Few Blockbuster Deals Come Out of Toronto Film Festival

(MoneyWatch)  Several interesting observations from the Toronto International Film Festival, which closed this weekend -- all regarding what it means that only three (yes, three) major deals happened. (Focus, Miramax, Lionsgate, Overture, and Sony Classics all walked away empty-handed.)

Sure, smaller deals will start to trickle in after the fact, but Variety's Anne Thompson put it simply -- the whole system is broken.

"It may be time to come up with a new model for how to do sell pics at fests, because the old one doesn't seem to be working anymore. Fanning bidding wars doesn't work when two big movies sell at a major fest and so many little companies are waiting to spend as little as possible on what's left. Says one Oscar campaigner: 'There's no rush anymore.'"

Steven Zeitchik, over at THR's Risky Biz blog, says slow sales in some ways mirrors the housing market:

"Some of this, it's true, may be a price issue, which will get addressed with time. One exec we talked to compared the slow fest sales to the housing crisis, saying that a seller unable to find a buyer for his home doesn't mean that no one wants it -- it just means that the seller needs to get over his denial about the state of the market. Once they do, the house closing wil follow."

That may account for sales in the coming weeks, he says, but Zeitchik, too, wonders if something bigger is wrong with the whole system.

Contrast that take with the one over at Patrick Goldstein's Big Picture blog. He spent time with Sony Classics co-chiefs Tom Bernard and Michael Barker over the weekend and says walking away from the festival with no titles is all part of the Sony Classics' survival strategy:

"I realized that they operate under a very different model than everyone else. If you want to gauge how their festival went, you have to wait till long after it's over. Barker and Bernard don't get into bidding wars -- they invariably buy movies after the festival has ended, when the hot air has gone out of the balloon and the buying price has drifted back down to Earth."

Barker says it's all about long-term strategy and exercising discipline...an old-school and yet extremely timely business strategy these days.