TORONTO (AP) \u2014 Anyone will tell you it\u2019s the audiences that make the Toronto International Film Festival<\/a>. They aren\u2019t purely industry folks, like they are in Cannes or Venice, but more boisterous, enthusiastic moviegoers with their own rituals, like growling like buccaneers at the piracy warning that plays before each screening.<\/p>\n That real-moviegoer energy has always made TIFF a good measuring stick for not just what might catch on during Hollywood\u2019s awards season, but also what will click with audiences. Yet there might be no more endangered species in today\u2019s film industry than the kind of crowd-pleaser that thrives in Toronto.<\/p>\n More than most years, this year\u2019s festival, which wraps up this weekend, has been a veritable ark for the castaways of today\u2019s Hollywood: star-driven dramas, big-screen comedies, adult-oriented movies without a whiff of franchise about them. All struggled to reach the screen in the first place. But for many of these movies, the fight to reach audiences is just getting started.<\/p>\n One of the standouts was Derek Cianfrance\u2019s \u201cRoofman,\u201d<\/a> a stranger-than-fiction true tale about a North Carolina man (Channing Tatum) imprisoned for robbing dozens of McDonald’s by burrowing in from their roofs. He escapes prison and, instead of trying to outrun the authorities, hides out for weeks inside a Toys \u201cR\u201d Us. Cianfrance, the grittily realistic filmmaker of \u201cBlue Valentine\u201d and \u201cThe Place Beyond the Pines,\u201d uses the story as a funny and oddly moving examination of box-store materialism. Paramount will release it Oct. 10.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was shopping it around, a lot of people were saying, \u2018We don\u2019t make movies like this anymore,\u2019\u201d Cianfrance said. \u201cSo it\u2019s really hard. It\u2019s one of the reasons why there are so many production credits on the front of the movie. I had to get it from everywhere to be able to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n The movie industry is coming off a summer that fell painfully shy of expectations. May-to-Labor Day ticket sales at the North American box office came to about $3.67 billion, according to Comscore, well short of the $4 billion-plus season that was once automatic. You could point to numerous reasons for that, like the diminished potency of superhero films or that Sony Pictures Animation\u2019s \u201cKPop Demon Hunters,\u201d the biggest hit of the summer<\/a>, launched on Netflix, not in theaters.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s also true that Hollywood, mostly concerned with hitting home runs, is badly in need of some doubles, too.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s TIFF was full of good candidates, though some of them will be steered toward streaming platforms. That includes Rian Johnson\u2019s deliciously gothic, surprisingly sincere, church-set whodunit \u201cWake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,\u201d<\/a> which Netflix will give a two-week theatrical release despite its director\u2019s strong affinity for theaters.<\/a><\/p>\n And Paul Greengrass\u2019 \u201cThe Lost Bus,\u201d<\/a> a disaster movie for the age of climate change, will likewise get a quick two weeks in theaters before landing on Apple TV+. Starring Matthew McConaughey as a bus driver rescuing kids during the 2018 Camp Fire, Greengrass’ film viscerally captures the swift-spreading blaze, as well as the dry, tinderbox landscape it rose out of.<\/p>\n But even a brief theatrical run can be hard-won. Nia DaCosta\u2019s \u201cHedda,\u201d<\/a> a stylish 1950s-set Ibsen adaptation starring Tessa Thompson, will launch in theaters Oct. 22 before detouring to Prime Video a week later.<\/p>\n \u201cLiterally three months after it was greenlit, people were like: This movie wouldn\u2019t happen anymore,\u201d DaCosta said. \u201cWe were with Orion Pictures, a full theatrical release, and then the strikes happened. We were holding. We had to fight for the movie to stay alive. We lived but the consequence of that was theatrical window and then Prime Video. We did feel that industry shift. But I\u2019m really proud we got to make it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPeople put guarantees into their contracts, like it has to be theatrical,\u201d she adds. \u201cStudios do not care. They did it to (Christopher) Nolan<\/a>. They can do it to any of us.\u201d<\/p>\n When Aziz Ansari premiered his directorial debut, \u201cGood Fortune,\u201d he referenced that reality in his introduction. \u201cOriginal theatrical comedy,\u201d said Ansari. \u201cThose are three words that are scary in our industry right now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGood Fortune,\u201d<\/a> which Lionsgate will release Oct. 17, is a little clunky at times, but its satire of the gig economy isn\u2019t off target, nor is Keanu Reeves\u2019 performance as a sweet but mistake-prone angel. Ansari plays a man driven to homelessness whose not-official guardian angel (Reeves), overstepping his bounds, swaps his life with that of a much wealthier man (Seth Rogen).<\/p>\n It was one of two movies at TIFF trying for a throwback kind of high-concept comedy. The other was David Freyne\u2019s \u201cEternity.\u201d<\/a> It\u2019s set in a retro-designed afterlife way station where the dead select an eternity to live in. Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is forced to choose between living out her afterlife with her husband of 65 years (Miles Teller) or her first husband, who died fighting in Korea (Callum Turner). Again, the (sort of) guardian angels in charge of guiding each soul \u2014 Da\u2019Vine Joy Randolph and John Early \u2014 steal the show.<\/p>\n \u201cEternity,\u201d inspired by \u201cA Matter of Life and Death\u201d<\/a> and almost certainly the most traditional movie A24 has ever released, will, like \u201cGood Fortune,\u201d try to find a comedy audience that\u2019s mostly been left to the streamers. But tastes are always changing. Donna Langley, chief of Universal Pictures, noted as much in her talk at the festival.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re seeing the shift in horror,\u201d said Langley, who pointed to \u201cauteur directors turning to horror.\u201d “It\u2019s not the horror as we came to know over the last decade.\u201d<\/p>\n Fate, like it does in \u201cEternity\u201d and \u201cGood Fortune,\u201d will soon have its say for this year’s crop of crowd pleasers in search of ticket-buying crowds. Some signs are ominous. Last year\u2019s winner of the festival\u2019s People’s Choice Award \u2014 the most watched honor of TIFF and usually a signal of a surefire best-picture nomination \u2014 went to the Stephen King adaptation \u201cThe Life of Chuck.\u201d<\/a> Mike Flanagan’s film didn\u2019t have distribution at the time, and when Neon ultimately released it in June, \u201cThe Life of Chuck\u201d went mostly unnoticed. It was a reminder that success in Toronto no longer guarantees anything.<\/p>\n Some are taking distribution into their own hands. Black Bear Pictures, the production company behind last year\u2019s \u201cSing Sing,\u201d<\/a> announced that it will distribute one of the buzziest TIFF entries: David Mich\u00f4d\u2019s \u201cChristy,\u201d<\/a> starring Sydney Sweeney as the boxer Christy Martin. Black Bear co-financed \u201cChristy,\u201d just as it did two other highlights of TIFF: Clint Bentley\u2019s Denis Johnson adaptation \u201cTrain Dreams,\u201d<\/a> a hit at Sundance, and Daniel Roher\u2019s \u201cTuner.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTuner,\u201d which played without distribution in place, stars Leo Woodall (\u201cThe White Lotus\u201d) as a piano tuner with a pitch-perfect ear who, after his father-figure partner (Dustin Hoffman) falls ill, uses his gift to crack open safes. It’s a crackling crime thriller, and \u2014 like so many of the movies at TIFF \u2014 the kind of movie that supposedly doesn’t get made anymore. And yet movies like \u201cTuner\u201d do get made, somehow, and will keep finding a way to do so, so long as audiences show up for them.<\/p>\n \u201cSomeone wrote, \u2018This movie-movies really hard,\u2019\u201d Roher said at the premiere, citing a review. \u201cI was like: That\u2019s right. That was the intention.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.voiceofalexandria.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" TORONTO (AP) \u2014 Anyone will tell you it\u2019s the audiences that make the Toronto International Film Festival. They aren\u2019t purely industry folks, like they are in Cannes or Venice, but more boisterous, enthusiastic moviegoers with their own rituals, like growling like buccaneers at the piracy warning that plays before each screening. That real-moviegoer energy has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2014554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[21796,22339,21741,21912,369169],"class_list":["post-2014553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-business","tag-comedy","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-tiff-mid-sized-movies-audiences-roofman"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/At-TIFF-the-mid-sized-movie-strives-to-survive-Celebrity.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2014553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2014554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2014553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2014553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2014553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A movie industry in need of doubles, not just home runs<\/h2>\n
Twisting fates for comedies<\/h2>\n
Keeping the faith for \u2018movie-movies\u2019<\/h2>\n