LOS ANGELES — When the digital wizards at a forward-leaning media company last year introduced their newest idea, an entertainment unit, they couldn’t resist an antique touch: “BuzzFeed Motion Pictures” arrived with a video logo modeled on images from a primitive movie projector called a zoopraxiscope, invented by one Eadweard Muybridge, circa 1879.
“We were looking back in time, and were sort of blown away” by the trappings of the early film industry, explains the BuzzFeed division’s president, Ze Frank. “There was something almost otherworldly about them.”
Old viewing habits die hard.
In a surprising turn, some of the most aggressive contemporary purveyors of information, journalistic and otherwise, are seeking future growth from what has not seemed novel since Edison’s day: the feature-length motion picture.
In the last several years, BuzzFeed Media, Vice Media, CNN, Condé Nast and Newsweek have all built units or alliances aimed in part at creating long-form narrative or documentary films that will be seen in theaters. They will use time-tested promotional apparatus — including festivals, awards and brightly lit marquees — to draw viewers, many of whom will ultimately see the movies online or on television.
Most such film programs are still in start-up mode, as they contend with the extended lead times, heavy capital requirements and maddening uncertainties — Hollywood calls it “development hell” — that come with the business of long-form visual storytelling. Goals and strategies differ, and whether new film units will produce profits is largely a question for the next decade, when all will have had time to find hits or fail.
Costs will range from the nearly microscopic cost of some documentaries, through the roughly $2 million per film that Fox is spending on films at Vice, to the tens of millions of dollars that may be invested by studios in films from, say, Newsweek or Condé Nast.
While they vary, the operations are all planted in the notion that classic movie formats have immense power to open cultural conversations, and to hold viewers who might otherwise be lost to a competitor with the next bold headline, or two-minute video.
“It is a magical moment in a marketing plan,” said Eddy Moretti, the chief content officer of Vice. Mr. Moretti referred to the hoopla, and personal bonding, that may accompany the screening of even a small film like “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” his company’s Persian-language drama, which was shown mostly on the festival circuit last year.
“It’s fun, even if only 45 people show up,” added Mr. Moretti.
Vice, known for alternative-minded, world-spanning digital productions, began experimenting with feature film almost nine years ago. A penchant for foreign languages and settings has been a box-office hurdle; last year’s “Fishing Without Nets,” a drama shot in Somali, French and English, was barely seen in its brief theatrical release.
Mr. Moretti and company will focus mostly on English-language movies in their new venture, Vice Films, formed late last year in partnership with 20th Century Fox. The idea now, said Mr. Moretti, is to use Fox capital and marketing power to sell low-budget, Vice-style movies, perhaps two a year, as something much more than a come-on for the Vice digital channels.
Fox, noted Mr. Moretti, “knows how to get box office and to get the awards.”
CNN Films, begun in 2012, was already deep into the Academy Awards game this year, though without much luck. Its documentary “Life Itself,” about the film critic Roger Ebert, was snubbed in the Oscar nominations, as was its “Blackfish” the year before — perhaps a sign that old-line voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lean away from movies that are meant to find the bulk of their viewers on television.
Virtually all of the 16 feature documentaries delivered to CNN by its in-house unit to date have played first in theaters. But the payoff comes mostly from network ratings and associated online traffic.
“Blackfish,” about apparent abuse of orcas and trainers in the SeaWorld parks, for instance, had just $2 million in ticket sales when Magnolia Pictures released it in 2013 (and its budget was small, though higher than the often reported figure of $76,000, said Gabriela Cowperthwaite, its director). Yet 27 million viewers — the audience equivalent of a $200 million theatrical blockbuster — have seen the film in its 28 airings to date on CNN.
“It never really left the discussion,” said Amy Entelis, senior vice president for talent and content development at CNN Worldwide.
Five or six films a year — including “Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine” and “Sunshine Superman,” about BASE jumping, both set for broadcast in 2016 after theatrical release by Magnolia — are probably the network’s ceiling, said Ms. Entelis. And any reach toward a nonfiction narrative hit is “way far down the road,” she added.
At Newsweek, by contrast, just such narrative movie hits are the target of a new partnership with the producer Mark Ciardi and his Apex Entertainment.
Working in partnership with the sports and venture capital investor Will Chang and others, Mr. Ciardi has been invited to mine Newsweek’s coverage from the moment of conception, as potential grist for both television shows and studio-level films.
“In the old days, you publish a story, and a Hollywood entity might option it and in the exceedingly rare case turn it into a film,” Jim Impoco, Newsweek’s editor in chief, wrote in an email. “What we’re doing is inviting Apex into our editorial decision making.”
For Newsweek, one hope is that the allure of film drives more ambitious storytelling. For Mr. Ciardi — with an eye on the surprise success of “American Sniper,” based on a real-life story with heartland appeal — the goal is material for hits perhaps even grander than his own prior oeuvre, which includes the inspiration-minded Disney films “Secretariat” and “Million Dollar Arm.”
“It’s Middle America,” Mr. Ciardi said of what he presumes would be the audience for Newsweek-branded films. “If they get excited about a movie, it can be as powerful as anything out there.”
In Morocco on Monday, Condé Nast Entertainment, on a similar quest for conventional movie hits, is set to finally start shooting its first feature.
Formed in 2011, the Condé Nast unit, though busy with shorter films and cable series, had spent years hunting movie material from the company’s magazines, including Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, after watching others mine their output to produce films like “Argo,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “A Beautiful Mind.”
This year, the entertainment division landed on a modestly budgeted comedy called “Army of One,” based on a 2010 GQ article by Chris Heath about Gary Faulkner and his one-man quest to apprehend Osama Bin Laden. Nicolas Cage is the star; Larry Charles, known for “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” is the director.
Endgame Entertainment is financing the film, with help from foreign presales, while the Weinstein Company’s TWC-Dimension unit will release it in the United States, on a date yet to be set.
So far, said Dawn Ostroff, the Condé Nast Entertainment president, her unit has set up 18 potential film projects with Hollywood studios, large and small, from a pool of 75,000 stories and articles in the company’s archive. If film development is painfully slow, she added, the alternative — letting others profit from the Condé Nast properties — is much worse.
“How could we not?” she said of the effort.
As for BuzzFeed, Mr. Frank, speaking by telephone last week, said his company was still defining what might constitute long-form visual entertainment in its rapidly changing universe, never mind any talk about specific titles, stars or release dates.
But its many staff writers, he said, in collaboration with Michael Shamberg, the longtime film producer and now a BuzzFeed adviser, are devising material that is intended, in some way, to become the basis for movies.
“It doesn’t look like the classic 110-page script,” Mr. Frank said of their typical effort. At this point, he noted, those writers are creating characters who might relate to the BuzzFeed site’s 150 million or so monthly viewers, and feeling their way toward motion pictures that may or may not be viewed in theaters.
Why bother?
Because, Mr. Frank said, long-form visual storytelling seems the best way to deal with life’s deeper themes: “sex, love, war, jealousy and betrayal,” for instance.
“The Russian novel was the standard for a while,” he said. “Right now, I really feel it’s the feature.”
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