At TIFF, the mid-sized movie strives to survive

TORONTO -- Anyone will tell you it’s the audiences that make the Toronto International Film Festival. They aren’t purely industry folks, like they are in Cannes or Venice, but more boisterous, enthusiastic moviegoers with their own rituals, like growling like buccaneers at the piracy warning that plays before each screening.

That real-moviegoer energy has always made TIFF a good measuring stick for not just what might catch on during Hollywood’s awards season, but also what will click with audiences. Yet there might be no more endangered species in today’s film industry than the kind of crowd-pleaser that thrives in Toronto.

More than most years, this year’s festival, which wraps up this weekend, has been a veritable ark for the castaways of today’s Hollywood: star-driven dramas, big-screen comedies, adult-oriented movies without a whiff of franchise about them. All struggled to reach the screen in the first place. But for many of these movies, the fight to reach audiences is just getting started.

One of the standouts was Derek Cianfrance’s “Roofman,” a stranger-than-fiction true tale about a North Carolina man (Channing Tatum) imprisoned for robbing dozens of McDonald's by burrowing in from their roofs. He escapes prison and, instead of trying to outrun the authorities, hides out for weeks inside a Toys “R” Us. Cianfrance, the grittily realistic filmmaker of “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” uses the story as a funny and oddly moving examination of box-store materialism. Paramount will release it Oct. 10.

“When I was shopping it around, a lot of people were saying, ‘We don’t make movies like this anymore,’” Cianfrance said. “So it’s really hard. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many production credits on the front of the movie. I had to get it from everywhere to be able to do it.”

The movie industry is coming off a summer that fell painfully shy of expectations. May-to-Labor Day ticket sales at the North American box office came to about $3.67 billion, according to Comscore, well short of the $4 billion-plus season that was once automatic. You could point to numerous reasons for that, like the diminished potency of superhero films or that Sony Pictures Animation’s “KPop Demon Hunters,” the biggest hit of the summer, launched on Netflix, not in theaters.

But it’s also true that Hollywood, mostly concerned with hitting home runs, is badly in need of some doubles, too.

This year’s TIFF was full of good candidates, though some of them will be steered toward streaming platforms. That includes Rian Johnson’s deliciously gothic, surprisingly sincere, church-set whodunit “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” which Netflix will give a two-week theatrical release despite its director’s strong affinity for theaters.

And Paul Greengrass’ “The Lost Bus,” a disaster movie for the age of climate change, will likewise get a quick two weeks in theaters before landing on Apple TV+. Starring Matthew McConaughey as a bus driver rescuing kids during the 2018 Camp Fire, Greengrass' film viscerally captures the swift-spreading blaze, as well as the dry, tinderbox landscape it rose out of.

But even a brief theatrical run can be hard-won. Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” a stylish 1950s-set Ibsen adaptation starring Tessa Thompson, will launch in theaters Oct. 22 before detouring to Prime Video a week later.

“Literally three months after it was greenlit, people were like: This movie wouldn’t happen anymore,” DaCosta said. “We were with Orion Pictures, a full theatrical release, and then the strikes happened. We were holding. We had to fight for the movie to stay alive. We lived but the consequence of that was theatrical window and then Prime Video. We did feel that industry shift. But I’m really proud we got to make it.”

“People put guarantees into their contracts, like it has to be theatrical,” she adds. “Studios do not care. They did it to (Christopher) Nolan. They can do it to any of us.”

When Aziz Ansari premiered his directorial debut, “Good Fortune,” he referenced that reality in his introduction. “Original theatrical comedy,” said Ansari. “Those are three words that are scary in our industry right now.”

“Good Fortune,” which Lionsgate will release Oct. 17, is a little clunky at times, but its satire of the gig economy isn’t off target, nor is Keanu Reeves’ performance as a sweet but mistake-prone angel. Ansari plays a man driven to homelessness whose not-official guardian angel (Reeves), overstepping his bounds, swaps his life with that of a much wealthier man (Seth Rogen).

It was one of two movies at TIFF trying for a throwback kind of high-concept comedy. The other was David Freyne’s “Eternity.” It’s set in a retro-designed afterlife way station where the dead select an eternity to live in. Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is forced to choose between living out her afterlife with her husband of 65 years (Miles Teller) or her first husband, who died fighting in Korea (Callum Turner). Again, the (sort of) guardian angels in charge of guiding each soul — Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early — steal the show.

“Eternity,” inspired by “A Matter of Life and Death” and almost certainly the most traditional movie A24 has ever released, will, like “Good Fortune,” try to find a comedy audience that’s mostly been left to the streamers. But tastes are always changing. Donna Langley, chief of Universal Pictures, noted as much in her talk at the festival.

“We’re seeing the shift in horror,” said Langley, who pointed to “auteur directors turning to horror.” "It’s not the horror as we came to know over the last decade.”

Fate, like it does in “Eternity” and “Good Fortune,” will soon have its say for this year's crop of crowd pleasers in search of ticket-buying crowds. Some signs are ominous. Last year’s winner of the festival’s People's Choice Award — the most watched honor of TIFF and usually a signal of a surefire best-picture nomination — went to the Stephen King adaptation “The Life of Chuck.” Mike Flanagan's film didn’t have distribution at the time, and when Neon ultimately released it in June, “The Life of Chuck” went mostly unnoticed. It was a reminder that success in Toronto no longer guarantees anything.

Some are taking distribution into their own hands. Black Bear Pictures, the production company behind last year’s “Sing Sing,” announced that it will distribute one of the buzziest TIFF entries: David Michôd’s “Christy,” starring Sydney Sweeney as the boxer Christy Martin. Black Bear co-financed “Christy,” just as it did two other highlights of TIFF: Clint Bentley’s Denis Johnson adaptation “Train Dreams,” a hit at Sundance, and Daniel Roher’s “Tuner.”

“Tuner,” which played without distribution in place, stars Leo Woodall (“The White Lotus”) as a piano tuner with a pitch-perfect ear who, after his father-figure partner (Dustin Hoffman) falls ill, uses his gift to crack open safes. It's a crackling crime thriller, and — like so many of the movies at TIFF — the kind of movie that supposedly doesn't get made anymore. And yet movies like “Tuner” do get made, somehow, and will keep finding a way to do so, so long as audiences show up for them.

“Someone wrote, ‘This movie-movies really hard,’” Roher said at the premiere, citing a review. “I was like: That’s right. That was the intention.”