CANNES, FRANCE — There are two distinct classes of Cannes Film Festival visitors.
A select few get invited to Paul Allen's yacht party, and most others don't. A handful of Cannes visitors stay in five-star beachfront suites, but pretty much everyone else squeezes into small apartments.
And when it comes to buying films, the elite American distributors look for mainstream hits, while the masses are left to pick over the countless foreign-language titles, many of which will never be sold or seen.
For smaller distributors, foreign-language releases have become extremely tricky business. U.S. moviegoers gravitate toward wide-release blockbusters, and for every subtitled hit there are hundreds of fizzles.
What's worse, supposed art-house theater chains are no longer showing the best from beyond our borders. Fully half of the auditoriums at the Landmark in West Los Angeles this week are booked with "Angels & Demons," "Star Trek" and "X-Men Origins: Wolverine."
"With foreign-language films, you have to be selective," says Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics, one of the most accomplished and successful distributors of subtitled movies. "And yes, you have to be much more selective than you used to be."
In addition to Sony Classics, the few companies that have done well with import movies include Focus Features, IFC Films and Magnolia Pictures.
But now an aggressive company is joining the fold, hoping that it can somehow capitalize on its core cable television audience of gays and lesbians, and transform itself from a distributor of occasional schlock (including Paris Hilton's "The Hottie & the Nottie" last year) into a destination for award-winning imports.
Regent Releasing is the surprise owner of this year's surprise foreign-language Oscar winner. "Departures," which beat favorites "Waltz With Bashir" and "The Class" for the Academy Award, will begin its domestic theatrical release on May 29 in a few cities across the country, including Los Angeles.
A domestic gross of just $1 million is considered a foreign-language home run these days, and hardly any releases pass that modest milestone. Oscar winners, however, have fared comparatively well recently. "The Counterfeiters" grossed about $5.5 million in 2008, "The Lives of Others" sold more than $11.2 million of tickets the year prior, and "Tsotsi" almost reached $3 million in 2006.
