It’s impossible to write a word about Summit Entertainment LLC without referencing the phenomenal success of its surprise fangirl hit Twilight, adapted from the first of author Stephenie Meyer’s popular book series. The film’s success has also provided punsters with a bonanza. So please forgive us for repeating the obvious that Summit—known for years as Patrick Wachsberger’s busy foreign-sales entity—is now basking in a red hot Twilight zone and a new, ahem, dawn as a full-blown studio.

Passed over by the major studios and left to die in turnaround, Twilight was finally rescued by Summit, which, marketing costs aside, produced the film for reportedly under $40 million. This little engine that could—in spite of being a vampire romance without horror or sex—is now choo-choo-ing towards $160 million at the domestic box office.

The success stunned the industry and “was really helpful to us,” says Summit president of worldwide production and acquisitions Erik Feig. “We are relatively new as a studio and it’s great to show the community that we could take Twilight and give it a strong, unique point of view and reach its strong fan base and even have it go beyond its fans. It upped our profile in the right way.”

The film’s $70.7 million opening weekend stateside was a record for a fangirl bow and also a record for a female director. While Twilight hit its core audience solidly, it also crossed over to females above 25 and, thanks to Summit marketing that emphasized action elements, brought in young males.

Feig oversees all of Summit’s in-house productions, co-productions and acquisitions, as well as the studio’s involvement with client company films like the Academy Award-winning pictures Babel and Michael Clayton. He is charged with creating, finding and managing an annual production slate of eight to ten films and an acquisition slate of about two or three films per year.

Sitting high atop this summit are Patrick Wachsberger, co-chairman and president of Summit Entertainment and CEO of Summit International, and Robert G. Friedman, Summit Entertainment co-chairman and CEO of worldwide theatrical.

April 2007 marked the company’s transformation from foreign sales to a one-stop motion picture entity, a la Overture and the reconfigured MGM. This was when Wachsberger and Friedman closed a financing deal led by Merrill Lynch along with a consortium of investors that provided the company with access to over $1 billion for development, production, acquisition, marketing and distribution of filmed entertainment across all media.

Before the expansion, Wachsberger’s Summit was a foreign-sales giant and distributor since the early ’90s. Prior to Summit, Wachsberger ran Odyssey Entertainment and Distributors and was involved in such films as Pelle the Conqueror and Switch. He began his career working on over 20 films in Italy and France and most recently produced such films as In the Valley of Elah and the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie blockbuster Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Friedman, the former vice chairman and chief operating officer of Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group, has a rich background in advertising and marketing as well as leadership in such critical areas as the specialized arena, the DVD market and international distribution at such studios as Warner Bros. and Paramount. With experience so broad and deep, Friedman is the perfect complement to the foreign sales and production heft of Wachsberger.

Asked what he believes are those corners of the business that demand closest scrutiny and vigilance as Summit moves forward, Friedman responds, “In today’s competitive global film marketplace, we must remain vigilant in two key areas—first, making the best product possible, and second, creating the right marketing campaign to support each film in every distribution window to maximize profitability.”

The strategy has served Twilight well. Commenting on the studio’s main attraction of the moment, Summit president of domestic theatrical distribution Richie Fay casts some light on the Twilight phenom and what’s behind the success: “I think the most important thing was that the material was known to its audience. Thanks to Stephenie Meyer, the book was so well-known. The many fans talked about Twilight among themselves and to their parents and boyfriends.”

Fay says “a perfect storm worked in our favor with the book being so popular and fueling our marketing, plus the delay of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from November to July opened up a nice release date for us on November 21.”



Beginning his close to 38 years in the industry in distribution, Fay has a strong background in exhibition: He was a film buyer for United Artists Theatres and Loews and served as president of AMC Film Marketing for 10 years, where he was responsible for film buying and in-theatre marketing and also negotiated deals with distributors.

Yet the Twilight phenomenon reflects how the business has changed. Notes Fay, “The industry reacts very quickly these days to how a film performs and that’s a sign of health. Exhibitors were asking for more prints and moving [Twilight] into bigger rooms as they took advantage of the ticketing websites. They could tell from the online activity what was going on. Additionally, we get a sense from inside the industry, from our recruited screenings and our clipboard surveys in malls and online. These tracking devices indicate who’s interested and this helps us prepare for the demand. But we credit exhibition for reacting very strongly to all these advance signs.”

Fay especially credits the marketing for leveraging the popularity of the book. “We sent our marketing team to Comic-Con in San Diego, which is now more than just a comic-book convention. It’s a great place to get an idea of what young fans in the teens to high 20s age group like even beyond comic books. So we saw we had a substantial audience of young teenage girls as our core group and promoted down there.”

Asked what aspect of the marketing pushed Twilight over the top, Fay cites “the simplest of aspects—the one-sheet that showed the couple caring for each other. Rather than focus on just a vampire movie, we focused on the relationship between the young couple. After all, it is a clean, chaste, PG-13 movie.”

The film swept the fangirls away, but what about the boys? Answers Fay, “They finally were showing up. What we learned about skewing female is that the younger guys will go to the film with the girls.”

Fay observes that some circuits did better with Twilight than others. “Some handled the promotion better and really saw what the film was. They took advantage of getting multiple prints just to keep the film on their screens.” Including Canada, the film has reached more than 3,425 locations in the U.S. and Canada.

Feig says he first became aware of the project when he looked at the script. Although Twilight came to him as damaged goods both rejected and turned-around, “I saw that it was incredibly targeted and had a strong concept and a lot of sensitivity and showed how well we could develop all this.”



About the film’s mostly lackluster reviews, Feig observes, “We knew this wouldn’t be review-driven, but the film was so good we felt its audience was going to find it.”
Reviews these days seem to correlate less and less with audience size, a trend that Feig ascribes to the fact that “moviegoing audiences are now making more impulse buys in terms of the films they see. And if they see enough promotion on TV, hear it on the radio or come across it on the Net and the film has an interesting element, they’ll come regardless of the reviews. Reviews may spark interest or bring audiences back, but, for the first week, most audiences are impulse-buying patrons.”

The success of Twilight, of course, has energized the production and acquisition sides of Summit. The company recently acquired feature rights to Amy Sutherland’s books about exotic animal trainers and a reporter in a shaky marriage who is sent to cover them. Titled Kicked, Bitten and Scratched, the project, now being written, is, like Twilight, another female-centric project.

Feig describes it as a “high-concept romantic comedy that has a targeted audience of young and older women. We’re trying to broaden out beyond a single concept and make it the classic date movie.”

As for New Moon, the Twilight sequel announced only a few days into the film’s record-making release, Feig reveals, “We’ve commissioned a script from Melissa Rosenberg [who is adapting from Meyer’s book] and a first draft is completed.” Eclipse, a third book in the series, is also being fast-tracked.

A cloud recently enshrouded New Moon with news that Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke won’t be returning to direct additional editions of the franchise. (Reports on the matter differ but suggest there might be, ahem, bad blood between the director and the studio.) Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass) is helming the next chapter.

Feig, like Wachsberger, previously produced the critically acclaimed In the Valley of Elah for Summit and box-office smash Mr. & Mrs. Smith. He also oversaw Summit’s financing and acquisition of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky and the Oscar-nominated Once. Feig began his career by packaging and producing the hit I Know What You Did Last Summer and the indie hit Slackers for Sony. He established Summit’s production banner in 2001 and became a Summit partner when it expanded into a worldwide studio in 2007.

Responding to a recent New York Times article finding a lack of consensus on what might be the Summit “brand,” Feig suggests any notion of brand is moot: “We’ve been able to work in multiple genres and at multiple budget levels as we engage interesting filmmakers with multiple voices. Our range [of product] is broad.”

Acknowledging the challenge that home entertainment presents, Feig comments, “It takes the right kind of movie to get people to leave their homes, and such movies as Twilight or Mamma Mia! or Four Christmases are those movies that motivate filmgoers. The movie has to be an event movie or something special and high-quality like Slumdog Millionaire.” Summit, he suggests, is also upbeat about 3D, “which is great for the right material.”



Twilight also spurred the recent consummation of Summit’s output deal with Showtime, which covers not just the current hit but planned sequels and upcoming films on Summit’s roster. Cable is just another piece of the much larger Summit picture that is still drying on the canvas.

Besides Twilight, Summit has already released a handful of films, including the Christina Ricci and Reese Witherspoon starrer Penelope, a fairy tale about a young woman afflicted with a secret family curse; Never Back Down, a teen drama from Mandalay Pictures; the 3D animation adventure Fly Me to the Moon, about three houseflies trapped aboard Apollo 11; and Sex Drive, a teen road-trip film in the spirit of American Pie.

Soon to arrive in Twilight’s red glare (or should that be green for money?) are upcoming releases that suggest the company’s tilt to the mainstream. Rian Johnson’s Brothers Bloom, a romantic adventure caper embracing con-artist brothers and a wealthy heiress in exotic-looking locales, debuts in theatres on May 15 and features Oscar winners Rachel Weisz and Adrien Brody alongside Mark Ruffalo.

Due early next year and for wide release is Paul McGuigan’s Hong Kong-set Push, starring Dakota Fanning and The Fantastic Four’s Chris Evans in a sci-fi thriller about American ex-pats with psychic powers.

For March comes Alex Proyas’ Nicolas Cage starrer Knowing, a sci-fi suspense film about a discovered time capsule that contains a code of random numbers designating impending disasters and the end of the world.



Summit has set next May for the urban film Next Day Air, about a package with hidden cocaine that is sent to the wrong address, and July for the Summit-financed Bandslam, a battle-of-the-rock-bands romance from Walden Media starring Alyson Michalka, Gaelan Connell and High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens. Scheduled for October are Sorority Row, a horror thriller with sisters running for their lives, and the sci-fi animated Astro Boy, from Japan’s Imagi Studios and featuring a superhero robot and the voices of Nicolas Cage, Donald Sutherland and Nathan Lane.

At the most recent Toronto Film Festival, Summit plucked Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, which does not yet have a release date. Fay describes it “a story about a group of guys in Iraq who have to diffuse bombs, but it’s not so political.”

Asked how, amid so much change and so many challenges, Summit might best deal with its exhibitor partners, Fay replies, “The best thing we can do is to make good movies and make movies that the public wants to support. And to achieve this, you don’t skimp on marketing.” Fay concedes that Summit’s big challenge is “the competition from the large studios and the amount of films they put into the marketplace. We compete with this by delivering good movies and good marketing.”

Summit proved it means business in marketing by bringing over from Paramount veteran marketing and publicity executive Nancy Kirkpatrick. As Summit Entertainment’s newly designated president of worldwide marketing, she conceptualizes, orchestrates and oversees the campaigns for Summit’s slate, as well as their subsequent ancillary windows, including DVD and VOD.

To fill its pipeline, the company has over a dozen projects in various stages of development and production but it is, of course, the two Twilight sequels—New Moon and Eclipse—that are generating the most excitement. Summit is targeting the former for the end of 2009 or early 2010.

Leveraging its roots, Summit remains strong in international sales for both its own slate and third-party product, a logical world view reflecting French-born Wachberger’s overseas film background. Oscar-contending The Wrestler is just one of many films Summit is selling overseas. The company is also doing world sales for Oscar contender The Baader Meinhof Complex from German industry giants Uli Edel and Bernd Eichinger.

Feig explains Summit’s international sales business: “We focus on handling international distribution rights for either giant event films on the order of Die Hard or quality independent features like Babel. Besides the distribution, this includes doing pre-sales and the collections.” In fact, according to Feig, Summit has just done pre-sales for The Book of Eli, the Denzel Washington starrer from Alcon Entertainment, one of its longtime client companies.

Summit’s business outside the U.S. also includes a multi-territory distribution agreement with Entertainment One, one of the world’s leading international independent filmed entertainment distributors. The deal for Summit feature films allows entry into the Canadian theatrical film distribution market and greater business potential in the U.K. Via output agreements, Summit is also partnered with such major European players as SND/M6 in France, Nordisk Film in Scandinavia, and Tele-Muenchen for Germany and Austria.

Summit, says Feig, “has always been focused on global. When we evaluate, we look at worldwide appeal. Our international experience is great for us in going into a movie. And international is not just one market but a bunch of independent markets. So we make sure that our marketing is appropriate to each individual territory. It also helps that we have great access to international filmmakers.”

Additionally, Summit has a home-entertainment set-up in sales, marketing, distribution strategy and retailer relationships and has Universal Studios Home Entertainment to handle physical distribution.

Key to the company’s success is the exhibition community, says Friedman. “They have been fantastic. They have been there from the beginning of Summit and continue to support us and it also makes us happy when we can give them high-quality product that the audience also loves.”

Fay spreads more holiday cheer: “The theatrical business looks pretty healthy and I’m expecting a busy Christmas and end of year that will be even better than ’07, which was a record. People want to escape to the movies, so it’s our job to just give them what they want.”

In spite of the punishing economy, the view from this summit is rosy indeed for theatres, audiences, and the industry’s latest full-service studio.