Hurt Locker helps distributor scale new heights

Kathryn Bigelow may be the toast of Hollywood, but behind the scenes, the night’s biggest winner was a group of low-profile executives at a small but increasingly-influential film company called Summit Entertainment.

In September 2008, the independent firm paid the princely sum of $1.5 million for US distribution rights to The Hurt Locker, after it premiered to critical acclaim at the Toronto Film Festival.

At the time, it was a risky deal: Iraq war movies have a long-established track record of bombing at the box office. But Summit stuck to its guns. They released the film last summer, and saw it do decent, rather than fantastic business, making $12 million.

Now, of course, Summit are sitting pretty, with US DVD rights to a title that only a few Americans have seen, but millions now want to watch, and a growing reputation as one of Hollywood’s most reliably-profitable organisations outside the “big six” major studios.

The firm’s history stretches back 12 years, but it only began to make headlines in 2008, when it released the first in a series of relatively low-budget films based on the Twilight series of books, by Catherine Hardwicke.

That has now become a commercial phenomenon. The first two Twilight films have made the combined total of over $1 billion at the box office, and a third, Eclipse, due out at the end of June.

They are known in a sometimes extravagant industry for attention to the bottom line. Summit operates out of relatively-modest offices in Santa Monica, and has relatively few employees. While it attempts to make mass-market titles, it never gives film-makers a budget much north of $70 million.

Reciepts from the Twilight films have allowed them to back promising new projects at a time when many rivals are struggling to raise finance. They are currently releasing titles the rate of about one a month.

A new Robert Pattinson title, Remember Me, is out next weekend, and their Vanessa Redgrave and Amanda Seyfried film Letters to Juliet hits cinemas in May.

The firm was founded by Patrick Wachsberger, Robert Hayward and David Garrett as an international sales company in the mid-1990s, and is primarily owned by private investors.

Though there is no such thing as a “typical” Summit film – they tend to simply back projects which appeal to their commercial instincts, the success of The Hurt Locker means they now boast artistic credibility, as well as financial know-how.