At TIFF, the mid-sized movie strives to survive

Anyone will tell you it’s the audiences that make the Toronto International Film Festival. They aren’t purely industry folks, like they are in Cannes or Venice, but more boisterous, enthusiastic moviegoers with their own rituals, like growling like buccaneers at the piracy warning that plays before each screening.

That real-moviegoer energy has always made TIFF a good measuring stick for not just what might catch on during Hollywood’s awards season, but also what will click with audiences. Yet there might be no more endangered species in today’s film industry than the kind of crowd-pleaser that thrives in Toronto.

More than most years, this year’s festival, which wraps up this weekend, has been a veritable ark for the castaways of today’s Hollywood: star-driven dramas, big-screen comedies, adult-oriented movies without a whiff of franchise about them. All struggled to reach the screen in the first place. But for many of these movies, the fight to reach audiences is just getting started.

One of the standouts was Derek Cianfrance’s “Roofman,” a stranger-than-fiction true tale about a North Carolina man (Channing Tatum) imprisoned for robbing dozens of McDonald’s by burrowing in from their roofs. He escapes prison and, instead of trying to outrun the authorities, hides out for weeks inside a Toys “R” Us. Cianfrance, the grittily realistic filmmaker of “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” uses the story as a funny and oddly moving examination of box-store materialism. Paramount will release it Oct. 10. “When I was shopping it around, a lot of people were saying, ‘We don’t make movies like this anymore,’” Cianfrance said. “So it’s really hard. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many production credits on the front of the movie. I had to get it from everywhere to be able to do it.”

The movie industry is coming off a summer that fell painfully shy of expectations. May-to-Labor Day ticket sales at the North American box office came to about $3.67 billion, according to Comscore, well short of the $4 billion-plus season that was once automatic. You could point to numerous reasons for that, like the diminished potency of superhero films or that Sony Pictures Animation’s “KPop Demon Hunters,” the biggest hit of the summer, launched on Netflix, not in theatres.

But it’s also true that Hollywood, mostly concerned with hitting home runs, is badly in need of some doubles, too. This year’s TIFF was full of good candidates, though some of them will be steered toward streaming platforms. That includes Rian Johnson’s deliciously gothic, surprisingly sincere, church-set whodunit “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” which Netflix will give a two-week theatrical release despite its director’s strong affinity for theaters.

And Paul Greengrass’ “The Lost Bus,” a disaster movie for the age of climate change, will likewise get a quick two weeks in theaters before landing on Apple TV+. Starring Matthew McConaughey as a bus driver rescuing kids during the 2018 Camp Fire, Greengrass’ film viscerally captures the swift-spreading blaze, as well as the dry, tinderbox landscape it rose out of.

But even a brief theatrical run can be hard-won. Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” a stylish 1950s-set Ibsen adaptation starring Tessa Thompson, will launch in theaters Oct. 22 before detouring to Prime Video a week later.

“Literally three months after it was greenlit, people were like: This movie wouldn’t happen anymore,” DaCosta said. “We were with Orion Pictures, a full theatrical release, and then the strikes happened. We were holding. We had to fight for the movie to stay alive. We lived but the consequence of that was theatrical window and then Prime Video. We did feel that industry shift. But I’m really proud we got to make it.” “People put guarantees into their contracts, like it has to be theatrical,” she adds. “Studios do not care. They did it to (Christopher) Nolan. They can do it to any of us.”

Associated Press