{"id":627244,"date":"2026-09-17T06:52:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T06:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/627244\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T06:52:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T06:52:16","slug":"aura-entertainment-on-life-after-distributing-obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/627244\/","title":{"rendered":"Aura Entertainment on Life After Distributing Obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen indie film<\/a> veterans Marc Goldberg, Christian Mercuri and Jared Goetz joined forces last year to form a new U.S. distribution company, Aura Entertainment, they knew they were entering a tough market. The past two years had seen a flood of new indie buyers \u2014 Row K, Room 8 Films, Obscured Releasing, 1-2 Special, Sumerian Pictures, 101 Studios \u2014 launch with big dreams but, to date, only meager results.
So they kept things modest, focusing on commercially oriented, midbudget films with theatrical potential that could still make their money back on digital release.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe don\u2019t try to go too big,\u201d says Mercuri. \u201cWe\u2019re not dreamers; we\u2019re pretty grounded, [and] we try to produce and distribute films with that mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThey even kept their day jobs. Aura is a partnership between Mercuri\u2019s sales, finance and production outfit Capstone, known for horror<\/a> and action titles like Fall (2022) and Boy Kills World (2023); Goldberg\u2019s Signature Entertainment, a U.K. distributor that also produces indie action, including last year\u2019s Trap House with Dave Bautista; and Goetz\u2019s Ascending Media, the digital distribution and consultancy firm he set up in 2019 after stepping down as president of domestic TV at Lionsgate. All three continue to lead their respective companies while running Aura independently.<\/p>\n

\n\tGoing into TIFF last year, they were cautiously optimistic. Aura\u2019s new slate \u2014 which included Trap House, the paramedic buddy comedy Code 3 with Rainn Wilson and Lil Rel Howery, the comedy K-Pops!<\/a> from first-time director Anderson .Paak, and Doin\u2019 It, a comedy co-written by and starring Lilly Singh \u2014 looked solid. They also had a little indie horror film, directed by a 25-year-old YouTuber, they were bringing to TIFF\u2019s Midnight Madness. A film called Obsession<\/a><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe rest is the stuff of festival legend. Curry Barker<\/a>\u2019s film killed it in the room, setting off a bidding war that ended with a $15 million worldwide sale to Focus Features. With global box office at $512 million and counting, Obsession is the biggest-ever TIFF pickup.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Aura boys, however, are staying calm.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI couldn\u2019t be prouder of the results in our first year,\u201d notes Goetz. \u201cAnd we are going bigger, but without losing the disciplined approach on every single film that got us here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Obsession premiered at TIFF and became the biggest film ever sold at Toronto, what attracted you to it?<\/p>\n

\n\tCHRISTIAN MERCURI We\u2019re one of the few truly independent studios \u2014 we develop, produce, finance, we do everything technically in-house. We pride ourselves on being very producer- and director-friendly, and we\u2019ve been making films that don\u2019t depend on cast. We like commercial concepts in a genre that\u2019s not right down the middle, films that are a little left of center, and we look for unique filmmakers. Obsession was in that world for us. We study the directors we\u2019re going to work with \u2014 we really dig into the stories and we try to champion them. I think we did a really good job of shepherding it with Curry, and we\u2019d worked with [Obsession star] Inde Navarrette<\/a> before, so we thought she\u2019d be perfect for it. And then you hand it over to the movie gods.<\/p>\n

\n\tMARC GOLDBERG When Christian brought us the film for our inaugural slate, we had a chance to look at it before everyone else, and we were hugely excited. But equally, we\u2019ve all been in the business long enough to know that films premiering at Midnight Madness sometimes don\u2019t even find distribution. So we headed into the festival with the view that this could quite easily have been an Aura release as part of our initial slate. That was a plan the three of us had discussed.<\/p>\n

\n\tMERCURI From the onset of when we announced, the one thing we always told ourselves is: Every film is unique. It\u2019s not one-size-fits-all, so we don\u2019t force things into our hands or somebody else\u2019s hands. We take an individual approach, even to the films Aura releases, and to how we market and promote them, and it keeps all our companies very flexible.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve said you are focusing on acquisitions at this year\u2019s market. What are you hunting for, and does coming off a massive success change your ambition?<\/p>\n

\n\tGOLDBERG There are 29 movies right now that the Aura acquisitions team is looking at, but also with Signature in the U.K., where Signature is releasing 60 movies. We bring with us three acquisitions people, so there are five of us covering 29 movies, with a look specifically for Aura to find the commercial movies that are audience-pleasing. We\u2019re looking for films that, when they hit the platforms, are going to be watched. That fundamentally sounds like common sense, but it doesn\u2019t always seem to come into the mindset of acquisitions people.<\/p>\n

\n\tA great case in point: We\u2019ve had the No. 1 movie on Amazon for the past six days: Icefall, with Joel Kinnaman, which didn\u2019t have any theatrical release. It\u2019s a by-the-numbers action film, but with the right promotion, it\u2019s a movie audiences clearly are hungry for. There is that sweet spot of finding exactly that kind of material.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tJoel Kinnaman in Aura Entertainment\u2019s Icefall.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of TIFF<\/p>\n

\n\tIs there a volume you\u2019re targeting on the distribution side?
GOLDBERG At the moment, our target is 12 to 15 movies a year. That said, we\u2019re incredibly opportunistic, and if the right movie comes along, we don\u2019t have a set amount we have to release or can\u2019t release, so it could quite easily stretch up to 20-plus depending on what opportunities are out there. It\u2019s more internal bandwidth than anything.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn terms of the slate, one we\u2019re really excited about is a big-budget action film with Samuel L. Jackson and Joel Kinnaman again \u2014 The Beast, which is being released in theaters on Oct. 9. It has full support from the cast, and we\u2019re really excited with the strategy we\u2019ve got on that, releasing on a minimum of 500 screens.<\/p>\n

\n\tGOETZ This time last year, there were announcements of lots of companies coming into the distribution space. They made a lot of noise in Toronto, and we see what\u2019s happened since. We are very disciplined in our approach. The three of us provide a unique combination of skills and experience that allows us to find angles when other people can\u2019t. And we are going bigger, but without losing the disciplined approach on every single film that got us here.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tFrom left: Lil Rel Howery and Rainn Wilson in Code 3.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAura Entertainment \/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

\n\tHow do you assess the health of the distribution side of the business?<\/p>\n

\n\tGOETZ Last year, when some of these new entrants were throwing down pretty sizable MGs [minimum guarantees] on films, we\u2019d look at that, hear what the numbers were and think, \u201cThat just doesn\u2019t make sense.\u201d There\u2019s just no way. So we sat back. The three of us have two major meetings a week where we go through what\u2019s out there, how we assess it, what the potential is. It\u2019s just staying disciplined and staying true to our internal mandate. We want commercial films.<\/p>\n

Where do you see the gaps in the market at the moment?<\/p>\n

\n\tMERCURI Original content. Original content across all studios, independents, platforms \u2014 original ideas, where we used to push the envelope a little bit and take chances and take risks. Doing something slightly different, having an eye to the cinematic experience. It\u2019s a tough market, but we know what we\u2019re doing, we\u2019re good at what we do, and this is actually the right time to start a distribution company because where there are difficulties and challenges, there are also opportunities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When indie film veterans Marc Goldberg, Christian Mercuri and Jared Goetz joined forces last year to form a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":627245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,1928,93,1043,11311,61,1042,60,2379,1998],"class_list":["post-627244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-curry-barker","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-horror","tag-ie","tag-international","tag-ireland","tag-obsession","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}