Main Street Films Inc. had a big weekend.
Its movie, “Jackie & Ryan,” starring Katherine Heigl, was set to premiere on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival in Italy.
Now comes the long-anticipated part for the Irvine-based entertainment company—how will audiences back home receive it?
“It’s about American struggle in everyday life,” said Craig Chang, who founded Main Street Films in 2007 with a couple of silent partners. “The music is just phenomenal. People are going to see Katherine Heigl in a different light. This film is nothing like she’s ever done.”
The entertainment company has a backlog of projects like “Jackie & Ryan,” all waiting for a moment in the spotlight—or a decade, if Chang could have it his way.
They include German spy drama “West,” which will be released in October around the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; action comedy “Barely Lethal;” and a 30-minute TV series pilot, “Really,” done for Amazon.com Inc. and airing on its Prime Instant Video on Aug. 28.
Its producer credits list also includes already-released titles such as “Great Expectations;” “The Pin,” a Yiddish language movie; and “La Bare,” a documentary about a male strip club that appeared in theaters last month.
“As soon as I watched it, I realized it had a special audience that you can cater to, and when I see something I like, I go after it,” Chang said about acquiring “La Bare” at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. “I chased down the producer and said, ‘You have five minutes to make a decision, here is the price—I didn’t want to waste time.”
The company also partnered with Hong Kong-based investment fund Crown Brand Corporation Ltd. to acquire four films from Double Edge Entertainment in Taiwan for distribution in China. It will co-produce Mandarin-language films for the North American market to be distributed as video on demand and on DVDs, as part of the same partnership with Crown.
Main Street Films has 20 employees and ramps up staff on a project basis. It generates revenue with every movie ticket sale, digital download or DVD purchase. The company also profits from selling movies to cable and “free TV” channels, and through licensing and merchandise deals.
The private company does not disclose its earnings, but Harrison Kordestani, the company’s president, said it has more than $20 million invested in just a couple of the movies awaiting release.
Its main focus at first was financing production and distribution. Chang said he “started seeing a shift in the distribution model” and in 2012 decided to bring it in-house, along with marketing.
“The old model of giving someone money to build a widget is gone,” he said. “We think outside the box, and I know it’s a cliché thing to say, but we leverage a lot of (the) popularity of the people we work with to get exposure. For example, “Barely Lethal”—which stars Jessica Alba, Hailee Steinfeld and Samuel Jackson—if you add all their Twitter followers together, you get 15 million. We can reach those audiences very quickly, especially with digital distribution being the key element in film release.”
The company chooses to stay in Orange County because its founders are based here, Chang said, and “we don’t want to get sucked into Hollywood minutia—a lot of lunches, a lot of dinners, a lot of coffees, and no action. “Marketing films, releasing entertainment content, it’s just like anything else: We can do it here just as well, especially with digital content.”
