Neon, Tom Quinn’s indie company, which won last year’s best picture Anora, is back at the Oscars this year with several non-English-language films six years after its Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite upset victory.
Rarely had foreign language film been nominated for the Oscar for best picture until Bong Joon Ho‘s Parasite won the top prize in 2020.
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This year, two are competing in the top category — Brazil’s The Secret Agent and Norway’s Sentimental Value. The trio — alongside last year’s surprise best picture victor, the English-language drama Anora — share a common bond: Neon, the indie distribution outfit run by Tom Quinn, whose keen taste and maverick style have led him to success both at the box office and the world’s most prestigious awards shows.
Quinn’s mantra when launching Neon in 2017 was to target younger moviegoers who would be more open-minded when it came to foreign-language films, elevated genre titles (look no further than Parasite, which grossed $262 million at the global box office), documentaries and edgy awards dramas, such as I, Tonya, one of the company’s earliest hits.
Neon secured the domestic distribution rights to the last 6 films in a row that won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. They include Parasite and Anora, and Oscar best picture nominees A Triangle of Sadness (2022) and Anatomy of a Fall (2023).
Unlike a major studio, indie companies have used awards season as a marketing tool to goose box office grosses. Yet it’s become more difficult to keep a movie in theaters long enough to profit from such a bump as platform releases go by the wayside. Though that’s exactly what Neon distribution chief Elissa Federoff did with both Sentimental Value and Secret Agent, and it worked.
Secret Agent got the biggest post-nomination bump of any film competing for best picture (it is nominated in 3 other categories, including bests actor for Wagner Moura). First opening in select theaters over Thanksgiving, the film had earned $2.6 million at the time of Oscar noms on Jan. 22. Over the March 6-8 weekend, it crossed the $4 million milestone on its way to $4.3 million through March 11–37 percent of its earnings came in the post-nomination corridor, according to Comscore.
When nominations were announced, one of the films that was shut out of the best picture race was Park Chan-wook’s dark thriller No Other Choice. In a riff on the traditional “for your consideration” billboards that pepper Los Angeles during Oscar and Emmy seasons, Neon created a billboard for No Other Choice that began with the banner line, “a snub above the rest.” And in a another line, certain letters were crossed out of “for” so that it read “f your consideration.”
The snub may have been worth it. No Other Choice grossed a hefty $10 million since, one of the top-grossing foreign-langauge films at the U.S. box office in recent times, excluding anime franchises or films from India. It began its platform run over the year-end holidays in early January before leaving theaters in late February after being made available in the home on premium VOD.
Neon may not be successful in pulling off another surprise best picture win like it did a year ago with Anora, but it still has plenty to celebrate, between its number of Oscar noms or the fact that four of the five movies competing for best international feature were distributed by Neon; Sentimental Value, Secret Agent, It Was Just an Accident and Sirāt.
