With 39 Academy Award nominations, 11 wins, and greater than $400 million on the field workplace in simply eight years, Tom Quinn has turned Neon into one of the vital disruptive forces in impartial cinema. The distributor behind finest image winners Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and Sean Baker’s Anora, in addition to Oz Perkins’ horror hits Longlegs — the highest indie launch of 2024 with $74 million home — and The Monkey, which earned practically $40 million, has helped restore religion within the theatrical enterprise.
Honored on the Zurich Summit with this 12 months’s Sport Changer Award, Quinn sat down with CAA’s Roeg Sutherland (a former Sport Changer honoree) to hint an unlikely path from cataloging reels at Sam Goldwyn to constructing one of many premium manufacturers in world cinema.
Quinn’s origin story doubles as a primer in entrepreneurial coaching. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years—it’s passed by so rapidly,” he mentioned, noting he’s labored on “one thing over 400” movies in his profession, from his Neon titles again by means of the many years beforehand on the Sam Goldwyn Firm, Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Photos, and at The Weinstein Firm’s label Radius.
Goldwyn for Quinn was movie college and boot camp: He cataloged archives, ran a projection sales space, and cycled by means of improvement, manufacturing and acquisitions. “Seven and a half years there gave me a pathway: I wished extra management over the flicks we purchase, in service of how they’re marketed and publicized.” Magnolia, underneath Cuban, turned the proving floor. “Cuban primarily gave me free rein to go purchase 40 films a 12 months… there was no censorship, simply working inside a monetary mannequin.” Doing all his personal modeling, negotiating, and pitching, “as executives we have been cross-trained,” he mentioned, formed Quinn strategy to the enterprise.
The leap from govt to founder started with a nudge from buddy, and future enterprise associate, Jason Janego: To cease “taking part in beginner ball” and go professional. The outcome was Radius, a boutique label at The Weinstein Firm, that embraced simultaneous VOD releases at a time when that was nonetheless taboo. Snowpiercer, Quinn’s first collaboration with Bong Joon Ho, supplied proof of idea. The movie grossed $4.5 million in theaters regardless of having a simultaneous VOD launch. David Robert Mitchell’s horror breakout It Follows turned a case examine in adaptive windowing. “The plan was: We take it theatrical in 20 markets, with no introduced VOD window, and let the viewers resolve the following window,” Quinn mentioned. “The Thursday evening on the Arclight [in L.A.] did $6,000; that informed us it needs to be a large launch. We canceled the VOD window and went broad.”
Jake Weary and Maika Monroe in ‘It Follows.’
RADiUS-TWC/Courtesy Everett Assortment
Quinn and Janego left Weinstein in 2015 to “increase cash for a corporation that might proper the wrongs of earlier locations I’d labored, constructed on higher enterprise practices,” mentioned Quinn. “The place we’d solely work on movies we might promote with a straight face, that we actually believed in one hundred pc.”
It turned out to be an enormous ask. It took two years to lift the start-up capital. Quinn credit Sutherland with serving to safe Neon’s first backer, SR Media, which put in $15 million. Janego finally stepped away from the corporate earlier than Neon launched in 2017.
These first years have been scrappy, partly by design. “It was six folks inside a WeWork—mainly like a chef on a cook dinner line,” Quinn recalled. An early success was Matt Spicer’s darkish comedy Ingrid Goes West (acquired through CAA). Margot Robbie took be aware of Neon’s marketing campaign for the movie, which earned a good $3 million. When Robbie’s I, Tonya got here to market, Neon was among the many bidders.
“By then, we have been possibly 15 folks, and we had simply sufficient cash to purchase I, Tonya,” Quinn mentioned. Neon “plunked down $6 million,” and bought the film, regardless of a deep-pocketed bid by Netflix (“who got here in with 3 times our supply”).
Two weeks later, Neon launched the movie’s Oscar marketing campaign, teaching I, Tonya to a $30 million home launch and three Academy Award nominations (with a finest supporting actress win for Allison Janney). “The whole lot modified after that,” mentioned Winn. “Filmmakers began trying and saying, ‘Theatrical will not be lifeless. Have a look at what you are able to do while you do it proper.’”
‘I, Tonya,’ Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding
30West/Courtesy Everett Assortment
From there, Neon’s model cohered round curatorial conviction and the artwork of selling. For Parasite, Neon’s trailer foregrounded the movie’s solely two strains of English “we put them entrance and heart within the trailer to present audiences consolation,” mentioned Quinn. For Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Neon’s hook wasn’t the courtroom drama — a big portion of the movie — however a whodunit immediate: “Did she do it?” which “aimed larger than what a movie like this might historically gross.”
Neon’s in-house ethos, mentioned Quinn, is a type of non-groupthink. When Jason Wald, VP of manufacturing, pitched him on Longlegs with a two-minute clip, his intuition was to present the movie a tough no. “I mentioned: ‘You’ve bought to be kidding—we’re not doing this.’” However Wald satisfied him. “When Oz [Perkins] delivered the film, I believed: I get it! It is a beautifully-made horror movie.”
The Longlegs marketing campaign is a part of the Neon legend. Their underground marketing campaign ditched the usual teaser, trailer, poster and TV spots strategy for a single cryptic billboard, a mysterious phone quantity, and a path of on-line breadcrumbs to entice followers to determine the thriller of the movie.
“We noticed, everyday, the interplay and validation throughout supplies and world-building,” mentioned Quinn. “The advertising and marketing isn’t merely promoting the movie, it’s additive; its personal artifact. It was enjoyable and really efficient.”
Longlegs opened at quantity 2 on the U.S. field workplace, behind solely Despicable Me 4 in its sophomore body, grossing $22.4 million. It went on to earn $74 million and remains to be Neon’s all-time field workplace champ.
Nicolas Cage in Neon’s ‘Longlegs’
Neon/Courtesy Everett Assortment
However Neon has remained true to its arthouse roots. Quinn paid $1.6 million for North American rights to Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Woman on Fireplace, an unusually aggressive transfer for a French-language title, on private conviction that “this was a once-in-a-lifetime film.” When Quinn and acquisitions head Jeff Deutchman learn Julia Ducournau’s script for Titane, they made her a proposal on the spot. The movie went on to win Cannes’ Palme d’Or, Neon’s second Palme (after Parasite), and the beginning of a six-film profitable streak on the world’s number-one movie competition, which continued this 12 months with Jafar Panahi’s It Was Simply an Accident.
“Model identification issues. Inside the corporate, now we have painstaking discussions and we don’t compromise,” mentioned Quinn. “That dedication attracts filmmakers. Not all the pieces works, however yearly we attempt to put out the right ‘ten-film’ catalog: If you happen to like one among our films, I feel I can persuade you to take a look at the opposite 9—and possibly the remainder of our 125-film catalog.”
Quinn addressed the widespread rumors that he’s seeking to promote that catalog, and all of Neon, to the best bidder. “We’re all on the market in a roundabout way,” he admitted, however mentioned, “creating an organization simply to exit was by no means my purpose. The incoming curiosity we get is validating, it exhibits we’re an actual, sustainable enterprise, 9 years in, with out taking a lot exterior funding.”
No matter occurs with Neon, this 12 months’s Zurich Summit Sport Changer mentioned he’ll “by no means cease going into screenings and making an attempt to purchase films…My favourite factor is sending a proposal throughout the screening and shutting the deal earlier than the credit roll. I like the game of it. However on the finish of the day, the legacy is the movies, the artwork. Céline Sciamma mentioned one thing that all the time caught with me: In case your artwork isn’t political, is it truly artwork? That’s one thing I firmly imagine.”
