How to Run a Specialty Studio in 2026, with Searchlight President

SPEAKER_1 (0:05)

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Matt Belloni (0:39)

Welcome everyone. My name is Matt Belloni. I am the host of The Town and I'm a writer for Puck. I write a newsletter there which you should all be reading. Lucas also writes a newsletter for Bloomberg that you should also be reading. We have a very special guest today in Matthew Greenfield. He is one of the most important figures in independent film and specialty film over the past two decades. I have a whole intro for you that I'm going to ignore.

If I miss some of your key movies, please tell me.

Your bio is actually pretty easy because you've been in Searchlight for 20 years. Before that, you were- My second job. Yeah. Well, you were a curator at Sundance, right?

Matthew Greenfield (1:18)

I worked with Michelle Saturn writing and directing labs at Sundance. Before that, I was an independent producer.

Matt Belloni (1:23)

But it's great that you've been at one company for so long because there have been many different iterations of Searchlight over the years.

I'm thinking back to when I first started covering the business and you guys ran the table with Slumdog Millionaire, a movie that Warner Brothers had and decided was not good or commercial. You guys took it and not only made hundreds of millions of dollars, but one best picture all the way through the 2010s with movies like Juno and Shape of Water and Three Billboards. I saw the new one this past couple of days, Wild Horse Nine from Martin McDonough. It's extremely good. I recommend everyone see it. The question I want to start with for you is, what is Searchlight now? You're six years into the Disney relationship. I think when that deal happened, a lot of people were questioning.

Rupert was very good in nurturing you guys and letting you do what you wanted to do at Fox. Then you come under this big Disney banner where they weren't making movies like you guys make. You brought something new to the company. Now six years in, what is Searchlight? What is the Searchlight movie? What is the brand?

Matthew Greenfield (2:41)

I think, first of all, I think that was an exciting thing. Disney is an incredible fit for us. Always been a smaller part of a bigger company and Disney didn't have what we do, so they wanted to add that.

This word of Bob Iger and Alan Bergman and Josh Jemaro and Dana Walden, they're eager for having, there's seven studios, each one does something different and we do something different than the others, and each one is unique. For us, that's a great place to be. There's a real definition internally and externally for what we're doing versus the other companies and they really want the thing we do. I think in a large part, there's two ways to think about what we do now versus in the past. In some sense, there's a real continuum from the beginning, which is the desire to work with great storytellers, great film artists making interesting, innovative, personal, authentic, entertaining movies across all genres that we can reach all around the world. I think what that means in terms of individual movies is ever-changing, and so what that meant five years ago is different from what it means today, it's different from what it meant five months ago, it's different from what it will be tomorrow, and that's the constant effort, which is to constantly search for how do we tell stories that feel new, that feel fresh, that feel interesting, that feel worthy of a theatrical experience, that feel worthy of making the effort that people have to make to go see a movie in the theater and will entertain and satisfy them, and hopefully, like the movies you mentioned, will last long into the future as part of cinema history and culture. Then what is that now? Well, I think there's no one thing. I think it's trying to find things that haven't been seen before. So I think part of what you're trying to do is to find movies that people don't know they want, that they don't know that they want, but that once they see, they recognize themselves in it, they are entertained by it, it tells them a new side of humanity, a new side of entertainment, whether that's a comedy or a drama or a genre movie. In any movie, it's trying to expand the boundaries of cinema, expand the boundaries of storytelling, tell something new. I think familiarity is the challenge that we have to battle against, but there's no definition. I think once you start to define it, that's actually the problem. If we say we want this, that's boring to an audience. Nobody wants the thing that they already know is there or that they can see at home.