LOS ANGELES — Picturehouse is back.
The small, feisty distributor of some daring indie films, including “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus,” is being rebuilt — independently of its former owner, Time Warner — by the film entrepreneurs Bob and Jeanne Berney and fellow investors.
Mr. Berney said in an interview Tuesday that he will be chief executive of the new company, while Ms. Berney will be its president. “We’ve acquired the Picturehouse brand and logo from Warner Brothers,” Mr. Berney said on Tuesday.
An initial deal is in place to distribute the films through Netflix in lieu of a traditional pay television agreement, after the movies’ release in theaters and in home entertainment formats like DVDs. And there is a first film on deck: A 3-D action movie titled “Metallica Through the Never,” that stars the band Metallica and has a concert in the middle of it.
Formed by Mr. Berney in 2005 as a joint venture between New Line Cinema and HBO, both units of Time Warner, the original Picturehouse briefly flourished as a distributor of independent film. But it was closed in 2008, as Warner pulled back from the small film business. The reconstituted company will be based in New York.
Mr. Berney, who had previously been associated with Newmarket Films, was briefly the chief executive officer of Apparition, and then became the distribution president of FilmDistrict, before leaving in 2011. Ms. Berney, who had been the director of public relations and marketing for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, held marketing posts at both Apparition and FilmDistrict.
On Tuesday, Mr. Berney said he is seeking additional financing for Picturehouse in its new incarnation. But he has set a release date of Aug. 9 for the Metallica film, and expects to be in business at the Sundance Film Festival that starts this week, looking to fill out a slate that he believes will include two or three films in 2013, and as many as six annually in the following years.
“We’ll do an aggressive platform release” of those films, he said. Mr. Berney described a strategy that begins with the release of films in a small number of theaters and then, with the successful pictures, may build to theater counts of a thousand or more.
Warner Brothers, he said, has contractual first-look at the foreign theatrical distribution of any film for which the new company acquires international rights.
As for the old Picturehouse logo with its brightly lit block letters over New York, it will now be seen on the new films. “The Picturehouse logo is just really close to my heart,” said Mr. Berney.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/picturehouse-small-film-distributor-is-returning/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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