The battle for dominance of the fall film market has begun with the opening of the 2024 Toronto Film Festival. With an eight-figure funding boost from the Canadian government, Toronto is set to officially launch a new market in 2026, positioning the Toronto International Film Festival as a contender or even replacement for the current fall champion and American film market.
AFM has been on edge since the closure of the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica last year. This iconic location on the Pacific Ocean has been AFM’s home since 1991, and its move to the Le Meridien Delfina up the hill for the 2023 market was a major setback. Members of the hospitality workers’ union Unite Here Local 11 denounced the hotel’s unfair working conditions and staged loud and disruptive protests outside the building. Inside, market-goers complained about a facility that was not designed to accommodate the hundreds of buyers and sellers who enter and exit the building every day. AFM’s organizers, the Independent Film and Television Alliance (IFTA), quickly abandoned the idea of holding the event there again this year. Instead, AFM pulled out and relocated to the Palm Casino Resort in Las Vegas for its 45th convention, scheduled to take place Nov. 5-10.
“The move to Las Vegas has left AFM in a bit of limbo; who knows if it’ll work out,” notes an international film sales executive with 20 years of experience in the film market. “TIFF sees an opportunity to usurp AFM’s position as the fall’s main film market.”
Toronto has long been a thriving business town, with buyers and sellers setting up shop in the city’s downtown hotels and negotiating deals. Sony Pictures Classics struck deals on the eve of TIFF 2024, acquiring key worldwide rights to director Laura Piani’s debut feature film, Jane Austen: Wrecked My Life. Lionsgate’s Grindstone Entertainment Group and Roadside Attractions picked up U.S. rights to Dito Montiel’s Riff Raff, and Amazon Prime Video picked up all international rights except Germany to the sci-fi feature film Assessment, starring Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel, ahead of its festival premiere.
In 2022, TIFF experimented with a formal market with a series of “Industry Select” programs that screen films outside the festival’s official lineup but with rights available worldwide. While TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey insists that the new Toronto market won’t compete with AFM, “I think AFM leans more toward a purely commercial product. We have kind of a festival-grade thing,” he told THR, adding that there’s plenty of time “between Cannes and Toronto, and Toronto and AFM” for companies to attend all three markets with new projects.
Sales companies aren’t sure the cost of participating in yet another movie market is worth it.
ComScore estimates that the domestic summer box office totaled $3.67 billion, down 10 percent from last year, with few independent hits despite Neon’s “Long Legs” ($74 million domestically) and A24’s “Civil War” ($68 million).
“The market for indie films is tough,” said a London-based distributor at this year’s TIFF. “Distributors are pulling out, there are only a handful of independent distributors that can offer true MGs[minimum guarantees]and there’s not much wiggle room cost-wise.”
As TIFF transitions into a formal marketplace, cost-conscious buyers and sellers of indie films are finding more casual ways to do business. The Venice Film Festival, which doesn’t have a film market, has seen some high-profile deals in the U.S., including A24 acquiring the rights to Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Queer” (starring Daniel Craig) from CAA Media Finance, Netflix acquiring the Angelina Jolie-starring Maria Callas biopic “Maria” from FilmNation, and Metrograph Pictures acquiring Neo Sora’s feature debut “Happy End” from Magnify.
“For us, Venice has become similar to what Toronto used to be,” says one European seller, “We hold meetings in hotels, talk informally with buyers and make deals — all without spending money on booths or transatlantic flights.”
