The indie film outlook for 2024

Another year of Sundance is now in the books, and while there may not have been any obvious breakout films along the lines of last year’s Past Lives, the range, diversity, and quality of the 2024 program is a sign that the specialty film market is thriving. Later this month, we’ll see more evidence when the Independent Spirit Awards announce its winners, with nominees including Past Lives as well as The Holdovers, American Fiction, May December, and All Of Us Strangers. And then March brings the film portion of South by Southwest, where 2023 Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All At Once made its debut. We’ll be keeping an eye out for next year’s awards winners there too.

The convergence of events and timing this year couldn’t be better for independent filmmakers. After a summer of strikes that brought production to a halt in 2023, the studio slates are thin and full of sequels, remakes, and nostalgic cash grabs. But even if it were operating as usual, the multimedia conglomerates that control the studios have become increasingly wary of taking financial and creative risks before production. Yet they’ve established their own distribution arms like Searchlight and Sony Pictures Classics to take advantage of the not-insignificant segment of the audience that feels underserved in the mass market. They’re not willing to invest in these projects up front, but they’re more than happy to take their cut and kudos when they deliver them to theaters and streaming platforms hungry for content.

Even lionized filmmakers like Martin Scorsese have had to look elsewhere for financing when the studios come up short. Paramount pulled its funding from Killers Of The Flower Moon before production started due to the change in the focus of the script from the FBI investigation to the tensions between the white and Osage communities. The same thing happened with Scorsese’s previous film, The Irishman. Paramount was originally set to produce but dropped out during pre-production. It was later picked up by Netflix. In the case of Killers, after Apple stepped in to finance it, Paramount picked it back up for distribution.

So what’s next on the horizon for independent cinema and indie co-productions in 2024? What are the breakthrough films everyone will be talking about this year? What do mini-majors like A24, Lionsgate, Focus Features, and Neon have in store? And what could be in the mix for awards consideration at this time next year? It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve gotten our Oscar predictions in early.

Documentaries are having a moment

The growth of streaming services has been a huge boon to documentary filmmakers, who finally have a platform other than art house movie theaters to get their work in front of audiences. Netflix in particular is going all in. Five of the six Sundance films it picked up this year were documentaries. One of them, The Greatest Night In Pop, about the historic recording of “We Are The World,” is already available to stream on the platform.

Netflix hasn’t announced release dates for the remaining docs, but they include:

• Will & Harper — A heartwarming documentary that follows Will Ferrell and his close friend Harper Steel, a former SNL writer who recently came out as a trans woman, as they take a road trip together.
• Daughters — About four young girls preparing for a Daddy Daughter Dance with their incarcerated fathers in a Washington, D.C. jail.
• Ibelin — The true story of a Norwegian gamer who died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25 and was mourned by the online community he’d found within World Of Warcraft.
• Skywalkers: A Love Story, which has nothing to do with Star Wars but everything to do with a pair of Russian daredevils who sneak into skyscrapers and film themselves performing death-defying feats.

Here are some of the other documentaries to look out for this year, from other distributors:

• Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, which was picked up by Warner Bros. Discovery
• Frida, a biography of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, which went to Prime Video
• Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza, heading to Paramount+

Delayed projects back on the schedule

March will see the premiere of A24's Problemista, the surreal comedy from writer, director, and star Julio Torres. He plays a toy designer from El Salvador who takes a job working for a temperamental artist (Tilda Swinton) in order to keep his work visa. The film premiered at SXSW nearly a year ago and was supposed to come out last summer, but was pushed back during the strikes. It’s been generating positive buzz on the festival scene, and now audiences will finally get a chance to see what all the fuss is about.

Another highly anticipated indie finally getting a release is The Bikeriders, which was originally set to premiere in December. The film had some heat on it before awards season but its production company, New Regency, ultimately pushed the release date back to this coming June. Set within the Midwestern motorcycle culture of the late ’60s, it stars Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, and Jodie Comer. Comer especially has been singled out for her performance in the film as the wife of a reckless bike club member, played by Butler.

Hopes are also high for the release of Challengers, now set to open in April. When the trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s film about a complicated love triangle between three tennis stars, played by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, dropped last June, it caught people’s attention. But then it too was moved off the schedule so that the cast would be able to promote it after the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike. As if that tease wasn’t enough, quotes from a few pre-strike interviews started emerging and drove the hype even more.

Festival favorites to watch out for

Sundance is more than just a festival: It’s a market. Bidding wars can and do happen, and are often a good indicator of a film’s future success. Many of the films that lit up the festival this year will be coming to a screen, big or small, near you very soon. Here are some of the ones we’re keeping our eyes on.

• I Saw The TV Glow — A24 will release the third film from Jane Schoenbrun, the director of We’re All Going To The World’s Fair. It’s a horror film about two teenage friends who start experiencing strange things that cause them to question reality after their favorite TV series is canceled. The cast includes Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Danielle Deadwyler, Phoebe Bridgers, Helena Howard, Fred Durst, Amber Benson, and Conner O’Malley.
• It’s What’s Inside — The one Netflix acquisition that wasn’t a documentary, it was also the biggest sale of the festival, with a final price tag of $17 million. The official logline describes the enigmatic premise thusly: “A pre-wedding party descends into an existential nightmare when an estranged friend shows up with a mysterious suitcase.”
• Kneecap — Michael Fassbender stars in this fictionalized musical biopic about a Northern Irish rap group. It was the first Irish-language film to premiere in the NEXT section at Sundance, and was the first major sale this year. It also won an audience award at the festival.
• Love Me — The premise of Love Me sounds wild, but you have to appreciate the originality of this unconventional romance set in a post-human world. Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun play the human embodiments of an ocean buoy (Stewart) and an orbiting satellite (Yeun) who begin communicating with one another and eventually fall in love.

• Presence — 35 years after his career-making Sundance debut Sex, Lies, And Videotape, Steven Soderbergh returned with this psychological thriller about a haunted house told from the point of view of the ghost. Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan play parents who move their family into the house, unaware that they’re being watched (by the “presence” in the title, as well as the camera, and thus the audience itself).
• Real Pain — Fresh off of Golden Globe and Emmy wins for his performance as Roman Roy in the final season of Succession, Kieran Culkin is back on the big screen in this film about two cousins who take a tour of historic World War II sites in Poland to honor their grandmother. Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote and directed the film, plays the other cousin.
• Thelma — Get ready for the June Squibb-aissance. In this action comedy, the 94-year-old actress plays a woman who falls for a telephone scam and then sets out to get her money back from the scammers, accompanied by her motor-scooter-riding friend (Richard Roundtree, in his final performance). She even does her own stunts. Writer-director Josh Margolin has said the idea was inspired by his own feisty real-life grandmother.