In May, Taika Waititi, the director of Disney’s four-quadrant comic-book movie hit Thor: Ragnarok, will begin production on a much tinier film, a World War II satire about a 10-year-old boy trying to fit in in fascist Germany with the help of an imaginary friend. Executives at Fox Searchlight, the specialty division of 21st Century Fox, green-lit Waititi’s subversive script, Jojo Rabbit, months ago. In the wake of Disney’s blockbuster new deal for Fox announced on Thursday, Jojo Rabbit becomes an unintended example of what a Disney-owned arthouse division might do.
“We believe in Taika as a filmmaker, and we felt like this was a movie where we can make it on our scale and the right way . . . He doesn’t have to sand off the edges, doesn’t have to change the humor,” said Matthew Greenfield, who heads up production for Fox Searchlight with David Greenbaum. The two executives spoke with Vanity Fair at their offices in early December, at a time when the Disney-Fox deal was just a rumor—but one propelling nervous conversations around their Century City lot. “We hope that any company will value what we do,” Greenfield said of the potential deal. “We feel like the filmmakers we work with . . . [could] then go on to make big movies for the main division.”
Much of the discussion over the juggernaut media merger has centered on what it will mean for the tentpole movie business. Searchlight represents just a sliver of the theatrical marketplace—usually around 1 percent of any given year’s box-office receipts. Still, the company could fill a gap in Disney’s slate creatively. The Burbank media giant dominates the box office with its Lucasfilm, Marvel, and animated properties—but Disney hasn’t had a specialty division since it sold Miramax in 2010, and the Disney brand is largely absent from arthouses and from the Oscars, outside of animated categories. Speaking on a conference call with analysts in the hours after the deal was announced, Disney chief Bob Iger said he is “very interested in what Searchlight accomplished and . . . we fully intend to stay in those businesses.”
In a world where studios collect recognizable brands like they used to collect movie stars, Fox Searchlight has chosen instead to seek novelty, a strategy that sees it heading into another awards season with strong contenders—this year The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Battle of the Sexes. “Familiarity is the enemy,” Greenfield said. “Why would you bother? You have access to 10,000 familiar things from your home right now. . . . What excites the audience is things that feel new, not things that feel familiar.”
Much of Searchlight’s success has come from the 23-year-old company’s relative stability in the rocky world of independent film, guided by its long-serving co-presidents, Stephen Gilula and Nancy Utley. As the independent-film acquisition market has gotten crowded with new players like Netflix, Amazon, and A24, Gilula and Utley have shifted Searchlight’s model. They rely increasingly on films that the company finances and produces itself, at a wider range of budgets, charging Greenbaum and Greenfield with developing, budgeting, casting, and producing them. “We just decided, look, we’re in better control of our destiny if we get involved earlier,” Gilula said. Utley continued: “If we own our own I.P. [intellectual property], we can’t be made to overpay.”
In 2017, homegrown movies comprise more than 70 percent of Searchlight’s slate, up from about half that three years ago. In 2016, Searchlight promoted Greenbaum and Greenfield, who had been mentored by the studio’s previous head of production, Claudia Lewis, with the intention that the duo help push the studio into the era of increased production. The shift coincided with one of Searchlight’s most disappointing acquisitions experiences—its $17.5 million purchase of Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation, which saw its Oscar and box-office hopes wither when a scandal from the filmmaker’s past resurfaced. So far, all of Searchlight’s planned 2018 releases are the studio’s own productions, including the next movies from Wes Anderson, Marielle Heller, and Yorgos Lanthimos.
Searchlight has always relied on a mix of movies produced in house, such as early hits The Full Monty, The Ice Storm, and Juno, and acquisitions, like Little Miss Sunshine and Beasts of the Southern Wild. But changing market forces have impacted the company, as independent films often head to festivals now with many territories pre-sold, and new players in the marketplace spark bidding wars. “If you go to Sundance, Berlin, or Toronto, you’re often looking at domestic rights only, or domestic plus a few specific territories,” Greenbaum said. “In a bidding war, the financial implications are different.”
For years, Searchlight had a self-imposed budget cap of $15 million. But the company has recently expanded the budget range of its productions. Guillermo del Toro’s Shape of Water cost $20 million, and Pale Blue Dot, an upcoming space-set movie from Fargo’s Noah Hawley, will also clock in higher than the studio’s traditional range, Greenbaum and Greenfield said. “When we came on board, we sat with Steve and Nancy and ultimately with [20th Century Fox Film Chairman] Stacey [Snider], and said, ‘We believe that we need to be a place that can support the most ambitious filmmakers,’” Greenbaum said. ”That allows a filmmaker to present a vision that demands that it be seen on the big screen and feels urgent and cinematic.”
Both men came into their jobs with strong film-industry backgrounds. Greenbaum, who joined Searchlight in 2010, worked at Miramax when the studio made films like There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Greenfield, who arrived in 2006, had been an independent producer on movies like The Good Girl and Chuck & Buck and was second in command at the Sundance Institute’s feature-film program. The duo have complementary styles and tastes, perhaps best exhibited by the formative film experiences they cite. For Greenbaum, it was watching Monty Python’s The Holy Grail with his father; for Greenfield it was watching French New Wave films in a world cinema class at Santa Monica’s Crossroads School.
Much of the culture at Searchlight is infused with the history of the lot where it is situated—a lot that will stay with Rupert Murdoch’s slimmed-down company, christened “New Fox” in the Disney deal. In an era when many studio executives watch footage from their projects on an iPad from the backseat of a car, Greenbaum and Greenfield still watch their dailies in the underground screening room that used to house the Fox swimming pool where Marilyn Monroe swam laps. Their offices are in Fox’s old wardrobe department. And staff meetings over scripts and projects are designed for employees across the company to advocate for projects they feel passionate about, with the thinking being that passionate audiences will follow. “People are looking for movies that are a little bit richer or more textured or require a little more thinking,” Greenbaum said. “There’s an appetite for those movies. . . . The big question, of course, for the future is, where does that business live?”
