Last night, I started getting emails regarding Netflix’s decision to shutter their Red Envelope Entertainment division, which invested in co-productions, partnered with larger distributors such as Magnolia and IFC to give their acquisitions a boost, and acquired indie films for theatrical distribution on their own. Over 100 films were released under Rev Envelope since it sprung up in 2005, including a number of press darlings and minor hits such as 2 Days in Paris and The Puffy Chair. Hacking Netflix reported last night that Netflix would only be letting 4 employees go in the course of Red Envelope’s dissolution; this morning, indieWIRE pegged the number at 5, which was the entire division, including executive Liesl Copeland.
The problem seems to be that Red Envelope forced Netflix to essentially compete against the Hollywood studios, indie arms and legit indies who supply the bulk of their content. Netflix will now focus its energy on moving content from those sources into digital distribution pipelines. Which will be awesome, once they finally broker a deal with Apple so that you and I can watch their G-D movies on our MacBooks and iPhones…
Meanwhile, a related (if inverse) story broke at roughly the same time, concerning IndiePix.The digital and DVD distributor of indies and docs announced at BritDoc yesterday that Ryan Harrington, formerly of A&E Indie Films and thus an executive producer of huge-profile docs such as American Teen and Jesus Camp, will be heading the new Indiepix Studios, where he’ll exec the doc and narrative productions that company has invested in, as well as manage broadcast sales. In this indieWIRE story, Harrington notes IndiePix’s “amazing technology that allows a person to download to own, and it can be burned onto DVD that is ‘DVD quality,’ and while that may be what they’ve been most known for, the company has been gradually upping its investments in films for awhile, most successfully with Billy the Kid.
So: a company previously dedicated to digital delivery seriously expands into production just as a company with documented successes in co-production and distribution gets out of those rackets in order to focus purely on digital delivery. Once again, the restructuring of the indie film realm defies easy trend-izing, as all of us stand around throwing stuff at the wall and waiting to see what sticks.
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