There are infinite anecdotes about what happened to our best-laid plans when the coronavirus hit. But in the context of Hollywood, one must stop and appreciate the unique pain of\u00a0Erik Feig\u00a0\u2014 a veteran film executive whose rogue production and financing company\u00a0Picturestart\u00a0was only months into its infancy when the global shutdown arrived.<\/p>\n
Funded by a consortium of top private and strategic investors (including Warner Bros., Scholastic and Bron), former Lionsgate Mo\u00adtion Picture Group co-president Feig\u2019s vision was to serve distinct voices with a uniquely pliable infrastructure. A shop that could fully or partially finance and produce indie-to-mid-budget films without the deep pockets of streaming or tie-ups with the studios. One that could foster talent, cross it over into new mediums and offer full marketing services. COVID-19 scrambled those ambitions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing I came back to, the principle behind why we set up Picturestart, was to be strong but flexible. Everything we make is unified by this concept we call \u2018discovery of voice.\u2019 Stories about and for people who are figuring out who they are, where they fit in, what they stand for. Our goal is to enable talent\u2019s vision and help them figure out how to get things done, so we did that for ourselves in the pandemic,\u201d Feig says.<\/p>\n
Feig and his team spent almost a year drilling down on development and packaging in anticipation of this past February, when the whistle blew and six films went into back-to-back production: Tig Notaro and Steph\u00adanie Allynne\u2019s \u201cAm I OK?\u201d and Cooper Raiff\u2019s \u201cCha Cha Real Smooth,\u201d both starring Dakota Johnson; \u201cLuckiest Girl Alive\u201d with Mila Kunis at Netflix; A24\u2019s \u201cSharper\u201d with Julianne Moore; the ambitious video game adaptation \u201cBorderlands\u201d at Lionsgate; and the raunchy live-action talking-dog comedy \u201cStrays\u201d from the \u201cLego Movie\u201d team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller at Universal.<\/p>\n
All of these projects entered Picturestart in nascent stages, and each received bespoke support before finding distribution. Feig\u2019s creative philosophy and financial model is a rarity in a contemporary landscape rife with consolidation. He champions a kind of film that\u2019s disappearing from the wide theatrical market \u2014 offbeat stories that can appeal to indie audiences or scale up into the mainstream, often aimed at adults, which require risky spending.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople have feared that Ber\u00admuda triangle of a budget zone, but that hallowed space has been unbelievably successful for me. That\u2019s the zone where \u2018Step Up\u2019 lived, and \u2018Twilight,\u2019 \u2018La La Land\u2019 and \u2018John Wick,\u2019\u201d Feig says, name-checking his previous credits. \u201cThese were mid-budget movies with unique visions, all a bit left of center or reinventing the genre they were in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Picturestart will produce up to eight features in 2022, including a biopic about barrier-busting super-agent Sue Mengers at Apple, from producer and star Jennifer Lawrence, and a feature from \u201cSearch Party\u201d creators Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss. The company has also invested in series like the upcoming reimagining of \u201cI Know What You Did Last Summer\u201d and the \u201cGrease\u201d prequel \u201cRise of the Pink Ladies.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cIf someone told you there\u2019d be a 12-car pileup on the freeway, you probably wouldn\u2019t get on,\u201d Feig says of the current mad dash to stockpile streaming services with wholly owned content.\u00a0 \u201cThere are other ways to get to your destination, and we want to be that other way.\u201d<\/p>\n