Growing Pains for Weber’s Senator U.S.

The turbulent economy seems to be the go to excuse these days for bad management. The Weinsteins who were reportedly having difficulty finding coin to release their 2009 slate, will eventually pull out of their tight spot and so will Marco Webber and his Senator U.S. label, which until now has managed to only release The Informers – a title that got raped by Sundance critics three months before its release.

Today’s Hollywood Reporter piece sheds some light on some of the consequences of Senator false moves. With a novice understanding of the film distribution business, it looks like well dried up the moment they went to Sundance and wasted money that would have been used to release their current slate of pictures on grabbing the rights and then re-working Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn’s Finest. The additional purchase of The Greatest probably didn’t help either. They already had a half dozen titles waiting to be tested on the market and despite having the expertise of a Mark Urman, they failed to work with the cards that they already had.

If we recall, Senator U.S., Overture and Summit Entertainment got into the distribution game while everyone was calling the demise of independent film business. Summit has since hit a home-run with its vampire teen romance tetralogy which allows the company to fund other productions and Overture is multi-tasking by populating its slate with future projects based on balance sheet it has with the box office return: in 2008 they released 8 pics and while this year they only have Sunshine Cleaning they also have the sci-fi pic Pandorum and Michael Moore’s documentary to generate enough revenue for the next batch of releases. If they are lucky, Overture probably only broke even in their first year – but at least they tested the waters and adjusted their infrastructure. If you look at their slate today: they come across as strictly a genre label.

All is not lost for Senator – they have a slate that should play well to different crowds and they either have the choice of unloading some titles or finding someone to release the films for them. First thing they should do is try their hands at releasing Jonathan Levine‘s All the Boys Love Mandy Lane on 400-800 screens – it already has tons of support from the film geek community and next do the type of word of mouth campaign with the Julia Roberts starrer Fireflies in the Garden.

In the mean time they need to unload the difficult pair of cards with subtitles Jean-François Richet’s Mesrine: Part 1 – Death Instinct and Mesrine: Part 2 – Public Enemy #1, tempt bigger studios into grabbing Unthinkable (which I heard was a great dark thriller) but probably needs a healthy P&A budget, seek some dollars for an Oscar-friendly December release for The Greatest, push Splice to a logical late early 2010 Spring-ish date and get a partner willing to make a tentpole 2000-plus theater release out of Antoine Fuqua‘s Brooklyn’s Finest in the summer of 2010. P.S: Don’t even bother going to Toronto to pay more product.