Sometimes, a film comes along and most audiences just don’t know how to wrap their head around it. Some of those films find a strong life in the coming years on home video platforms, while others sink into the perpetual blackhole of mediocrity. While the jury is still out on lasting impact of Nicolas Winding Refn‘s The Neon Demon — with a $7 million budget, it will end its domestic run with just over $1.2 million at the box office — one writer-director has some clear thoughts on the matter.
Alex Ross Perry (Queen of Earth, Listen Up Philip) has written an article for The Talk House exploring what he considers the inherent issues in independent distribution that have been exhibited by The Neon Demon and its perceived failure by many. Perry posits that Demon is a staggering masterwork of modern cinema — putting to shame all the “weird” indie films that aren’t actually weird at all — with a truly unique style, ambition, and verve that demands comparisons past Lynch and Jodorowsky all the way to the cinematic heights of Possession director Andrzej Żuławski.
Segueing to the state of distribution, he goes on to say that the title “art house” has been watered down almost to the point of fraud, and what this means for distribution and theatrical experiences. In essence, his statement is that studios — like Demon‘s distributor Amazon, which he has some rather unpleasant things to say about — sometimes go for the “dump-and-grab” style of distribution that is toxic to true cinema-going.
Check out the most damning portion of his statement below:
With a fancy Cannes red carpet premiere and the eventuality of splashing the film across the main page of Amazon when its streaming time comes, why would anybody care what a box-office flop it was? And also, why on earth would anybody think this film needed to be on 800 screens in the first place? Perhaps the thinking here is to copy the callous dump-and-grab studio model of quickly throwing product out there before anybody can point out how little audience support it is likely to amass and then move on as quickly as possible. Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a reasonable point of comparison, never played on more than 250 screens and, I was shocked and amazed to discover, grossed over seven million dollars while playing in theaters from October 2001 through May 2002. There is a sensitivity to the handling of such cinema that, like nearly everything else about the ongoing disastrous spectacle that is independent film distribution, is a lost art.
Perhaps lessons will be learned, but it may take some time to see the results. As for The Neon Demon, we’d argue that while Amazon (and their theatrical distribution partner Broad Green) likely would’ve been pleased to see the film perform better theatrically, the biggest intent for their acquisition was their Prime Video service, where the film will have exclusive streaming for many years to come once it arrives there soon.
In the meantime, Winding Refn sat down for an extensive talk at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and it is now available in video form. He talks about how he is not so much exploring femininity as just making movies about what he “wants to see.” Being the mad auteur he is, when asked what he wants to see he naturally responds, “everything.”
Enjoy the full talk below, along with our discussion of the film.
Do you consider The Neon Demon a failure? What about independent distribution as a whole?