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‘I’m Not Going to Sell a $60 Candle’
Neon changed the Oscars game with Parasite. Four years later, A24’s rival is still betting on international film.
The intertwined story, in which a personal-tragedy narrative combines with a reporter’s globe-hopping investigation into the roots of systemic racism, arrived with the highest test-screening scores in Neon’s history, surpassing even Parasite in the amount of “total positive” and “definite recommend” responses, Quinn says. The Parasite gamble was in some ways lower stakes, despite it being a title “everybody was super afraid to touch,” according to Quinn.Bong’s English-language efforts to date, Snowpiercer and the Netflix-distributed factory-farming fable Okja, were positively received but not hits, and Quinn says that he was among the few studio executives to notice the director had a history of “massive” DVD sales. But if Anatomy falls short of that lofty goal (and as a compensation prize claims Best Screenplay as many Academy Awards pundits have posited), simply getting to the Dolby Theatre in big categories with yet another English-language adjacent drama from far outside Hollywood registers as a win for Neon, further bolstering its relevancy — especially among the Letterboxd-reviewing/Criterion Channel–watching chattering class who comprises the studio’s most dedicated core.
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