Bobby Allen: “At MUBI we build loyalty and invest in the long term”

MUBI (previously known as Les Auteurs ) was launched in 2007 with the backing of several independent distributors and the MEDIA Programme. Who backs you today, and how many full-time employees do you have?
Bobby Allen: MUBI is a privately-owned company, with several angel investors (such as Eric Fellner from Working Title) and an investment from the Chinese group Haunxi Media who came in last year. Efe Cakarel is the largest shareholder. We have around 35 employees.

How has the company evolved over the last decade and what makes you unique?
BA: Yes MUBI is ten years old and we spent the first six years trying to figure out the business model. Before, we had a standard large library and aggregation of content offered on a subscription/transactional basis, pretty much like most platforms, but that didn’t work very well.

The key in our business is traffic to trial, [a 7 day free use of the service] and trial to subscriber, but we couldn’t convert even half of one per cent of traffic to trialist. So we switched to a curated model, which is what we have today. A simple curated programme of 30 films available for a small subscription fee each a month, with one film replaced every day.

Would you say that MUBI is a boutique shop for quality films, unlike Netflix that is more like a supermarket?
BA: Yes. When we changed our model, we went out to raise more capital to invest in content and boost our subscription base. This is exactly the image we used.

How exactly is MUBI structured in terms of business activities and who are the main curators?
BA: MUBI has three business areas: content/editorial, marketing and technology. In the content division, we have three programmers, one for the UK, one for the US – our biggest territories-and one for the international/rest of the world. Then the editorial team does video interviews, festival coverage etc.

How do your three main programmers select the films?
BA: They are like festival programmers. They constantly ask themselves what retrospective do I want to show, which film do I want to show? Then we have an acquisition team of three people who acquire the content and have relationships with producers and sales agents.

What is your subscription base today?
BA: We have around 100,000 subscribers in more than 200 territories and around 8 million registered users and our conversion from users to subscribers has gone from 0.8% to 22%.

How important is the Nordic region for you?
BA: As a region, the Nordics is in our top 10 markets. Our subscribers tend to concentrate in the US and in the main Western countries, including the UK (the fastest growing market), France, German speaking countries, Spain, Italy, Benelux.

Who are your key partners?
BA: Basically we deal with all the key players – sales agents and independent distributors such as Scanbox, NonStop, Another World in the Nordics. We have global deals with major sales companies such as Gaumont, MK2, who like working with us because we can monetise content that isn’t otherwise exploited. A company like The Match Factory has great arthouse films, but in the first round of sales, they don’t necessarily close all rights deals. So after they’ve gone through the festival circuit, they come to us and we sign global deals on specific titles.

How do revenues go back to producers?
BA: The deals are mainly library deals so we close revenue share deals with sales agents acting on behalf of producers. We bear the costs of encoding and bringing the films out to the audience, report quarterly and send a cheque. Sometimes we do licence fee deals whereby we pay local distributors a set licence fee for a 30-day transmission. But the revenue share deals are better for us because we can maximum the timing of the programming and for distributors who often end up generating more revenues that way.

What triggered your decision to enter the theatrical market in 2016?
BA: When we started to grow with our new business model, we started to invest in content. We did for instance multi-year licence pact deals with majors and mini-majors such as Sony, Paramount, Studiocanal, Icon. The key at the beginning was to build a film library. Then we decided to give our subscribers fresh titles, and this had to be done through all right deals. We also wanted to build our cinephile brand and it made sense for our brand to be present in a cinema environment. So last year we started acquiring films for our largest markets, the US and the UK.

What we decided was two things: concentrate on quality-not volume, with a line-up of six films a year (for each territory) and then build a marketing campaign around each film. This includes P&A spend, positioning, and how to address the window issue for each film. Of course, our goal is to show our films exclusively on MUBI, as early as possible, but we respect the needs of our partners/exhibitors and negotiate windows and exclusives on a film by film basis.

What release strategy did you use for The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki that opened in the UK and in the US on April 21?
BA: In the US we have a full 90 day window from theatrical to SVOD. The film is booked in 20-25 venues in the key cities with landmark cinemas, then it will be on MUBI in July. In the UK, we have a four-week window and it will be on MUBI on May 18. Curzon approached us and said: ‘we’d love to book the film and have it on our Home cinema platform’ and we agreed.

It was bold to release Olli Mäki in US and UK cinemas, a film with no star names, shot in black and white…
BA: Yes, but the film is charming and entertaining. It won many awards and the reviews were outstanding, notably in The Guardian, the N.Y Times and LA Times. We knew the word of mouth would be good. Of course, the challenge was to hold the screens. So we built the campaign to maximise the amount of time the film would be in the cinemas. We positioned it as a smart dating movie, to go beyond the arthouse crowd and attract the younger audience. We did word of mouth screenings with a leading dating app, Time Out in the UK, word of mouth screenings in New York with MOMA etc.

What are the results so far?
BA: The film has grossed around $50,000 between the US and the UK so far and we’re satisfied with the results. But the gross BO is not the most important. Also key to the theatrical release is that it helps build the value of the film on ancillary media, and the reputation of the filmmaker.

At the end of the day, as a subscription based company, we build loyalty and invest in the long term.

One initiative that you did last summer with Nicolas Winding Refn was a curated programme, to coincide with the UK theatrical release of Neon Demon…
BA: Yes and we want to do more of such curated programmes with important filmmakers who do appreciate what we do. For instance Barry Jenkins [director the Oscar-winning Moonlight] is a big fan of MUBI, he went twice to the cinema to see Olli Mäki and tweeted about it on his account.

What is MUBI’s mid-term strategy? Will you start investing in films as equity partners?
BA: Instead of acting only as distributors, we will enter earlier in a film as equity investors, co-producers. That will activate our own online community and create a buzz on projects at an earlier stage. We are currently talking to producers to try to identify the films that we want to invest in.

Are you interested in entering the TV drama market that is attracting the best talents today?
BA: At some point, we will develop different channels for MUBI, for instance a MUBI Kids channel, MUBI doc channel, MUBI TV drama, always based on quality curated programmes. TV Drama does work wonderfully in the VOD environment. It’s a challenge to cinema when it comes to the online space. But this would be part of a longer-term strategy.

With your great film library, is film education of the next generation on your agenda as well?
BA: Great question. Yes we have a project that we’re working on for students that we will announce soon. It’s vital for youngsters to build their film culture, so we do a lot of filmmakers’ retrospectives. Youngsters are fixated on screens, there is the problem of fake news, misleading images, but unfortunately there is little education about how to interpret images.

What are your objectives for Cannes?
BA: We are interested in several films and are already in contact with sales agents. In Berlin, we bought three films in competition, so it would be nice to acquire another three competition titles in Cannes.

What advice would you give producers?
BA: Today technology is really driving the usage of and access to content. It’s tougher for producers and sales agents who don’t get the prices they used to from distributors. But at the same time, there are more distribution opportunities than ever, with theatrical self-distribution, or all rights deals or simple VOD deals. Perhaps in the future people will launch a film on Twitter, then on theatrical, then on MUBI. So my advice to producers is to be inventive and open to new challenges.