Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International have partnered to bring the Academy Award-nominated live-action and animated short films to select U.S. theaters before the Oscar broadcast on March 5, 2006. The films will later be available through HDNet and Magnolia's new Home Entertainment division, as well as across other platforms that include ShortsTV on mobile phones.
"Up until now, people had very little access to see Academy short nominations before the Academy ceremony. We're excited to have the opportunity to showcase these fantastic films while they're still in contention for the big prize," said Magnolia president Eamonn Bowles.
Shorts International ceo Carter Pilcher added, "This year's Oscar-nominated shorts are the year's best films. In the past, only insiders and Academy voters got to see this powerful, short form cinema. Now, for the first time, they're available to theater-goers and will reach the audience they deserve."
The series starts running Feb. 24 at the Cinema Village in New York City and Laemmle Fairfax in Los Angeles, as well as weeklong runs with Landmark Theatres in San Francisco, Detroit, Berkeley, Atlanta, Seattle and Denver. Regal Cinemas will show the program in Austin and Portland on Feb. 26 & 27 and The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago will run the series March 3-9. More markets will be added in the coming weeks.
The deal was negotiated by Magnolia's head of acquisitions Tom Quinn, head of business affairs Jason Janego and Eamonn Bowles with Carter Pilcher, Susan Petersen, Simon Young and Linda Olszewski representing Shorts Intl.
Shorts Intl, a division of Britshorts Ltd., is a leading short film company with the largest and most diverse film catalog devoted to short films, which includes titles from the American Film Institute, the British Film Institute and the former Hypnotic catalog. Shorts Intl has also recently launched ShortsTV and ShortsTV Corto (Spanish language version), a short film channel created for distribution to mobile television and cable television networks.
Magnolia Pictures (www.magpictures.com), an independent distributor, recently released Roger Donaldson's THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN with Anthony Hopkins; Alex Gibney's Academy Award-nominated documentary, ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM, and also mounted the successful multi-platform release of Steven Soderbergh's BUBBLE. Magnolia Pictures is part of a vertically-integrated group of media properties co-owned by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban that also includes the Landmark Theatres chain, production companies HDNet Films and 2929 Productions, high-definition cable networks HDNet and HDNet Movies, and film and television library Rysher Ent.
