At Saturday’s Produced By conference, Neon CEO Tom Quinn said he “wouldn’t survive a day” in the environment of corporate Hollywood. He said he’s worked with major studios before, navigated layers of middle management, and sat in Zooms with 50 people in which “at no point in any of those meetings was anybody on the other side able to make a decision.”
“I just don’t want to work at a company like that. So that’s a critique of a corporation,” he said at the conference on May 30. “The idea of putting two of those together? I mean, how would you feel if A24 and Neon merged? That would be ridiculous. So I don’t understand it.”
Quinn was asked pointedly how the consolidation of Hollywood affects an indie like his own company, and though he never used the words “Paramount” or “Warner Bros. Discovery,” there’s no doubt which two corporate giants poised for an industry-shifting mega merger he was talking about.
“If growth is this endless pursuit with no real mission or idea about what we’re trying to accomplish, how are you able to make good, creative decisions? And with that amount of debt around your neck, I don’t know how you take any creative risk,” he told moderator Rebecca Keegan. “The only sensible thing you can do is make the most creative, bold decision in order to get yourself out of that predicament, but then I have not seen a corporation of that size do that.”
Quinn is riding high off the company’s seventh straight Palme D’Or win at Cannes, this time for Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” (he insisted that Neon isn’t intentionally chasing Palmes or a certain number of films in competition, even if he knows no one will believe him) and he spoke throughout his fireside chat about his company’s vision of taking risks early at the script stage, of building a slate that is global and agnostic to genre or country of origin, and also of avoiding going above a certain budget.
Some budgets, he felt, are too big for him to wrap his head around, and admitted that Neon does have a hard cap or ceiling on the types of films the distributor produces. He looks at the $35 million spent for Bong Joon-ho’s “Snowpiercer” or the same budget for the original “John Wick” as a good barometer and emblematic of the type of “action snob” movie he would like to but has yet to make.
So when thinking about larger consolidation and what that means for the industry, that’s where he starts to get nervous.
“It concerns me. I think the lack of competition is bad,” Quinn said. “There’s another thing happening here that I’ve seen across our industry for a long time. The Uberization of entertainment, the algorithm. I don’t want to understand it. I want no part of it. And I think it’s really important for us as a company that we are a true independent, and to stay true to our filmmakers. We should value our job as much as they value their work, and I think we should be as accessible as they are. And I think we should be as creatively adventurous and involved as they are in their work. I think those are the decisions that have made us stand out.”
Quinn, when thinking about what he wants Neon to be and how big he wants Neon to grow, made a comparison to a film he made when he was still with Magnolia, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” That film was about “creative perfection,” and it profiled a person who achieved the height of quality and perfection without ever straying from his humble roots. His restaurant is the best in the world but is not in some ballyhooed location. Instead, it’s located inside a subway station and has just 10 seats, yet each seat is treated with the utmost attention to detail, Quinn explained. He would love for that to be Neon.
“Those 10 seats are never going to grow, but those 10 seats, the notoriety around those 10 seats grows exponentially, if they do their job well. I would like our slate to be those 10 films,” he said. “So we will never change. We will never leave the subway. But the line will get longer and longer.”
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