which wasn't a reflection on the studio being a "failure." It was merely emblematic of the studio handling smaller challenging titles that often didn't make much theatrical noise domestically. With this kind of history, it was mildly diverting for box office geeks with no life (hey, that's me!) to see IFC Films become the Disney of 2020 COVID cinema.
Cut to 2023, though, and those 2020 victories are starting to look like a harbinger of the future. In 2023, IFC Films released Blackberry, which made $2.4 million domestically. That made Blackberry only the second IFC Films release (following The Death of Stalin) to crack $2 million in North America since The Man Who Knew Infinity in 2016. Meanwhile, the first three months of 2023 have been kind to IFC Films. The Taste of Things, even with zero Oscar nominations to its name, has made a fantastic $2.5 million domestically.
Most impressively, though, Late Night with the Devil, a low-budget horror title acquired by IFC, opened to $2.8 million domestically. It's the first time in history an IFC Films release has cracked $1+ million on opening weekend. As a cherry on top, after just three days, it's also already the 17th-biggest movie ever for IFC Films. Unless it falls off a cliff after its debut weekend, it'll almost certainly crack the top five biggest IFC Films ever domestically. Since 2014, only one movie (The Death of Stalin) has been entered into that elite club, making this potential box achievement all the more fascinating.
What's going on here? Even before the pandemic, IFC Films had years like 2017 where it never released a movie that grossed over $1.305 million. What's behind this box office resurgence?
The clearest culprit behind the IFC Films box office renaissance appears to be consolidation. Specifically, the IFC Midnight label seems to have been discontinued. Launched in 2010, IFC Midnight was meant to provide a separate shingle for indie horror films that IFC acquired. It was meant to be the Dimension Films to IFC's Miramax. This approach suggests how drastically the American arthouse scene has changed in just 14 years. Today, A24 releases The Zone of Interest and Bodies Bodies Bodies under the same label without an issue. In 2010, though, IFC brass wanted a dividing line between The Human Centipede (First Sequence) and White Material.
Most IFC Midnight titles were simultaneously dropped onto PVOD alongside their theatrical runs, which limited the box office draw of these titles save for the occasional The Babadook. By the mid-2010s, though, the indie horror box office boom was irresistible. Plus, IFC had sibling company Shudder (both owned by AMC Networks), which could provide the indie studio with arthouse titles to release. Shudder provided lots of projects for IFC Midnight, including the early 2023 hit Skinamrink. However, it appears that the IFC Midnight label is now defunct. In the last 14 months, IFC Films has dropped titles like Birth/Rebirth, The Origin of Evil, and Stopmotion alongside its usual band of arthouse projects. This shift alone explains the IFC box office rebound. English-language movies tend to make more money in North America than documentaries or foreign-language titles. Unsurprisingly, Late Night with the Devil has proven more lucrative for the studio than The Nest or R.M.N.
However, it's not just genre movies that are bolstering the box office profile of IFC Films. The Taste of Things making an impressive $2.5 million domestically is proof that the studio can also wring hefty grosses out of "old-school" arthouse titles. How come The Taste of Things managed to do so well? Part of it was that IFC put it into a hefty theater count. This French release played in over 500 locations at its peak. Something acclaimed like Wildlife from 2018 would've made more cash if IFC had expanded it to more than 105 locations! However, it also has to be said that The Taste of Things is also significantly better than many movies IFC Films has tried to launch in the last few years.
IFC Films distributed plenty of acclaimed films in the late 2010s and early 2020s (where are my fellow Happening, Swallow, Monica, and Farewell Amor fans at?). However, their biggest non-horror releases were not widely-acclaimed film festival favorites like The Taste of Things. Instead, IFC Films tried to lean a little more "mainstream" with things like The Catcher Was a Spy, Paint, Red Joan, and The Lost King. These titles didn't leave much of an impression critically or financially. Worse, they diverted the limited resources and attention away from personnel at the studio. IFC Films could've nurtured more acclaimed foreign titles and tried to turn them into domestic sleeper hits. Instead, IFC brass tried like heck to turn The Lost King into the next Eye in the Sky/Hello, My Name is Doris. We now live in an age where A24 can get something like Lamb to $2.6 million domestically. IFC Films, like many indie studios, needs to focus on delivering idiosyncratic movies rather than trying to fit into the "mainstream."
Luckily, this box office turnaround indicates the studio may have turned a corner. This transition has occurred at an opportune time, as the early months of 2024 have been shockingly kind to indie studios. As of this writing, 16 studios have cracked $10+ million in 2023. . Neon has scored its first ever $5+ million opening weekend (its biggest ever) with Immaculate. GKIDS has ridden the buz on The Boy and the Heron to another $11.5 million. Even beleaguered Bleecker Street has narrowly cracked $11 million for 2024 thus far. That puts Bleecker Street's 2024 box office already well above its entire yearly grosses in 2021 and 2022! Heck, shockingly, IFC Films has narrowly exceeded the 2024 gross of Walt Disney Pictures so far (thanks to that studio delaying all its spring 2024 tentpoles to 2025).
It's very good to see outfits like IFC Films, Bleecker Street, and Neon doing not only well at the box office, but thriving on multiple kinds of titles. We've always needed as many studios in the marketplace as possible for a healthy theatrical cinema landscape. However, these indie studios are more important than ever now. Forgive me for sounding "hysterical" or "hyperbolic", but I would say that the current Big Five studios (Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Sony/Columbia Pictures, Paramount Pictres) are all killing the theatrical film industry in ways big and small. They gobble up healthy movie studios (looking at you Disney), thus removing entities that produce theatrical releases. Studios like Warner Bros. are reportedly deleting finished movies rather than bringing them to theaters. All these studios (save for Sony and even they were guilty of this to a degree) put all their eggs in the streaming/PVOD basket a few weeks into the pandemic instead of putting their confidence into theaters.
Something else all these studios did? They refused to pay actors and writers liveable wages last year. The studios, plain and simple, are why there is a continued drought of new theatrical releases. Any and challenges for movie theaters in 2024 can be laid at their feet. Rich executives like David Zaslav, Bog Iger, Tony Vinciquerra, and others have created a dystopic cinematic landscape where only a few companies reign supreme. Those reigning companies are also indifferent to any concept other than lining their pockets with more money.
The American cinema scene has always been dominated by monopolies and big corporations. That's why the Paramount Decree of the 1940s came into being. However, the pain of this system is especially apparent in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We need studios that are excited and passionate about putting movies into theaters, not corporations referring to movies as "content" and viewing artists as expendable. That's why it's important that studios like IFC Films are turning a corner in their box office prowess. The name on the studio is irrelevant, it's just good to see studios not owned by Disney or Amazon leaving any kind of footprint on the theatrical marketplace. The biggest studios have clearly abandoned the idea of functioning like movie studios, as seen by Warner Bros. shelving so many finished movies. That makes the surging box office power of entities like IFC Films all the more crucial if the theatrical experience is going to continue.
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