http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/business/media/20th-century-fox-teams-with-vice-media-to-produce-low-budget-movies.html 2014-12-08 21:12:05 20th Century Fox Teams With Vice Media to Produce Low-Budget Movies The Brooklyn-based Vice, known for its gritty style and popularity with millennial audiences, will produce at least two low-budget films annually with Fox. === LOS ANGELES — Vice Media and 20th Century Fox have decided to make movies together, creating a film label focused on low-budget cinema that is “wild, weird, high-concept, left-field, crazy artistic, authentic and visceral.” At least that is how Vice Films, born from discussions that started over the summer between Vice executives and Jim Gianopulos, Fox’s chairman, will produce at least two films annually, the partners said. The budgets for these films, released either theatrically or on digital platforms or a mix of the two, will be tiny, at least by Fox standards, at about $2 million each. Fox will pay the production costs. “It’s partly a low-risk, high-upside way for us to explore new windows” without involving Fox’s main labels, Mr. Gianopulos said in an interview. Vice will also seek to develop and produce bigger-budget movies, perhaps in the $10 million to $20 million range, in alliance with various Fox divisions, which include the art house label Fox Searchlight Pictures and Fox International Productions. In addition, Fox’s blockbuster-focused movie division will have the right to develop feature films based on material from Vice’s content library. Based in Brooklyn, Vice has recently landed Last year, 21st Century Fox, which owns 20th Century Fox, bought a 5 percent stake in Vice for $70 million. Vice, which started as a free Canadian punk magazine two decades ago, has recently been valued at up to $2.5 billion and now operates various media businesses in 36 countries. For Mr. Gianopulos, along with experimenting with nontraditional release patterns, Vice Films fills a gap in his moviemaking empire. Some rival studios have found mainstream success with microbudget films supplied by partners. The most prominent example is Universal Pictures, which has a deal with Making films on tiny budgets is difficult for major studios, which are built to create behemoths like “ By teaming with Vice, Fox gains a valuable marketing partner. Vice has committed to use its global network of digital channels to promote output from Vice Films. Fox can also tap Vice to promote other movies. “Studios usually don’t like making $2 million films because they still have to spend a lot of money marketing them,” Mr. Moretti said. “But we bring scale and power with a certain audience.” For all the attention paid to new media, the creation of Vice Films demonstrates the continued importance of traditional media companies. Vice has already experimented with cinema by producing films in house — a Somali pirate drama, “Fishing Without Nets,” for instance — or acquiring movies at festivals, as Vice did with “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” a coming vampire movie. But the going has been tough without a studio partner. “I’ve learned that you can’t discount the power and experience of traditional distribution,” Mr. Moretti said. As for Mr. Gianopulos, he said, “You spend 10 minutes with these guys, who are fearless and irreverent, and you realize they represent the future.”