Focused on their new release slates, movie companies generally offload the cinema bookings of their older films. United Kingdom-based Park Circus the leader in distributing classics and retrospectives as a sales agency and distribution company.
“Sales agent” means has deals to book screenings of back-catalog movies of Hollywood’s major studios plus others. Park Circus gets rights for specific territories and specific media to each title; it just renewed a big contract for titles from Walt Disney Studios and its legacy Fox business.
Park Circus is the go-to outfit to book theatrical runs such as 1950 Hollywood classic “Sunset Boulevard” and 1946 black-and-white Christmas holiday perennial “It’s A Wonderful Life” starring Jimmy Stewart.
But it also books more recent films, which can tie into current film marketing. Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson is writer/director for the 1970s slice-of-life in Los Angeles “Licorice Pizza,” which United Artists Releasing premiered a week ago on limited basis to huge per-screen boxoffice. Park Circus offers Anderson’s film repertoire for a current retrospective, including another Los Angeles-set tale “Boogie Nights” (1997), which reminds contemporary filmgoers of Anderson’s cinema gravitas.
As for its catalog, the Park Circus web site says: “We license over 20,500 theatrical screenings per year in 113 countries around the world. From outdoor screenings in remote locations, to retrospectives in major cinematheques; from festival premieres of new titles, to pop-up screenings on city rooftops. Park Circus represents over 25,000 titles from all the major Hollywood and British studios, along with many specialist libraries and catalogues. Park Circus was one of the earliest adopters and supporters of digital cinema (our first digital release was ‘Brief Encounter’ in 2005). We now have over 2,000 titles available for digital exhibition. In addition, our extensive library of 35mm and 70mm prints is available for booking worldwide.”
From Disney and Fox alone, which just renewed, Park Circus reps 1,376 titles including “Fantasia,” “The Lion King,” “The Lady and the Tramp,” “The Darjeeling Limited,” the “Alien” and “Die Hard” franchises, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Founded in 2003, the Glasgow, Scotland-based Park Circus was sold in 2014 to Arts Alliance, part of the investment interests of the Norwegian Hoegh family. Arts Alliance provides cinema and movie services, so Park Circus fits into that business.
The founders established Park Circus after seeing a business opportunity when they booked a cinema screening of 1962 tormented drama “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” Big film companies didn’t want to devote resources to small bookings so Park Circus made deals to act as sales agents for specialty bookings for older films.
Related content:
Leave a Reply