Jane Rosenthal is taking the pulse of the nonfiction feature space — and it doesn’t look good. The mega-producer and Tribeca co-founder told Variety during a recent interview that she is “worried” about how documentaries are faring, especially amid the current political climate and rise in streaming.
When asked how the “business” of documentary films are going — citing how the Tribeca Festival is known for spotlighting pioneering docs — Rosenthal lamented that perhaps the golden age of political documentaries has passed.
“I’m worried about that space,” Rosenthal said. “Fewer places are buying hard-hitting documentaries. If it’s about true crime, you’ll get a deal someplace. The bigger platforms — Netflix and Amazon — want more celebrity stories and sports stories. But for political stories, it’s harder to find a home.”
It’s a concern that many documentaries and distributors alike have also voiced: “We are caught in this terrible place with what’s been happening on the commercial side with streaming companies focusing on true crime above everything else, and the existential threat on the public media side,” a documentary industry insider recently told IndieWire.
Companies are pulling back on buying docs, as A24 all but shuttered their doc division, laying off five employees, which was a majority of the staff. After getting an Oscar win for “Navalny,” CNN limited their nonfiction production, while “No Other Land” didn’t even land a distributor before winning an Oscar.
Nonfiction programming at Showtime Networks, which produced Oscar-nominated “Attica” in 2022, closed, along with “An Inconvenient Truth,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” and “American Factory” producer studio Participant. Political documentarians have now had to turn to self-distribution; “Union” and “Zurawski v Texas,” despite the latter being executive produced by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Jennifer Lawrence, all were self-distributed by their respective filmmakers.
Netflix VP of original documentary films and limited series Adam Del Deo told IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson that after winning Oscars for “Icarus,” “American Factory,” and “My Octopus Teacher,” the demand for documentaries has grown on the platform. Yet how much of that demand are for political films versus celebrity-driven features?
“We want to program titles that our members as a whole are going to love,” Del Deo said. “Some of those are going to be biopics, some of the content is going to be in the true crime space. And some is going to be in sports. There are also members that like films that are about topics that are important to them. That may not be the biggest audience, but we want to also be able to deliver those titles as well. So it’s really about variety.”
