EXCLUSIVE: Neon has emerged from a days-long bidding battle near a deal to acquire worldwide rights to Together, writer-director Michael Shanks’ Sundance crowd-pleaser that stars Dave Franco, Alison Brie and Damon Herriman.
The film premiered in the Midnight section on January 26 at the Eccles Theater, and WME Independent has been fielding offers ever since. All the major buyers of indie fare were in the scrum for the romantic horror-comedy. We’ll tell you when it closes how much the film went for, but the numbers Tuesday night were in the mid-teens, so the final probably approached $20 million — a good haul for a Midnight Madness entry.
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The logline: With a move to the countryside already testing the limits of a couple’s relationship, a supernatural encounter begins an extreme transformation of their love, their lives and their flesh.
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The film is produced by Picturestart’s Erik Feig and Tango’s Lia Buman, along with Brie, Franco, Mike Cowan and Andrew Mittman.
Despite the press decrying that Sundance is a failure — one insufferable, attention-craving blowhard called it an “extinction event” — more deals will follow. And Sundance will be OK. Some industry players and filmmakers went to Park City having just lost their homes to the L.A. wildfires, and the distraction somewhat explains the sluggish sales pace. But there are good movies at Sundance that will find distribution, if not on the hasty schedule that some journalists seem to require.
What is on the minds of many Sundance stalwarts is that the festival has outgrown Park City. They shut traffic on Main Street, but that only made it snarl everywhere else. Getting to the less-than-state-of-the-art theaters to see premieres is harder than ever. I’m hearing that Boulder, CO, is likely going to be where Sundance gets a rebirth. Reps from the city came dangling what I hear was a big tax credit rumored to be around $34M and a plan to have a more centralized festival as is the case with Telluride, Toronto and Cannes. Stay tuned.