Picturestart’s Erik Feig On Navigating The Low Tide In Indie Film

The 2025 Sundance Film Festival turned out to be a low key affair, but it got off to a rousing start with a $15 million world rights sale of Together, the body horror film acquired by Neon. Starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, it and gives Neon a chance to follow up its rousing genre success of Longlegs last year.

Together, which has also landed a berth at SXSW, is written/directed by Michael Shanks. Franco and Brie are a couple that moves to the countryside and a supernatural encounter begins an extreme transformation of their love, their lives, and their flesh. It was a real crowd pleaser to the Midnight Madness audience.

The film was produced and financed by Picturestart, marking the latest in a string of notable deals put together by the company formed by Erik Feig after a run at Summit and Lionsgate that included The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Hurt Locker and La La Land. While the company that launched just before the pandemic didn’t initially have high aspirations to be in the indie festival arena, Together marked Feig’s fourth big Sundance deal.

It followed 2023’s Theater Camp (US Dramatic Special Jury Award: Ensemble winner) to Searchlight Pictures; 2022’s Cooper Raif-directed Sundance Audience Award Winner Cha Cha Real Smooth to Apple TV+ for $15 million; and the Dakota Johnson-starrer Am I OK? to Warner Bros Pictures/Max.

All four films cost under $10 million, some significantly less, and a lot of that had to do with the confines of operating amidst the Covid shutdown. “I’d planned to do wider release movies with studios, that we were going to co-finance. That was the intention,” he swears. Picturestart is currently developing The Masque Of The Red Death to star Sydney Sweeney for A24.

Feig tells Deadline how Picturestart has gotten this far, so quickly. The Q&A was edited for clarity.

DEADLINE: You say you didn’t intend to lean into the prestige film area when you formed. How did you get to this point?

ERIK FEIG:  I had not really planned on financing independent movies. That was a very small part of my business plan. I’ve been a producer, a financier, an acquisitions executive. I’ve overseen a slate. I can wear multiple hats. The intention was to be doing wider release movies, with studios, that we were going to co-finance. But right after we launched, Covid happened. Everyone was kind of paralyzed. The movie that was later called Am I OK? came to us, looking for co-financing. When the lead financier dropped out, we decided to take over. That was our first movie. In the process, we got to meet both Molly Gordon [star] and Jessica Elbaum [producer]. Both of them turned us on to the short that was Theater Camp. At the same time [Am I OK? star] Dakota Johnson and [producer] Ro Donnelly brought us a nascent movie that they wanted to work on that became Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth. I had seen his film Shithouse and really loved it. We thought, okay, great, why don’t we kind of put additional bets on those two. All of them felt like relatively modest financial bets with very, very clear, identifiable audiences.

Together is my fifth movie with Dave Franco and I love him. He and his team at WME brought this movie to us. I did not know Michael Shanks but I read the script, watched his shorts. He’s really inspirational, such a clear vision. Not only was it creatively interesting and intriguing, not only did I love the idea that Dave and Ali were in it together, but, from a clinical perspective, this is a very clear, high concept, a unique spin on a genre that we know is commercial in the marketplace. And it has a unique double spin in that Dave and Ali are a married couple, playing a couple. Michael Shanks based it on his own relationship. A great marketing pitch.

DEADLINE: What’s your priority in deciding which ones to make?

FEIG:We really focus on how do you reach as big an audience as possible for that particular project. In some cases it’s really broad. In others it’s niche. But can it become the favorite movie for some group of people? Is the audience reachable? And is the film appropriate for the amount of money that we’re going to be spending to try to reach them? You create the production plan that’s appropriate for that budget. Even though I’m drawn by the creative journey and the vision of a filmmaker, I’m never, ever making movies just for me. And I never want to make a movie just for a director’s personal vision quest. In that case, they should do it on their own, shoot on their iPhone, or buy a journal if they just want to tell their personal stories. My job is to try and find creatives I think have something really special to say to an audience that is there, dying to engage with that, and I try to create the connecting blocks for that vision and that audience. I’ve tried to think about the objectives of all stakeholders — the creatives and the storytellers and the actors, and the financiers, and distributors, and the audience.

You really do have to think, does it have a shot in this competitive landscape? Is there a group of people who are dying and desperate to see this thing?

DEADLINE: How would you describe the competitive landscape right now?

FEIG: It used to be you were competing against a handful of other movies that are opening on that Friday night. That was it. Now the competitive landscape is literally everything. Consumers can get every piece of content that’s ever been created by mankind, there’s gaming and music and experiential and social media.

What’s really interesting about the media landscape right now is it’s so varied, from Wicked to Sonic to Nosferatu and The Brutalist. You have to ask that question, and do the math: how big is that audience? When do I need to get them? Do I need to get them the first weekend? Do I need to get them in theaters? Can I rely on getting them at home? Can I stay around for many weeks to get them? Am I going to get critics that are going to do the job for me? Do I need TikTok to do the job for me? How am I going to get people to know about this? How will I get people to engage with the thing that you’re bringing to them in the window in which you need them to? And the answer is different for all different movies and shows.

DEADLINE: How would you assess the current market?

FEIG: I would call it brutally efficient. No one is buying things because they want them. They’re buying things because they need them. They’re buying things because they see a very clear, identifiable consumer audience that they can access through their own business models. There is zero room for sentimentality. That said, there’s a breakout every single year, a wildly unexpected hit. And it can come from the indie world or from a studio, and I think that that’s kind of what keeps the gambler’s heart alive for all of us, chasing that high.

TV is a different story. There’s Baby Reindeer, Squid Game, Ted Lasso, Hacks. Those streamer platforms are more innovative in TV than in movies. The thing about TV is that you have eight hours, 10 hours, to build up an audience. With a movie, you have 90 to 115 minutes. That’s why series penetrate the zeitgeist on streamers, and movies rarely do. They just don’t have enough runway in the consumer mind. They need a theatrical runway to do that.

DEADLINE: It feels like your four Sundance sales found seams in a shifting marketplace.

FEIG: Am I OK? is a queer romance that’s well done with a good cast. Back in 2021 I thought, there are going to be a lot of streamers that are going to want to reach this audience. This is a genre that audiences consume on streaming platforms. We are going to make this for a streamer. That’s exactly how we thought about it. And for Cha Cha Real Smooth, I thought, okay, high-end dramedy. Good cast. Same thing. In all likelihood, it will be a streamer. At the same time, there is a kind of independent moviegoer that does actually go to theaters, so there was a chance that Theater Camp would have a theatrical play, but we thought most likely that a streamer would buy it. I was happily surprised that Searchlight really fell in love with it. I think there was a shift at that moment, where streamers weren’t as avid because at that point, they had gotten more educated about their audience. Who are they? How big are they? Who’s watching what for how long? And being niche on a streamer was actually not great. The acquisition price of Theater Camp wouldn’t have made a dent for a streamer, but it didn’t meet their business plan anymore.

Early on, they were throwing a lot of things at the wall to see what sticks, what people connect with. And then over the next two, three years, they’re like, oh, we get it. We get what they respond to, and we get what’s important to us, and we get what we don’tneed. And if they don’t need it, they don’t want it. There are emotional buyers who say, I love this; I need to have that. The streamers are not emotional buyers. They’re very, very mercenary buyers. They know their audience. They know what works, And if it doesn’t fit, they really don’t care. They may say, thank you very much, I enjoyed watching it, but they are not going to buy it. Because they have mature businesses now with a lot of data.

Together has a shot of being special and buzzy and noisy. We were really lucky that we had a bidding situation — but it was all theatrical, no streamers. Everyone wanted to release it theatrically, which is an evolution of the market. It shows there is a theatrical market. Audiences are coming out to movies. But they’re coming out for things that are little bit weird, a little bit different, a little bit noisy. No streamer came for that. This movie is a little bit too weird for them. I get that. And I’m very, very happy that this one fits into a theatrical business model.

DEADLINE: The films are mostly by first-time directors.

FEIG: That is something I’ve always loved from my first movie, I Know What You Did Last Summer [by Jim Gillespie]. The first movie we financed at Summit was Step Up by a first-time director [Anne Fletcher]. Twilight’s Catherine Harwicke was an emerging director in terms of stepping up to that studio platform. I worked on Jon Chu’s directorial debut Step Up 2, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks Of Being A Wallflower and Jonathan Levine’s 50/50 and Warm Bodies]. Taking bets on people early in their artistic and creative journey with something special to say has been a great experience for me. Hasn’t always worked out, but it’s been really exciting when it does. I can bring a level of experience or perspective. Okay, this is something special. Here’s how you can reach, potentially, the broadest audience and keep your voice complete and not water it down.

(Lionsgate acquired Summit in 2012. Feig exited in 2018 to launch Picturestart.)

DEADLINE: You’ve worked on the studio side and the indie side. How do they compare?

FEIG: I don’t view studios or the system as the bad guys. I don’t believe in an ‘us versus them’ system. I think that it’s a very symbiotic relationship. We’re all in this together. We’ve all signed on to this business. Anyone working in Hollywood, if all they wanted to do was police people and make money, they could have picked other industries. Everyone is doing this, whatever your position is, because at some level you love you love stories and you love creative. Everyone has their own perspectives and their own priorities. I’ve tried to think about what are the objectives of all the stakeholders. The stakeholders are the creatives and the storytellers and the actors. The financers. The distributors. The stakeholders are the audience. How do you reach them, and will they accept the film?

The thing about independent movies is, honestly, it kind of can be a little bit of a cheat. You can say yes to your own things, if you can figure out the way to make them for a low enough budget, to figure out the best plan that makes them viable. You don’t have to ask permission. You can just go for it, and I really, really love that.