Social media and re-releases; Lucky Red’s strategy for growing Italy’s arthouse audience | Features

Italy has the honour of being the biggest theatrical market outside of Japan for Wim Wenders’ Japanese-­language, Cannes prize-winner Perfect Days, with takings of $6.2m (€5.7m), representing 16% of worldwide box office. In fact, a whole series of arthouse films have performed strongly in Italy this year. The territory posted some of the top box-office results worldwide for titles such as Past Lives, The Teachers’ Lounge, The Boy And The Heron, Fallen Leaves and May December.

The common thread linking all of them is Lucky Red, the Italian distributor that handled their theatrical release. Coming up on its slate are anticipated arthouse titles such as Emilia Pérez, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, Grand Tour, We Live In Time and The Most Precious Of Cargoes. It is also distributing Andrea Segre’s political biopic The Great Ambition, the opening film of Rome Film Festival, which is being released on October 31 in more than 250 cinemas.

Lucky Red currently sits in fifth place in the 2024 distributor rankings in Italy, based on box-office takings. Ahead are the big Hollywood players — Disney, Warner Bros, Universal and Eagle Pictures (which releases Paramount and Sony titles in Italy). Below Lucky Red sits Rai Cinema’s distribution arm 01 Distribution, Mediaset-­owned Medusa and Sky-backed Vision.

For the first two months of the year, Lucky Red was the leading Italian film distributor with a market share of 17% thanks to its strong slate of international arthouse titles and delays to Hollywood releases caused by 2023’s US actors and writers strikes. It is currently standing at a 7.6% share of the 2024 market in Italy, with total box office of $28.8m (€26.7m).

Industry players

This year, Lucky Red’s success has led to it being awarded with the best international innovation distribution award at the third International Film Distribution Summit, which took place last month in Cologne. According to Lucky Red founder Andrea Occhipinti, the company’s 2024 performance is particularly pleasing given Italy’s severe box-office decline in the wake of the Covid pandemic. The Italian film industry was among the hardest hit worldwide; the country’s cinemas were some of the first to close and the last to reopen.

Lucky Red theatrical director Gabriele D’Andrea, who has worked at the company for 12 years, says a key factor in a strong 2024 is the consistency of its line-up. This began in late 2023 with the release of Ken Loach’s The Old Oak in November and Woody Allen’s Coup De Chance in December (Allen’s films play strongly in Italy and the country delivered Coup De Chance’s highest box office anywhere in the world).

“We have managed to build a cultural momentum for auteurs in Italy — we created something like a Marvel Cinematic Universe, but for auteurs,” says D’Andrea, who is also CEO of Italian cinema chain Circuito Cinema, which is majority-owned by Lucky Red. “Because of the consistency of the line-up, they each generated buzz for the other.”

The momentum was built on social media, within the theatres or by presentations from the directors streamed to multiple cinemas at the same time. “We treated these auteurs like a brand,” adds D’Andrea.

Timing was also important. Lucky Red, for example, held back the release of Past Lives until Valentine’s Day 2024 in Italy; by contrast, distributors in other territories mostly launched the film in summer or autumn 2023. It proved to be a good marketing hook, and the film benefited from additional Oscar buzz in February, grossing $3.7m (€3.4m) from 506,000 admissions. Lucky Red is also holding back the release of Emilia Pérez until January 9, later than most countries, to capitalise on anticipated awards interest.

More recently, it launched Maura Delpero’s Venice Silver Lion winner Vermiglio in Italy on 25 screens over its first weekend, expanding to 120 screens and then to more than 300 as word of mouth built up. “All the theatres wanted the film after it won at Venice, but we fought to keep the screens down to 25,” says Occhipinti. “That was the perfect strategy for a film by an unknown director, with an unknown cast, with Italian subtitles because it’s in a northern dialect. The theatres were full — there is no point in putting a film in theatres when the public is not ready.” Vermiglio has taken $1.3m in Italian cinemas at time of writing.

“My mantra is that the best distributor is the one who makes the least mistakes,” says D’Andrea, noting the Lucky Red team will always try to be creative and study successful campaigns in other international markets. “We are always trying to steal ideas from others who do things well, and try to understand if there is something new we can apply to our films.”

Audience connection

Lucky Red will also change posters, trailers and even film titles if it does not think they will work in Italy. “We customise our campaigns,” says Occhipinti. Social media is key, too. “We want to know our audience’s opinion and we listen to them on social media, and often we adjust our strategy,” says D’Andrea. “We are always thinking of ways to increase the quality of connection between the film and the audience.”

This is a reason Lucky Red is keen on re-releasing classic titles in cinemas, with The Shining, Once Upon A Time In America, Pulp Fiction and Amadeus on its upcoming slate. “They are important because you give the new generation the opportunity to watch them in the theatre for the first time,” says D’Andrea. “It also leverages the quality of the entire line-up.”

Occhipinti adds: “We are trying to create a community of people that is passionate about the movies.”

Lucky Red also does this through its programming of the Circuito Cinema chain, which has 40 cinemas and 126 screens, including several theatres in Rome, Florence and Bologna. “More than programming the films, it helps build strategic and organic synergies on films, on tailored promotions and on the general moviegoing experience,” says D’Andrea, adding that the chain is open to the entire market. “Circuito Cinema is an open environment for all distributors, especially arthouse.”

One of the main reasons that Lucky Red’s distribution slate is comprised largely of international features is that it is difficult for the company to acquire Italian films, observes Occhipinti. Rival distributors owned by broadcasters, such as 01 Distribution, Medusa and Vision, are an obvious home for the many Italian films funded by the likes of Rai, Mediaset and Sky respectively. However, Lucky Red has a key partnership with Sky, which takes pay-TV and streaming rights to its theatrical titles.

Lucky Red also handles physical distribution for companies such as Netflix, Universal and Wild Bunch’s Italian subsidiary BiM. There is no formal deal in place, but Lucky Red has distributed for Netflix whenever it has a theatrical launch, most recently Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand Of God in 2021. The partnership with Universal sees it release selected films for Focus Features, including MaXXXine and A Different Man. For BiM it handled the physical distribution for Wicked Little Letters, and will do so for Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here.

Funding hiccups

Lucky Red’s production business has been slower this year, notes Occhipinti, as a result of Italy’s tax credit being blocked for much of the year amid government reforms. Adding to the troubles, he says, payment of automatic funds — which are given to producers by the government for films that have performed well to invest in new features — are around four years behind schedule. The firm’s recent feature productions include comedy drama Il Più Bel Secolo Della Mia Vita and Alessio Cremonini’s Prophets.

Series production is now a focus: at the start of the year Lucky Red shot Rai’s ambitious opera drama Belcanto. Coming up, it will begin a second series of Gigolò Per Caso for Prime Video in January, while other series are in development for the likes of Rai, Sky and Mediaset as well as animation series for Prime Video and Netflix. It is also developing two features by first-time directors.

Why is a company with such a pedigree in film focusing so much on series production? Occhipinti, never afraid to ruffle feathers, says Lucky Red has “difficulty in financing films with broadcasters” who are key funders of films in Italy (Rai invests about $85m a year in a large slate of 50-70 Italian films). As broadcasters have their own distribution and sales arms, they “want to keep their money for films for their slate.”

Occhipinti says that makes it tough to be a pure independent producer in Italy: “There should be another way that is more productive and would lead to more variety in films. Having more partners on the same project would enrich the choice of films [that get made in Italy], and the way they are distributed, promoted and sold internationally.”

Lucky Red’s joint venture sales operation True Colours is also focusing more on series, partly for similar reasons and also to take advantage of the growth in series production. “We are struggling to find films to sell for international,” notes Occhipinti. “The broadcasters also have sales companies, and we have very strong competition from sales companies that are controlled by who financed their movie.” True Colours has hired Elliot Gustin-­Hollman from Newen Connect as its new managing director to cement its place in the series market.

Despite challenges on multiple fronts, it is clear Lucky Red has come a long way since its 1987 launch. It is feeling good about 2025 when the disruptions caused by the US strikes will be out of the way and the wider Italian box office picks up.

“We have huge hopes for 2025,” says D’Andrea. “We think 2025 will be the year of recovery.”

From the art: the evolution of Lucky Red

Source: Angelo Turetta/Netflix

‘On My Skin’

From its roots in distribution, Lucky Red is also active in exhibition, production and sales, and remains majority-owned (89%) by founder Andrea Occhipinti.

The firm is the major shareholder in the Circuito Cinema exhibition chain. It launched sales outfit True Colours in 2015 with producer Indigo Film, and its own production division in 2018, which kicked off with Venice Horizons title On My Skin.

It is a long way from Occhipinti’s initial career as an actor. He set up Lucky Red in 1987 with the late Chicago-born fashion designer Kermit Smith. Occhipinti traces the start of the company to a conversation in Germany, where he was promoting Ettore Scola’s The Family, in which he starred. At the time, Occhipinti recalls not being “fully satisfied with my career as an actor” and was fascinated by arthouse films.

He asked The Family’s German distributor, Francois Duplat, if he thought it was a good idea to get into arthouse distribution. “Three weeks later, he called me and said, ‘I have the Italian rights for a film by Werner Herzog called Cobra Verde with Klaus Kinski. This is the price,’” he recalls. “It was 80 million lira at the time, roughly €40,000 [$43,000].”

It was the first film on Lucky Red’s line-up, although Occhipinti says it was at least five years before the company established itself in the market with a strong line-up — one that by 1993 comprised films such as Nanni Moretti’s Dear Diary, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet and Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. There followed classics such as Belle Epoque, The Usual Suspects and Shine.

Smith and Occhipinti parted ways in 1999, when Smith launched his own outfit, Key Films. Since then, Lucky Red has built up its share in Circuito Cinema. It started to distribute more commercial films too, and moved from co-financing films (its first was Mario Martone’s 1995 Cannes Competition title Nasty Love) to launching its own production division in 2018.