Inside Tom Quinn’s Neon Revolution

With 39 Academy Award nominations, 11 wins, and more than $400 million at the box office in just eight years, Tom Quinn has turned Neon into one of the most disruptive forces in independent cinema. The distributor behind best picture winners Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and Sean Baker’s Anora, as well as Oz Perkins’ horror hits Longlegs — the top indie release of 2024 with $74 million domestic — and The Monkey, which earned nearly $40 million, has helped restore faith in the theatrical business.

Honored at the Zurich Summit with this year’s Game Changer Award, Quinn sat down with CAA’s Roeg Sutherland (a former Game Changer honoree) to trace an unlikely path from cataloging reels at Sam Goldwyn to building one of the premium brands in global cinema.

Quinn’s origin story doubles as a primer in entrepreneurial training. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years—it’s gone by so quickly,” he said, noting he’s worked on “something over 400” films in his career, from his Neon titles back through the decades previously at the Sam Goldwyn Company, Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures, and at The Weinstein Company’s label Radius.

Goldwyn for Quinn was film school and boot camp: He cataloged archives, ran a projection booth, and cycled through development, production and acquisitions. “Seven and a half years there gave me a pathway: I wanted more control over the movies we buy, in service of how they’re marketed and publicized.” Magnolia, under Cuban, became the proving ground. “Cuban essentially gave me free rein to go buy 40 movies a year… there was no censorship, just operating within a financial model.” Doing all his own modeling, negotiating, and pitching, “as executives we were cross-trained,” he said, shaped Quinn approach to the business.

The leap from executive to founder began with a nudge from friend, and future business partner, Jason Janego: To stop “playing amateur ball” and go pro. The result was Radius, a boutique label at The Weinstein Company, that embraced simultaneous VOD releases at a time when that was still taboo. Snowpiercer, Quinn’s first collaboration with Bong Joon Ho, provided proof of concept. The film grossed $4.5 million in theaters despite having a simultaneous VOD release. David Robert Mitchell’s horror breakout It Follows became a case study in adaptive windowing. “The plan was: We take it theatrical in 20 markets, with no announced VOD window, and let the audience decide the next window,” Quinn said. “The Thursday night at the Arclight [in L.A.] did $6,000; that told us it should be a wide release. We canceled the VOD window and went wide.”

Quinn and Janego left Weinstein in 2015 to “raise money for a company that would right the wrongs of previous places I’d worked, built on better business practices,” said Quinn. “Where we would only work on films we could sell with a straight face, that we truly believed in 100 percent.”

It turned out to be a big ask. It took two years to raise the start-up capital. Quinn credits Sutherland with helping secure Neon’s first backer, SR Media, which put in $15 million. Janego ultimately stepped away from the company before Neon launched in 2017.

Those first years were scrappy, partly by design. “It was six people inside a WeWork—basically like a chef on a cook line,” Quinn recalled. An early success was Matt Spicer’s dark comedy Ingrid Goes West (acquired via CAA). Margot Robbie took note of Neon’s campaign for the film, which earned a respectable $3 million. When Robbie’s I, Tonya came to market, Neon was among the bidders.

“By then, we were maybe 15 people, and we had just enough money to buy I, Tonya,” Quinn said. Neon “plunked down $6 million,” and got the movie, despite a deep-pocketed bid by Netflix (“who came in with three times our offer”).

Two weeks later, Neon launched the film’s Oscar campaign, coaching I, Tonya to a $30 million domestic release and 3 Academy Award nominations (with a best supporting actress win for Allison Janney). “Everything changed after that,” said Winn. “Filmmakers started looking and saying, ‘Theatrical is not dead. Look at what you can do when you do it right.’”

From there, Neon’s brand cohered around curatorial conviction and the art of marketing. For Parasite, Neon’s trailer foregrounded the film’s only two lines of English “we put them front and center in the trailer to give audiences comfort,” said Quinn. For Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Neon’s hook wasn’t the courtroom drama — a large portion of the film— but a whodunit prompt: “Did she do it?” which “aimed higher than what a film like this would traditionally gross.”

Neon’s in-house ethos, said Quinn, is a form of non-groupthink. When Jason Wald, VP of production, pitched him on Longlegs with a two-minute clip, his instinct was to give the film a hard no. “I said: ‘You’ve got to be kidding—we’re not doing this.’” But Wald convinced him. “When Oz [Perkins] delivered the movie, I thought: I get it! This is a beautifully-made horror film.”

The Longlegs campaign is part of the Neon legend. Their underground campaign ditched the standard teaser, trailer, poster and TV spots approach for a single cryptic billboard, a mysterious telephone number, and a trail of online breadcrumbs to entice fans to figure out the mystery of the film.

“We saw, day to day, the interaction and validation across materials and world-building,” said Quinn. “The marketing isn’t simply selling the film, it’s additive; its own artifact. It was fun and very effective.”

Longlegs opened at number 2 at the U.S. box office, behind only Despicable Me 4 in its sophomore frame, grossing $22.4 million. It went on to earn $74 million and is still Neon’s all-time box office champ.

But Neon has remained true to its arthouse roots. Quinn paid $1.6 million for North American rights to Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, an unusually aggressive move for a French-language title, on personal conviction that “this was a once-in-a-lifetime movie.” When Quinn and acquisitions head Jeff Deutchman read Julia Ducournau’s script for Titane, they made her an offer on the spot. The film went on to win Cannes’ Palme d’Or, Neon’s second Palme (after Parasite), and the start of a six-film winning streak at the world’s number-one film festival, which continued this year with Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident.

“Brand identity matters. Inside the company, we have painstaking discussions and we do not compromise,” said Quinn. “That commitment attracts filmmakers. Not everything works, but every year we try to put out the perfect ‘ten-film’ catalog: If you like one of our movies, I think I can convince you to check out the other nine—and maybe the rest of our 125-film catalog.”

Quinn addressed the widespread rumors that he’s looking to sell that catalog, and all of Neon, to the highest bidder. “We’re all for sale in some way,” he admitted, but said, “creating a company just to exit was never my goal. The incoming interest we get is validating, it shows we’re a real, sustainable business, nine years in, without taking much outside investment.”

Whatever happens with Neon, this year’s Zurich Summit Game Changer said he’ll “never stop going into screenings and trying to buy movies…My favorite thing is sending an offer during the screening and closing the deal before the credits roll. I love the sport of it. But at the end of the day, the legacy is the films, the art. Céline Sciamma said something that always stuck with me: If your art isn’t political, is it actually art? That’s something I firmly believe.”