Reuters
Amid the Cannes buzz, one firm aims to sell it
Friday May 21, 1:53 pm ET
By Jeffrey Goldfarb

CANNES, France, May 21 (Reuters) - As movie buyers prospect for hidden gems at this year's Cannes film festival, one firm is trying to bottle and sell the word-of-mouth that can catapult a small film to huge financial success.Discovering quality films for theatrical release has become increasingly cutthroat as media conglomerates and other film distributors struggle to keep audiences who are continually being lured by more and more entertainment choices.

FilmBuzz, a fledgling Los Angeles-based company, polls film festival attendees about whether they liked the movie, would recommend it to friends and family and if they would buy the DVD or soundtrack. The results produce a buzz score between 1 and 100.

The higher the score, the more likely the film has a chance for success at the box office, says FilmBuzz, which sells the data to producers to fine-tune their marketing pitches, and to distributors, who use it to assess movies they might otherwise never know about.

"There are a lot of films we've tested recently that don't have distribution that are outperforming films that do," FilmBuzz President Greg Kahn told Reuters.

FilmBuzz currently only works U.S. festivals, but Kahn came to Cannes to pursue expansion plans to European festivals.

In addition to the hundreds of sales agents and distributors trolling for good movies, most of the big studios have art-house units, such as Disney's (NYSE: DIS - News ) Miramax and MGM's (NYSE: MGM - News ) United Artists, that winnow through hundreds of independent movies to find one or two that might yield a huge profit.

Sceptics say attendees at the approximately 500 U.S. film festivals each year are not the best gauge for a movie's ultimate success and they question FilmBuzz's ability to spot a movie that would not otherwise get noticed.

"The silly presupposition here is that there are all these small gems that won't get discovered," said one international distributor, who requested anonymity. "The reality is that the good films always rise to the top."

Others say festival-goers are not a representative sample because they are freeloading friends of the director. Kahn's research has found, however, that only about 9 percent of attendees know anyone associated with the movie, and that most pay more to see a festival film than one at the local multiplex.

Some distributors say FilmBuzz provides an alternative to the time-consuming and unscientific methods of hearing about smaller independent films, such as calling the people who run the festivals or waiting for trade publication reviews.

"It puts films on your radar that the current system can't," said Daniel Katz, director of acquisitions for New York-based film distributor ThinkFilm. "I haven't picked up a film yet based on Greg's data, and I'm not sure if anyone else has either, but it's only a matter of time."

Kahn, who previously researched audiences for Viacom Inc.'s (NYSE: VIAb - News ) Showtime and Movie Channel cable networks, acknowledges his system isn't foolproof and doesn't promise that a high score will automatically translate to box-office success.

"Obviously we can't predict how many marketing dollars are going to be allocated to a film or how many screens it's going to be released upon, so in that sense it's difficult to predict the ultimate box office success," Kahn said.

"But with that information and the buzz score, we can reasonably predict how well the film is going to perform."